“Booby’s fruitless operations”: The Crisis of Male Authority in Richardson’s Pamela

Abstract

Critics have read Mr B.’s failure to rape Pamela either as evidence of his sexual impotence and Richardson’s authorial incompetence or as a testament to the power of Pamela’s heroically resistant voice. In contrast, I argue that Mr B.’s inability to acquit himself as a rake is crucially linked to his desire to silence Pamela’s narrative. While he fails to penetrate her body, he ultimately succeeds at insinuating a competing narrative within her epistolary text—a narrative that highlights his own discursive powerlessness and depicts her writing as an act of sexualized boldness. Mr B.’s counter-narrative allows him both to redirect his erotic pursuit and to supplant Pamela’s story with his own. As his professions of weakness become his means of co-opting and reforming Pamela’s writing, Mr B.’s rhetorical tactics anticipate Richardson’s own strategic self-diminution as he publishes Pamela alongside—and in opposition to—female-authored romances.