Reading 'Pamela': Gender, popularity, and canon formation

摘要

Samuel Richardson's first novel Pamela remains a problem text for many readers. Although it has earned an established place in the canon of English literature, this novel challenges many of our assumptions about the canon. In the eighteenth century, Pamela was both widely imitated and harshly criticized, and many of the responses to Richardson's first novel, whether laudatory or hostile, evaluate the work in gendered terms. Readers frequently connect popular appeal of Pamela to the idea of the feminine, particularly as it is associated with disease, inconstancy, detail, and circulation. This dissertation interprets the popular responses to this novel in the eighteenth century in order to describe the desires readers impose upon Pamela. Richardson's novel exploits its own status as a "best-seller" in order to be read, but then represses that exploitation in its attempt to become a canonic work. Drawing upon Hans Robert Jauss' theory of reception aesthetics, this study examines the history of reading this work and itegrates a historically based reader-response with a feminist perspective. Rather than defend the aesthetic integrity of Richardson's fiction, this study argues that the Pamela/anti-Pamela dichotomy reveals a kind of sexualized politics operating in almost any reading of a literary text. By exploring the connection between gender and reading in the responses to Pamela, the work questions the relation of gender to the formation of the canon and to the definition of a popular novel.