Even more Richardson

Let's stop and consider Pamela, the person not the novel of which she is the heroine, for a moment. The book is subtitled "Virtue Rewarded", but what virtue is rewarded?

At first glance it would seem to have to be her carefully preserved virginity. And that leads me to a bit of a digression about the history of virtue and the way the word changed its meaning.

Once upon a time, to be a good person was to be a good person. That is, being good was to strive to become a certain kind of human being. Saint Augustine, for example, insisted that there was no shame in being raped, not because he was a particularly progressive guy but because that was the logical consequence of the way he thought: to be be good was to cultivate your character not to be possessed of intact hymen.

During the period that Austen was writing, this idea of character was being replaced by a series of restrictions on what people could do and remain virtuous. A virtuous person stopped meaning someone who was good at doing certain kinds of things and started meaning someone who was good at resisting doing certain things, particularly sexual things.

Pamela, however, has another kind of virtue and it is a virtue we might expect to appeal to Austen. Pamela is a very good writer. All Richardson's claims to the contrary, it is Pamela's letter- and journal-writing abilities that lead her to succeed. We see this most clearly after she is married and Mr. B's sister shows up and insults her. Tragedy is averted by the sister reading Pamela's journal. What wins the sister over is Pamela's character and she learns about it through Pamela's writing. Which is to say that this character is not revearled just by what Pamela says but by how she says it.

Which is interesting given the way that Henry has just mocked the writing abilities of women. It is also interesting in that language and tehw ay it is used is a consistent marker of character in Austen. In Northanger Abbey, for example, the conversations that Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Thorpe have, in which much self-affirmation takes place but little actual connection is a standard Austen motif marking a character as morally insubstantial. On the other side of the ledger, the very rich conversations Elizabeth and Darcy have right from the beginning of their relationship (even when being unpleasant to one another as much information as affirmation is exchanged) mark them as morally substantial characters.