PAMELA

This novel is composed by letters that Pamela writes mainly to her parents. It is a epistolary novel.
The subtitle “VIRTUE REWARDED” say there is an happy ending.
The author is SAMUEL RICHARDSON was born in 1689 in Mackworth, Derbyshire. His mother, Elizabeth, was
a woman “not ungenteel” and his father (another Samuel) was a joiner from Surrey, described by his son as
“of middling note”. The reason why the elder Samuel had given up his London business for Derbyshire
remains obscure. Whatever the reasons, the family did not return to London for another decade, when they
took up residence in the vicinity of Tower Hill in 1699. Upon his family’s return to the city, Richardson
received a modest education, probably at the Merchant Taylors’ school, where a Samuel Richardson was
registered for 1701 and 1702. Although apparently intended for the clergy, at the age of seventeen, in 1706,
Richardson was forced to begin a seven-year apprenticeship under John Wilde as a printer, an employment
that he felt would “gratify my thirst for reading”. By 1715, he had become a freeman of the Stationer’s
Company and citizen of London, and six or seven years after the expiration of his apprenticeship set up his
own business as a printer, eventually settling in Salisbury Court. In 1733, Richardson also produced his first
work as an author. The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum is an advice manual based upon an actual letter written
by Richardson to his nephew some two years earlier. Around 1739 the author was also approached by
booksellers and friends John Osborn and Charles Rivington to produce a work containing a series of
exemplary letters to instruct the lower classes in both letter writing and moral improvement. The work was
eventually published in 1741 as Familiar Letters. One of the text’s series of letters relates a servant girl’s
resistance to her master’s attempts to seduce her. This narrative, which Richardson claimed to have based
on a real-life story, soon began to dominate the writer’s thoughts, and he temporarily laid aside Familiar
Letters to write his first novel Pamela (1740).
In response to the criticisms levelled against Pamela, Richardson wrote his own less-known and less-loved
two-volume continuation of Pamela (known as Pamela II) in 1741. All four volumes appeared together in the
1742 sixth edition of the novel with engravings by Francis Hayman and Francois Gravelot. In 1744 Richardson
began work on his next novel, the dark but brilliant Clarissa, which was eventually published serially over
1747 and 1748. Like Pamela, Clarissa focuses upon the trials forced on a young woman by a rakish aristocrat,
Lovelace. Unlike her predecessor, however, Clarissa’s virtue is rewarded not on earth but in heaven. Having
been disowned by her family for not marrying the man of their choice, suffering the indignity of being held
against her will in a brothel, and having endured the physical and emotional pain of rape at the hands of
Lovelace, Clarissa dies. The heroine’s tragic and noble acceptance of her fate won many devoted admirers,
some of whom, having read the first volumes, begged that Clarissa’s life be spared in the final chapters. Like
his earlier works, Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson’s last novel, is written in a series of letters, but unlike its
predecessors focuses upon the virtues and duties of a good man, the benevolent yet tyrannical Sir Charles.
The novel which is predominantly concerned with marriage, courtship, madness, filial and paternal duty was
immediately successful, with Richardson already contemplating a fourth edition by 1754. Richardson
produced no more novels before his death from a stroke on the 4th July 1761.
Richardson’s standing as a writer remained high throughout his lifetime. His works were translated into many
European languages and imitated freely. His works, however, constantly divided readers, and during the
nineteenth century there is evidence to suggest that the critical balance tipped out of his favour. This decline
is broadly contemporaneous with the declining reputation of the genre with which his work is most closely
associated: sentimentalism. Literature of sensibility (sentimentalism) privileged feeling, moral principle and
a display of affective emotion above all else. By the nineteenth century, sentiment had begun to appear
sententious, self-indulgent, and an offence to literary taste. Nevertheless, as a precursor of the Romantic
novel and the nineteenth-century novel of social realism, Richardson continued to be influential and was
admired and imitated by Rousseau, Madame de Staël, Hazlitt, and George Eliot. The centrality of women to
his novels as both character and narrative voice, coupled with his texts’ animated social exchanges and
incisive social observation, provided another important model for subsequent writers, including Frances
Burney and Jane Austen. Following the publication of Ian Watt’s seminal Rise of the Novel (1957), critics have
successfully restored Richardson to the title of (at least one) founding father of the modern realist novel,

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centred around the private, domestic world of the bourgeois household and the private subjectivity of the
bourgeois subject.

Samuel Richardson’s Letters Written to and for Particular Friends is a letter-writing manual containing
fictional correspondence between characters from all walks of life. These letters were intended to show
young ladies how to think and act justly and prudently in the common concerns of human life. The letters
were designed to be informative and relevant to their eighteenth-century readers. While working on his
letter-writing manual, Samuel Richardson was inspired to write his epistolary novel, Pamela. The
combination of the letter and the didactic moral intention was to be characteristic of Richardson’s fiction.
The transition from the Familiar Letters to Richardson’s first novel Pamela was quite simple. He himself said
in one of his letters “I almost slid into the writing of Pamela”. The theme of the novel, the resistance of the
virtuous servant to the attempts at seduction made by her master, was familiar in Puritan literature, and not
one that was confined to prose.

Pamela had a great success but also is being judge by modern reader.
It is divided into 2 volume, and the second part is again divided into 2 part. The second volume is a sort of
vindication on the first one.
In 1742 we already have the 6th edition of the novel.
In 1744 he began to write his second novel “Clarissa”, very much different from Pamela.
Carlo Goldoni got inspired by Pamela.

She is always cought into the acts, she writes to the moment, and have a sense of realism. There letters
writing by hand for particular friends, important occasion, style and form, familiar letters, contain 173 letter
one of each was never before published. This letters were intended to show young ladies how to think and
act justly and prudently in the common concerns of human life. The letters were designed to be informative
and relevant to their 18th century readers. In the novel Pamela is a 15 years old maid. At the beginning is
worried about her Master action.
The only virtue she possessed is her virtue.

WILLOBIE HIS AVISA:

This moral and allegorical poem was as popular in its time as Richardson’s novel, and for the same reasons.
In the words of one critic «the heroine is precisely the sort to appeal to the bourgeoisie, then and now.
Resisting all improper advances of noble suitors, she exemplifies Puritan virtue and provides a warning, patly
[fitly] stated, for other maids». The heading of Canto II of the poem, «The first triall of Avisa, before she was
married, by a Noble man: under which is represented a warning to all young maids of every degree, that
they beware of the alluring intisements [enticements] of great men», might serve as a motto for Pamela.

PLOT SUMMARY:
The novel begins with the death of the mistress of the B. household, leaving her servant Pamela concerned
about her future. From the opening sentences we learn that Pamela is an exceptional young woman in
exceptional circumstances. As a favourite of her mistress, Pamela has been moderately educated in writing,
keeping accounts and needlework (=ricamo). Her mistress’s son Mr B. decides to keep her on in service, with
special duties to take care of the household linen. Soon he gives Pamela a suit of clothes that had belonged
to his mother and Pamela begins to feel some anxiety about B.’s designs upon her. This causes her
embarrassment, even while she is evidently flattered, and raises her parents’ fears that their daughter is
“being set so above” herself that her virtue is in danger. From this point on, the novel develops an
increasingly claustrophobic and disturbingly voyeuristic atmosphere as the young woman is relentlessly
pursued, spied upon, and conspired against in the B. family home and later in the Lincolnshire estate to
which she is taken against her will. Still Pamela resists his advances. In one of her most powerful acts of
defiance towards B., Pamela disregards the fine suit of clothes given to her in favour of a homespun gown
and petticoat which constitute a visual symbol of their different social stations and the extent to which Mr
B. demeans himself in pursuing her. Realising that Pamela will not yield, B. kidnaps the young woman, who

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believes she is returning to her parents’ home. In Lincolnshire Pamela is effectively imprisoned and carefully
watched by the grotesque Mrs Jewkes who colludes with her master’s stratagems by allowing B. to disguise
himself as another servant to gain access to the young woman’s bed. Throughout her ordeal, Pamela seeks
help from B.’s parson, Mr. Williams, who is clearly also in love with Pamela. Williams provides a channel
through which Pamela can correspond with her family and offers the possibility of escape from her
imprisonment. Yet before their plans can be effected, B. discovers their plot and has Williams arrested.
Pamela contemplates suicide, but determines it her duty to face up to the trials before her and resign herself
to Divine will. As the novel’s subtitle suggests, virtue is rewarded and the couple are married. Pamela’s trials,
however, do not end with marriage, and before the novel’s conclusion she must first learn that B. has an
illegitimate child (Miss Goodwin), whom Pamela accepts as her own, and face vehement opposition to their
cross-class marriage by B.’s sister (Lady Davers), who, however, is eventually won over by Pamela.

EDITIONS:
The first edition of Pamela (dated 1741) was published by Charles Rivington and John Osborn on November
6, 1740, the second on February 14, 1741. Since the publication of William Merritt Sale’s Samuel Richardson
A Bibliographical Record of His Literary Career with Historical Notes (1936), scholars have known that there
were seven duodecimo [i.e. a size of book page that results from the folding of each printed sheet into 12
leaves (24 pages)] editions and an octavo [i.e. a size of book page that results from the folding of each printed
sheet into eight leaves (sixteen pages)] edition (1742) of Pamela and two duodecimo editions and an octavo
edition of the continuation (Volumes III and IV) published during Richardson’s lifetime. A duodecimo of both
(1762), called the “eighth edition,” appeared shortly after his death (1761). Richardson’s last and most
elaborate revision of Pamela, long believed to have been lost, was actually published in 1801 and reprinted
in 1810.

SUCCESS: the impact is hard to overestimate, soon the novel became fashionable must-read. The “Pamela
vogue”, as it has been appropriately coined, had a great impact, in the literary marketplace.
The novel spawned numerous prose, dramatic and even operatic imitations that sought to cash in
on Pamela’s success, including a spurious sequel by John Kelly entitled Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (1741).
• Adding insult to the injury of continuing Richardson’s novel for him, Kelly, like several of his successors,
effectively wrote out one of the most controversial yet important aspects of the original text by revealing
Pamela to be of noble descent with a genealogy that could be dated back to the Norman Conquest.

Hussy = puttanella/sgualdrina
LONG LASTING PRAISE:
In January 1741, two months after the publication of the book, The Gentleman’s Magazine stated that it was
“judged in Town as great a Sign of Want of Curiosity not to have read Pamela as not to have seen the French
and Italian Dancers”. “It was usual for ladies to hold up the volumes of Pamela to one another, to shew they
had got the book that every one was talking of,” said poet and woman of letters Anna Lætitia Barbauld, and
a later female admirer, Clara Reeve, noted that “the person that had not read Pamela was disqualified for
conversation, of which it was the principal subject for a long time”. Six years after its publication in England
it had been translated into French, German, and Italian. Its popularity continued for a long time. In 1820
Leigh Hunt drew a picture of the maidservant of his day. Her property includes “an odd volume of Pamela,
and perhaps a sixpenny play, such as George Barnwell or Mrs Behn’s Oroonoko”.

JOSEPH ANDREWS and SHAMELA= became from Shame and Shame so to sit
Joseph is Pamela’s brother. Pamela was simply adopt as a sort of politics key in order to catch a good and
rich husband. William is in love with Pamela but she is not corresponding him.
The version of Pamela is from the beginning following a well contrived plan in order to have a rich husband.
By some perverse obliquity of the writer the intended moral is reversed. Pamela is sentimental and obscene:
its obscenity is a direct result of its sentimentality. The combination of triteness and indecency with pious
professions pervades the whole novel. After attempting for two volumes (and occasionally with success) to

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put his hand into her bosom, Mr B. can still, when they are reconciled and the marriage arranged, blithely
refer to «our innocent enjoyments»

Henry Fielding’s first major novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr
Abraham Adams (1742) centers upon the maturational, character-testing and ultimately identityclarifying
experiences of Joseph Andrews, a virtuous and handsome footman “in his one and twentieth year,” who, in
Fielding’s mysteryhinting words, “was esteemed to be the only Son of Gaffer and Gammer Andrews, and
Brother to the illustrious Pamela whose Virtue is at present so famous.” A parodic travesty involving reversals
in the genders (or “clothing”) of the protagonist and upper-class antagonist of Pamela, previously mocked
by Fielding in Shamela (1741), the novel’s main action begins with attempts during a stay in London on
Joseph’s virtue by his recently widowed employer, Lady Booby, and by her servant, Mrs. Slipslop, comic
equivalents, respectively, of Richardson’s Mr B - (here, as in Shamela, spelled out as Booby) and his
mannishly evil housekeeper, Mrs Jewkes. Joseph resists, living up to both his given name (the Old Testament
Joseph, resisting Potiphar’s wife, is in the background) and his family name, emulating Pamela, his “sister,”
and even writing to her about their parallel ordeals in defence of ‘Virtue’.

PREFACE by the EDITOR.

Makes a list of different kind of intentions and aims of meanings of this text.
The preface is different from Roxana and Moll, justifying the nature and the contents, here it is all purity,
meaningful, worthy. A woman in this kind of society can be a Virgin, a Bride or a wife and a mother. In the
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novel there is a pure passion. The true author is Richardson, Pamela is a fiction character, but he is making
the novel authentic.

Pamela is a 15 years old maid servant in a genteel noble household. She tells that her mistress has died, so
she is worried about her future, what to do, if stay or move to another house, which would be the daughter
of her first mistress.
In the first 6 letters Pamela writes to her parents, and there is a sort of summary of what will happen. The
characteristics of the novel is that Pamela is writing and telling us things in the exact movement its happened.
LETTER 1: she is writing a letter and the master is entering the room, and takes away the letter from her and
read it. Social role should not be confused.
LETTER 2: is Pamela’s father answer. The parents are worried for her. The only asset/jewel/property she
possesses is her virtue.
LETTER 3: is Pamela’s replay.
Mr.B is a gentleman his intention are god from the beginning, an example he give her clothes.
Her suspicions and also her parents are well founded, he tries to sleep with her, kiss her. She begs him to
let her go to her parents, and apparently he said yes, but then she realised that she will go to the master
house in Lancashire, and she live like in a prison, she is controlled and doesn’t have even shose to go out.
Mr B tried to sleep with her and when she is undress he jump under the sheets and tries to break out her.
She tries to escape, even tries to suicide. Mr B is seduced by Pamela’s account of this misadventures of her
and by the fact that she was desperate to protect for virtue and they basically end up by proposing to her.
She was free to leave and on the point to go he sent a letter to her begging to came back, so she does and
they even get married.

Mr B. is a very interesting character, he will have a transformation in the novel. Pamela is static, she remains
attached to her virtue at all costs, and she never changes.
Mr B. is characterized in a sort of political reading in which Mr B. attitude might be regarded as a sort of law.
He is a “fashionable libertine”. Mr B. is the sole and exclusive representative in the novel of temporal power
and enjoys entire freedom from restraint by any superior authority.
It is kind normal that Mr B. is trying to seduce the maid servant, since he doesn’t try to ruin a god girl but
just a servant.

Telling how Mr B. was educated, how he was raised.

Some critics thinks Pamela virtue became as a rebellion against what we find the Mr.B’s absolute
government.

ROBERT FILMER, argued that monarchy was a species of patriarchy, and that all kingly and paternal rule was
ordained by God and embodied in the natural order of things. god’s created world was inherently
hierarchical, and all authority was ultimately Adamic. Adam was the archetype of earthly rule: he was the
first husband, father and king.
Mr B is not under any law, he is only under God.

JOHN LOCKE, sometime between 1679 and 1682, he drafted his Two Treatises of Government, the first
treatise being a refutation of Filmer, the second being a grounding of all legitimate rule in the consent of the
people governed and a defence of their right of revolution against tyranny. Pamela resist against the
rebellion and being controlled. This work is commonly called the founding text of liberalism, and it is held to
be a classic statement of the theories of natural rights, the social contract, private property, and consent as
the ground of legitimate government. If the rule of law is ignored, if the representatives of the people are
prevented from assembling, if the mechanisms of election are altered without popular consent, or if the
people are handed over to a foreign power, the they can take back their original authority and overthrow
the government. They can also rebel if the government attempts to take away their rights. For all these
reasons, while there are variety of legitimate constitutional forms, the delegation of power under any
constitution is understood to be conditional.

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MARRIAGE:
Marriage is conceived as a sort of contract in which both parts brings something to the agreement, even if
she is poor, she brings virtue and reclaims a morally sounder of life.

2 ELEMENTS WHICH ARE INTRESTING are Pamela’s clothes and her letters.
Clothes function first of all as the visible emblem of social standing.
LETTER 20: She is obsessed in a restrict view on what is appropriate on her social position.
LETTER 29: she divides of the clothes she is possessed, into three packages:
- the first→ one contains the clothes she has been given by her mistress (lady B), so the legitimate
fruits of her works
- the second→ Mr. B’s gifts, she doesn’t want to have it. Wearing that clothes would be exposing
herself to a sexual danger from Mr. B.
- the third→ Pamela’s clothes, the old one, especially the one she made of herself. It is the emblem of
her social class.
She doesn’t reject her body bit she doesn’t want use it as a weapon for seduction, she shows she is
renouncing that aspect of her body basically conforms to the ideal of femininity. It is the body which
provokes desire she doesn’t reject it, but she wearing those plain clothes, because she says she is still very
much pleased of her appearance, but this pleasure is not a sign of her being conscious of the erotic power
of the seductive power of her body.
Accepting Mr. B.’s clothes she would accepted his version of hid idea of the relation between classes and
sexes.
She would leave only with the third packages since there are all her clothes which identify her social classes.
She even talks to the clothes as they are the living testimony of her shames so close really function, as an
emblem of the different choices. She is moving away the other clothes, because it is the representation of
her shame. She want to stay at her own conditions.

LETTER 24: she is presenting to him whit the clothes she has made for herself.

She is not sure that her letter will ever be delivered, then she starts to take a journal.

PAMELA AS A NOVEL OF SEDUCTION

First part of the novel is made by Pamela’s letter from and to her parents, the second part is kind a journal.
Pamela unstitches her letters under orders from her master.
Pamela’s novel is describe as pretty novel. This narrative is composed by her emotion throughout the letters,
is as a seduction, since she is transforming herself in the letters. Mr B. requests the rest of her letters for his
perusal and is determined that if he has woven the intrigue, then he will supply the ending.

Mr B. threatens to excavate to the point in her clothing where the papers are lodged, and warns.
The pleasure she offers in the pleasure of the text not only sexual pleasure, rather than those forms of
pleasure that derive from mastering her body. Unlike his previous attacks on her person, his threat of
disrobing her parallels his voyeuristic perusal of her letters: he was in the letter a little portions of her and
he want to see more, from her body to herself. At the end Mr B. change into a faithful husband, and change
even his property, the castle in Lanchesteir became her house and before was a prison for her.
CLOSET:
I. a secluded chamber or room
II. a private or secluded room an inner chamber
Now chiefly in historical contexts.
THE MASTER AND THE CLOSET
Mr B.’s conversion is marked by the shift in function of Pamela’s closet. This room becomes the scene and
touchstone of their formally changing relationship. Pamela doesn’t control the action, but his recognition of
her closet as her private place plays a large role in what may fairly be called his courtship of her.

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A SACRED PLACE
Pamela is thankful to God, she doesn’t suicide of religious reasons. The place even begins to take an air of
sanctity. Her virtue are rewarded.

PSALM 137
The psalm combines three powerful emotions:
1. a recollection of the despair that the people of Israel felt during their period of captivity;
2. an intense desire for the Lord to exact vengeance upon the people of Babylon; (identify as Mr B.)
3. a muted bur very present sense of relief that the captivity has come to an end and that the people of
Israel are safely back in Jerusalem.

TYPOLOGICAL AMBIGUITY
Typologically the biblical empire of Babylon has always been interpreted in two equally supportable ways –
either as Israel’s tormentor, which deprived the Jews of their God- given homeland and condemned them
to an unrighteous captivity, or as Israel’s scourge, which forced the corrupt and isolatrous chosen people to
acknowledge their God, reconsider their heritage, and forge their identity. The books of Jeremiah and Isaiah
repeatedly condemn Babylon for its wickedness and prophesy its utter destruction; the book of Ezekiel, on
the other hand, does not attack Babylon directly and portrays the empire as the instrument of the Lord’s
vengeance against the idolatrous Israelites («sword» of the Lord = Babylon).

PAMELA’S PSALM
The heroine, held captive in Lincolnshire and facing nearcertain ruin, thinks of Psalm 137 and “takes the
Liberty to alter it to [her] Case more,” casting herself in the role of captive Israel. Her survival in captivity
depends on her ability to remain true to the core principle of her identity-chastity, much as the Jews’ survival
as a captive people depended upon their unwavering devotion to the principles of monotheism and the
worship of Jehovah. By the end of volume 1, Mr B. has been shown to be a rake, a libertine, a liar, a hypocrite,
a kidnapper, a phony, and an attempted rapist ⎼ no one whom a virtuous woman like Pamela would want
under any terms to accept as a husband.

MR B. AS BABYLOLN
Mr B.’s ‘revision’ of Pamela’s Lincolnshire captivity story depends on his ability to redefine his own biblical
role of “Babylon” in relation to Pamela’s “Israel”. Where Pamela had once portrayed him as the Babylon of
Jeremiah and Isaiah ⎼ the author of a wicked and deranged scheme to destroy an innocent victim ⎼ he must
attempt to recast himself as the Babylon of Ezekiel ⎼ an instrument of divine will that acted for the long-
term good of a chosen people.

VIRTUE REWARDED
The period of captivity is portrayed as a series of tests and trials designed by God to judge her worthiness to
receive an ultimate reward ⎼ and Mr B. begins the shift from having been an unholy tormentor to being a
divine agent.

MICHEL FOUCAULT, HISTORY OF SEXUALITY (1976) Alliance a system of marriage, of fixation and
development of kinship ties, of transmission of names and possessions. This deployment of alliance, with
the mechanisms of constraint that ensured its existence and the complex knowledge it often required, lost
some of its importance as economic processes and political structures could no longer rely on it as an
adequate instrument or sufficient support. Particularly from the eighteenth century onward, Western
societies created and deployed a new apparatus which was superimposed on the previous one, and which,
without completely supplanting the latter, helped to reduce its importance. I am speaking of the deployment
of sexuality: like the deployment of alliance, it connects up with the circuit of sexual partners, but in a
completely different way.

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FOUCAULT: ALLIANCE VS SEXUALITY The deployment of alliance is built around a system of rules defining
the permitted and the forbidden, the licit and the illicit, whereas the deployment of sexuality operates
according to mobile, polymorphous, and contingent techniques of power. The deployment of alliance has as
one of its chief objectives to reproduce the interplay of relations and maintain the law that governs them;
the deployment of sexuality, on the other hand, engenders a continual extension of areas and forms of
control. For the first, what is pertinent is the link between partners and definite statutes; the second is
concerned with the sensations of the body, the quality of pleasures, and the nature of impressions, however
tenuous or imperceptible these may be. Lastly, if the deployment of alliance is firmly tied to the economy
due to the role it can play in the transmission or circulation of wealth, the deployment of sexuality is linked
to the economy through numerous and subtle relays, the main one of which, however, is the body -- the
body that produces and consumes. Sexuality is tied to recent devices of power; it has been expanding at an
increasing rate since the seventeenth century; the arrangement that has sustained it is not governed by
reproduction; it has been linked from the outset with an intensification of the body with its exploitation as
an object of knowledge and an element in relations of power.

MR B. “EVOLUTION” VS PAMELA’S “STATICITY”

It is his inner conflict and its eventual resolution which Richardson uses to shape the structural pattern of his
story and to determine its climax and conclusion. Pamela, despite temptations, doubt, despair, never wavers
in her heart-and-soul belief in the righteousness of defending her virtue, and therein lies her strength.
Suspense is due to Mr. B’s indecision, not to her own.

Mr B. in Pamela version became a captain and he manipulate the social state of Pamela.

He manipulate Pamela for his own advantage.

JOHN KELLY’S SEQUEL (and ideological revision)

Pamela is a gentlewoman and she married a noble man.

ALLIANCE:
Marriages of alliance were based on what Michael McKeon characterizes as «the exchange of women aimed
at the establishment of kinship relations between men» (157), the purpose of which was to increase and
consolidate the political power of the ruling class, while simultaneously reproducing sharply defined class
and gender divisions that ensured its perpetuation. Women were merely pawns in an exchange that was
aimed at preserving the interests of men who dominated the patriarchal social hierarchy. Under the regime
of alliance, women of the aristocracy or propertied classes were clearly perceived as property; they either
belonged to their fathers or husbands. Consequently, these women had no claim to ownership of their
bodies as a reproductive site for the transmission of power.

SEXUALITY:
This situation was radically altered over the course of the eighteenth century through the development of
what Foucault identifies as «the main elements of the deployment of sexuality», the primary one of which,
he maintains, was «the feminine body» itself. Despite the fact that women were no longer required to bring
property or wealth into marriage with the deployment of sexuality, the reproductive function of their bodies
clearly took on added significance, since «names and possessions» were still transmitted through that body.
Women’s bodies were still understood as property and the eighteenth-century patriarchal code of femininity
continued to demand virtue, in the form of chastity, in a woman in exchange for social valorization --namely,
marriage. As a result, virtue, by safely containing desire, became the means by which women’s bodies,
already viewed as property, attained social value as a chaste but sexualized commodity that women could
now trade on the marriage market as a means of rising socially
He didn’t married her for reach more political power. She has to observed several rules that she is accepting.
Still stand in a power relationship from the husband, but he marries Pamela because he likes her and not for

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material reasons. She still stand an lower level. She takes pleasure not only in her body but in herself and by
the novel itself.