Faking It: Female Virginity and Pamela’s Virtue
Corrinne Harol, University of Utah
Volume 16, no. 2, January 2004
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel Pamela (1740) revolves around the repeated attempts of the aristocratic Mr B. to rape his servant, the exemplarily virginal Pamela. Mr B.’s pursuit of Pamela’s body instigates the narrative, but the objective of the novel is the loftier (by its own standards) investigation of Pamela’s interiority. The narrative action converts Mr B. from an admirer of Pamela’s body into an acolyte of her virtue and thus relocates feminine social value from virginity (and embodiment) to virtue (and interiority). Epistemological dilemmas catalyse this shift from virginity to virtue and transform the narrative from a rape plot to a marriage plot. Though the epistemological problems presented by Pamela’s virginal body do not at first appear crucial to Pamela, they nonetheless shape the epistemological crisis — and generic resolution of that crisis — around Pamela’s virtue. … While her virtue depends upon preservation of her virginity (while she remains unmarried), it ultimately transcends physicality: her virtue comes to represent the intangible qualities that make her suitable for the wildly implausible hypergamous marriage with Mr B.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Female Sexuality” include:
Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
by JOHN C. LEFFEL (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
At Seventeen: Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
by SHAWN LISA MAURER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Communal Sexuality: Mutual Pleasure in Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir
by KATE PARKER (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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