Subjectivity

Ruth Robbins

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781137612045
• eBook ISBN: 9781350309845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Who do you think you are? In Subjectivity, Ruth Robbins explores some of the responses to this fundamental question. In readings of a number of autobiographical texts from the last three centuries, Robbins offers an approachable account of formations of the self which demonstrates that both psychology and material conditions - often in tension with one another - are the building blocks of modern notions of selfhood. Key texts studied include:
- William Wordsworth's Prelude
- Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater
- James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Oscar Wilde's De Profundis
- Jung Chang's Wild Swans Robbins also argues that our subjectivity, far from being the secure possession of the individual, is potentially fragile and contingent. She shows that the versions of subjectivity authorized by the dominant culture are full of gaps and blindspots that undo any notion of universal human nature: subjectivity is culturally and historically specific - we are, in part, what the culture in which we live permits us to be. Concise and easy-to-follow, this introduction to the concept of subjectivity, and the theories surrounding it, shows that, in spite of the insecurity of selfhood, there is still much to be gained from the textual encounter with other selves. It is essential reading for all those studying 'autobiography' or 'autobiographical writing'.

1 Pamela, Rousseau and Equiano: Trousseaux, Confessions and Tall Tales

Subjectivity, as the Introduction suggests, is a very insecure possession. In this chapter, the three texts discussed are produced by writers who, in the words of Julia Kristeva, are sujets-en-procès (subjects in process/on trial). Kristeva argues, in fact, that all subjectivities are sujets-en-procès, that subjectivity is never complete, but is always in the process of being made and remade by the competing forces of the Symbolic order (the non du père) and the semiotic, a space made up of the demands of the body and of the non-signifying parts of language, such as speech rhythms, sounds, intonations and other non-semantic gestures. Additionally, she argues that it is a kind of trial – a trial for one’s life, one might say – in which laws made before one’s birth compete with the apparently autonomous self’s attempts to assert its individuality.¹ In bringing these three very different texts together, I want to suggest a number of possible ideas about subjectivity, and I begin with Kristeva’s concept because the paired ideas of trial and process are more acutely felt in some of these texts than in other places. In part, subjectivity depends on pre-existing scripts – you are what you have the ability to say, and, by extension, you are what you have read. This is particularly the case for the two relatively underprivileged subjectivities discussed here, the fictional character Pamela Andrews brought to life in Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela, and the real-life historical personage, Ouladah Equiano. Their attempts to make themselves – to achieve self-possession, one might say – depend very heavily on the privileged models of self hood that they find in already-existing texts. On the other hand, whilst Jean-Jacques Rousseau is at pains to argue in his Confessions that he is also underprivileged, his subject position is self-consciously produced as a series of acts of resistance against the conventional models available to him. He reacts to those models in part precisely because he is already possessed of and by them, and can take them for granted. For Pamela and Equiano, the situation is much more unstable, and this points out the fact that the subjectivity one is able to inhabit is at least as much a function of the economic and cultural circumstances in which one lives as it is a question of individual choices and will.

‘Who does she think she is?’ The case of Pamela

‘O my good girl’, replied [Mr B.] tauntingly, ‘you are well read, I see; and we shall make out between us, before we have done, a pretty story for a romance’. (Richardson 1980, 63)

The question in this subtitle is a refinement of the ones I posed earlier. It comes from an essay on the novel Pamela (1740) by Carolyn Steedman (Steedman 1992, 8). And amongst all the many things that Samuel Richardson’s novel might be, it is, as Steedman argues, a very potent rewriting of a historically and culturally specific script. Pamela documents the making of a particular subjectivity against the confines of class and gender; and the important word here is documents.

The case of Pamela in fact offers serious challenges to readers in my place and time, for we are at some considerable distance from the implications the text offered to its own place and time: modern student readers often struggle to understand what all the considerable fuss was about when the novel was first published.² The historian Hayden White comments that ‘The reality that lends itself to narrative representation is the conflict between desire and the law’ (White 1987, 12). In the West, we live in an era when that conflict is less acutely experienced, though we may well be mistaken in our assumption that our desires are easily met. For Pamela Andrews, however, duty appears a stronger motivation for actions than desire, and many of the problems she confronts are founded on duties that are in conflict with each other – the duty to her ‘master’, Mr B, duties to her parents (she usually signs herself ‘Your dutiful Daughter’ [Richardson 1980, 72]), and the duty she owes to her God. The burden of duty is centred on a female protagonist who is established as being especially vulnerable to assaults on her dignity, virtue and self-respect. Duty is not a merely abstract conception. Pamela produces ideas about emotion and sentiment (the possessions of an interior world) in a world that is very strongly materially realized with specificity of time, place and action. The novel is placed geographically, domestically and socially, implying that the emotions it produces are directly related to the wider cultural values of the mid-eighteenth century in which it is set.

The single most significant thing about Pamela Andrews, however, is that she can read and write. The whole of her existence in the novel, and indeed, the novel’s existence, is predicated on the fact that she is ‘always scribbling’ (Richardson 1980, 54). Her character is constructed entirely out of the words in which she narrates her own story and whenever she is silent, she ceases, for that moment, to exist. The fact that she is able to read and write is a social anomaly caused by the favouritism of her dead mistress: ‘my lady’s goodness had put me to write and cast accompts, and made me a little expert at my needle, and otherwise qualified me above my degree’ (43, my emphasis). These skills have rendered her déclassée; they have placed her outside the normal skill-set of her social station. She can read, write, count and embroider, and is thus overqualified for many of the servant-type jobs that would otherwise have been open to her. And it is highly likely that it is these attributes – the attributes of a lady in a young girl otherwise socially disadvantaged – that first excite Mr B’s unwelcome attentions.

Because Pamela’s written language is her character, she engages the reader in a series of questions about the nature of the relationship between words and the reality they supposedly describe. Richardson clearly presumed that we would read his novel in good faith: he expected us to believe that Pamela was always telling the truth, and that her motives were as she states them. He went to considerable lengths to reproduce the effects of reality – to create verisimilitude in his fiction so that readers would forget that Pamela is in fact merely an empty sign with no existence beyond the pages in which she appears. He therefore presents Pamela in medias res, writing her life story without the benefit of hindsight, and without the knowledge of how it will all turn out. In the excitement of her ‘writing to the moment’ readers are constructed to respond as if to a series of real, immediate crises. This impression is, of course, false. Even if we accede to a suspension of disbelief and accept Pamela’s ‘reality’, it is obviously the case that whilst ever Pamela is writing the crisis must have receded: no one writes down her thoughts whilst in the very midst of being raped, and there is always a gap between the actions that are narrated and the act of narrating those actions. Her continued narrative signals that she has survived to fight another day. In two senses, then, writing is literally the heroine’s whole existence: there is no Pamela (or Pamela) without her words; and there is a guarantee of her safety if she is writing ‘now’.

At the same time, though, Pamela’s writing of her story always risks drawing attention to the fact of her writing, and hence to the fact that her story might be read as fiction or as artifice. Her letters and diaries are not merely the container for the plot (the way in which the story gets told); they are also a major part of the plot. A lot of Pamela’s time and ingenuity is taken up with the practicalities of writing. For Pamela, paper, pens and ink are expensive and rare commodities. She must, therefore, ‘plot’ or scheme to ensure that she has sufficient materials for writing at her disposal, and she must write about these plots. She must find ways to circumvent the watchful eyes of Mrs Jewkes who wishes to see everything her prisoner has written. She must find the privacy in which to write – and in privacy, of course, she is at risk, because once away from the social spaces of the Lincolnshire house, she becomes vulnerable to the predations of her master. Finally, as my students always ruefully notice, even the first two volumes of Pamela do not represent a short book. There is an awful lot of paper to be kept away from prying eyes. Ironically, then, Pamela must keep on writing, thereby increasing the bulk of what she has written, about how she is going to keep that bulk hidden. The more she writes, the more she has to write. She is ingenious in her hiding places, hiding her letters in the garden under a sunflower, and eventually sewing them into her petticoats. This last hiding place has the effect of rendering the letters – at least for Mr B – erotically charged because they are close to the body that he wishes to possess. In a novel that is filled with more or less titillatory scenes, the most titillatory is the moment when Mr B threatens to undress Pamela to possess – not her body, this time – but her letters. He describes them as a romance or novel and wants to read them because he wishes to take over the authorship and direct the story’s ending: ‘there’s such a pretty air of romance as you tell your story, in your plots, and my plots, that I shall be better directed how to wind up the catastrophe of the pretty novel’ (Richardson 1980, 268, original emphasis). His desire to read the words she has written eventually becomes a virtual substitute for the sexual conquest he has so far failed to make:

‘Now’, said he, ‘it is my opinion that [your writings] are about you; and I have never undressed a girl in my life; but I will now begin to strip my pretty Pamela, and hope I shall not go far before I find them’. And he began to unpin my handkerchief. (Richardson 1980, 272)

Like pornography, Pamela’s writing has seductive effects, acting in a transitive way on Mr B’s world. The body of the text and the body of its ‘author’ are strangely mixed up in the novel, a highly suggestive conflation that tells us something about the possibilities of reading and writing as the sites of erotic encounter. He reads her as the heroine of one kind of fiction, and she resists his interpretation, constructing herself as a heroine in quite another genre.

The answer to the question ‘who does Pamela think she is’ is largely a matter of her reading. By the standards of eighteenth-century elite culture, although Pamela has been educated above her station, she is nonetheless woefully under-educated and under-read. The education of polite society in this period was one based on the Classics – on the dead languages and literature of Greek and Latin civilization. She may be able to read and write, but what she is able to read and write lays her open to charges of ‘vulgarity’, the vulgar tongue in this case meaning the vernacular language of English as opposed to the languages of the ancient texts. But it also means another kind of ‘vulgarity’ – her ‘under-reading’ is understood as a symptom of her under-breeding, her lack of high-class status. As Moyra Haslett notes, there was a certain discomfort with Pamela’s ‘homely diction’, a lexis which, as it were, named a spade a spade rather than a horticultural implement (Haslett 2003, 213). This discomfort derives from the fact that the eighteenth-century world of polite letters focused strongly on the concept of manners appropriate to an elite class, to an elegant periphrasis that avoided naming things exactly as they are. Nonetheless, Pamela exhibits an attitude to the written word which is testament to its potency, for her reading teaches her moral lessons which her own writing then seeks to replicate for the benefit of her own readers, both those within her text (Mr B and his society friends) and those outside it. There is a focus on the transitivity of the written word.

As a good Protestant, the most obvious text to which Pamela makes reference is her Bible. Her knowledge of this foundational text can be found in structural effects in the novel, such as the fact that her exile at Brandon Hall lasts for forty days and forty nights, the Biblical shorthand for ‘a very long time’ which covers everything from the duration of the Flood to the wanderings of Christ in the Wilderness. It can also be found in the frankly hilarious version she writes of Psalm 137 (‘By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion’). This Psalm, which records the emotions of exile experienced by the Israelites in their displacements from the Promised Land, argues that one cannot be oneself, because one cannot be ‘at home’, in a strange land – exile has serious consequences for selfhood. When Pamela adapts this Psalm, depending on how you look at it, she either elevates her own situation by an appeal to Biblical authority, or she unwittingly ridicules Biblical authority in the bathetic juxtaposition of her own individual situation with that of an entire exiled people. The poem she writes about her imprisonment – ‘When sad I sat in Brandon Hall’ (349) – strikes modern readers as comic. But the audience inside the book is moved by its pathos and praises Pamela’s sensibility, even unto weeping themselves, a move which itself constructs the emotion that Richardson also wished to reproduce in his own readers outside the text through the emotional affect of ‘sensibility’. Although Ian Watt’s account of the rise of the modern individual as evidenced by the representations of such psychologized characters as Pamela in the era of the rise of the novel has been much criticized, the effect of the Protestant emphasis on the individual quest for salvation via Bible study clearly does mark Pamela’s thinking about who she is, and thus also marks her writing of herself and our reading of her.³

Pamela, however, has not only read her Bible. In Letter 29 we discover that she has also read both Aesop’s Fables and the stories of the Protestant martyrs.⁴ She uses these texts as very direct examples to apply to her own experience. As she wonders what she will do for a living if she is forced to return to her parents and keep herself by harder kinds of labour than those she is used to, she explicitly compares herself with ‘the grasshopper in the fable, which I have read of in my lady’s books’, and draws the moral lesson that she would have been better off training to do work more fitted to her social position: ‘I had better, as things stand, have learned to wash and scour, and brew and bake, and such like’ (109). A little later, she compares her own experience to the story of a Protestant bishop who was to be burned at the stake and tested his own fortitude for the coming trial by putting his fingers into a lighted candle:

so I t’other day tried … if I could not scour a pewter plate … I see I could do it by degrees; it only blistered my hand in two places.

All the matter is, if I could get plain-work enough, I need not spoil my fingers. But if I can’t, I will make my hands as red as a blood pudding, and as hard as a beechen trencher, but I will accommodate them to my condition. (109)

As Margaret Doody has observed of this passage, Pamela founds her subjectivity on a range of rather incongruously juxtaposed preexisting scripts, from real life experience (beechen trenchers and blood pudding are part of the incontrovertible evidence of the ‘vulgarity’ or ‘lowness’ of that experience), to martyrologies (the martyred bishop), to the concerns of beauty manuals (blistered hands caused by hard labour) to the language of social duty (to which Pamela will ‘accommodate’ herself if so required) (Doody 1980, 12). There is both energy and comedy in this description of what she will do. And Nancy Armstrong also shows how the genre of the conduct manual – texts explicitly aimed at reproducing socially exemplary behaviour – are an essential feature of Pamela’s narrative and Richardson’s conception of his task as a writer (Armstrong 1987, esp. 66–7). But the passage also points out how Pamela habitually makes use of her reading: she always relates what she reads to her current situation behaving exactly towards the text as the moralistic fictions and conduct books of her age required her to do. There are multiple examples of this tendency in the novel. Fearing she will be raped, Pamela contemplates suicide, but she also fears becoming ‘the subject’ of her neighbours’ ‘ballads and … elegies’ (Richardson 1980, 212), fears, in other words, that she will be reduced to a moral fable; yet fables are part of her own process of making herself and she compares herself to ‘the poor sheep in the fable’ (224). Elsewhere, she considers faking her own death, taking her example from a tale she has read ‘of a great sea captain’ who thwarted his enemies by pretending to drown (208). And this tendency affects Mr B as well. His plans to entrap her into a sham marriage – his ‘horrid romancing’ (219) – are a plot element common in Restoration comedy.

The process of reading one’s own life into fictional models was one of the contemporary objections to novel reading, for the Protestant tradition makes great play of the concept of devotional reading which is designed to produce real effects in readers’ lives. If impressionable young women, in particular, read novels, mostly made up of improbable love stories, they were likely to be led astray into thinking forbidden thoughts and harbouring untenable aspirations. In this novel, there is a highly developed sense that reading as well as writing is a material practice that has material effects on the reader. After all, Mr B is finally seduced into marriage by reading Pamela’s story in her own words; he changes his ways and becomes an interpreter of moral lessons from the written word, just as Pamela herself is, and just as we are supposed to be in the world outside the text.

In becoming an author, Pamela stakes a claim to authority (the root word for both author and authority is the same). It is a claim that, in many ways, she has no right to make at all. Apart from her relatively feeble educational status, within the English class system that is the social backbone of the text, Pamela’s place is extremely insecure. And one reason why the text goes on at such length is to do with the psychological effects of that position on Pamela’s hopes and dreams. The rigidity of the social hierarchy is such that Pamela cannot imagine marrying Mr B like a latterday Cinderella. He is too far above her for this even to cross her mind at the outset. As Doody puts it:

She belongs to the bottom of the social pyramid; Mr B. and others refer to her father as ‘Goodman Andrews’, as he is not of the class entitled to be referred to as ‘Mister’. He is master of nothing. Mr B. orders … the servants … refer to Pamela as ‘Madam’, ‘Mistress Pamela’, ‘Mrs Pamela’, as if she were entitled by rank to the dignity of a title. But she knows that this is making a ‘May-game’ of her. By birth, she is mistress of nothing, and they are trying to maker her ‘Madam’ and a ‘Mistress’ in the sense of ‘whore’. (Doody 1996, 101–2)

The fact of class not only prevents Pamela from dreaming of a marriage to Mr B, at least at the outset; it also prevents Mr B from dreaming of marrying her. Pamela’s worthlessness on the social scale is cruelly exposed in the reactions of the local gentry to her plight during her Lincolnshire imprisonment. As Parson Williams reports:

I applied to Lady Darnford, and told her, in the most pathetic terms I could think of, your sad story, and shewed her your more pathetic letter. I found her well-disposed; but she would advise with Sir Simon, she said … She did, in my presence; and he said, ‘Why, what is all this, my dear, but that our neighbour has a mind to his mother’s waiting-maid! And if he takes care she wants for nothing, I don’t see any great injury will be done her. He hurts no family by this.’ (Richardson 1980, 172, original emphasis)

The lady reader in this exc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Who Do You Think You Are?
• 1. Pamela, Rousseau and Equiano: Trousseaux, Confessions and Tall Tales
• 2. Two Romantic Egos:Wordsworth’s Prelude and De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater
• 3. Victorian Individualisms and Their Limitations
• 4. James Joyce and Self-Portraiture
• 5. In Prison and in Chains: Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling
• 6. Talking Properly: Class Acts in Carolyn Steedman and Alan Bennett
• 7. China Women: Jung Chang’s Wild Swans and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
• 8. Death Sentences: The Sense of an Ending? Living with Dying in Narratives of Terminal Illness
• Glossary
• Annotated Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index