Reading Samuel Richardson's View On Female From Pamela

Samuel Richardson is a famous English novelist in the 18th century and he is also a master of epistolary novel in Europe. His three great epistolary novels are Pamela (1740-41), Clarissa (1748), Grandison (1754), which play an important role in the history of English novel. Richardson cares about the issues of marriage and moral admonition and most of his works always take the maid or middle-class female as protagonist. Richardson is good at describing emotional and psychological characters, and thereby creating a model of Britain's family novel. Pamela is one of his great works, known as the first modern novel in English literary history. There are some essays that analyze Richardson's novel with kind of critical theories. The critics'study on Richardson's works mainly develops from the perspectives of epistolary fiction artistry, narrative skill, psychological analysis, feminism, historical significance and religious attitudes. However, the research of Richardson's view on female in Pamela is not systematic. Resorting to the ex-achievement about his novels, this thesis takes Richardson's novel Pamela as analyzing text to reexamine his female image and excavate his vision of women on the condition of interpreting the profound meaning of his works objectively so as to catch on Richardson's points of view on women.The thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter centers on Pamela's manipulative independence in the male-dominated society through the analysis of Pamela's female image. Although Richardson is a male writer who cares about the fate of the female, he endows Pamela a falsified female voice. Pamela is represented as a manipulatedly independent woman. The second chapter attaches great importance to Pamela's submission to the male-dominated society. Pamela is a woman who lacks female voice after marriage. She transfers into an ideal woman. From the image of Pamela, Richardson's view on female---woman should identify with the male culture can be seen. The third chapter focuses on Richardson's view on female from the aspect of contemporaneous reader's acceptance of the novel. It is not difficult to see that Richardson tries to implant a completely patriarchal marriage morality to female readers. Only be obedient, and submissive, can virtue be rewarded. Pamela is known to be a perfect female image in Richardson's eyes. A deep study of Pamela shows that there are a variety of contradictions in her personality: challenge to male authority but yield to male-centered society. Essentially, she is a perfect"angel of men's desire"created according to the feudal patriarchal criterion. Pamela is the spokesman of Richardson, and her image reflects Richardson's attitudes towards female: what Pamela obtains is a kind of manipulative independence and she should identify with the male culture and women should be moralized in the patriarchal society. Although Richardson attempts to protest against the inequality of women's position in patriarchy and particularly for his attempt to portray Pamela as his ideal woman, it must be acknowledged that Richardson cannot break away from the patriarchal ideology that constitutes his greatest limitation in his vision of women. Richardson can not be considered as a feminist. Moreover, Richardson is not keen enough to explore female characters'revolt consciousness compared with his contemporary women writers. He approaches most of his heroines externally rather than internally, which results from his unconscious reinforcement of patriarchal modes of perception on women.