A Film Canon

One of the most original novels of the eighteenth century, Pamela ushers in a new testament of learned letters, fusing the epistolary tradition with an emergent psychological individualism and social realism. The first volume is much stronger than the second, presenting Pamela's literacy as her greatest crime, Mr. B's insistence upon periodically reading her version of events as his greatest act of violation (thereby identifying him with the voyeuristic reader), and the aristocratic institution itself as a perverse, erotic economy, culminating with the proto-Gothic overtones of the remote estate in which Pamela finds herself imprisoned. Unfortunately, the second volume - which witnesses Pamela and Mr. B's somewhat implausible reconciliation - transforms this manual for working-class virtue into a self-consciously old-fashioned aristocratic code of conduct, as Pamela finds her delightful eloquence reduced, successively, to so many idiotic, hyperbolic affirmations of her inferiority; a recurrent, abject stammer; the silence engendered by her secret wedding ceremony (in which Mr. B teaches her to speak with her heart, rather than her mind) and, finally, the nauseating affirmation of female silence upon which the novel concludes, with Mr. B imperiously - and weakly - co-opting the dual roles of poet and essayist; or, alternatively, the role of myopic, misanthropic critic, as if the awkward transition from letters to journal were a mere index of the perverse demands of that particular readership.