Queer Time in Pamela

This chapter explores how Samuel Richardson both represented, and contributed to, the emergence of eighteenth-century models of heteronormative, white, and genteel, masculinity in his 1740 novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. In particular, it considers how Richardson articulated manliness in relation to the ordered temporality of the domestic space of the home. Critics have long associated Richardson’s writing with the production of new cultural and social modes. Michael McKeon argues that the ‘…spectacle of Pamela is a kind of “glass” in which the gentry see not her “public” meaning but themselves, the authority of her upward mobility…’, whilst Terry Eagleton claims that ‘Richardson did not only share in the bourgeois public sphere of eighteenth-century England; he helped to construct it’. More recently, critics like Paul Kelleher and Kathleen Lubey have approached Pamela from a queer studies perspective with decisive consequences for criticism in the field. Reading the melding of sexuality and sentiment in Richardson, Kelleher has shown how Pamela’s attachment to moral goodness ‘arrests for a time … the narrative development of reciprocated heterosexual desire’. Meanwhile, placing Richardson in the context of the pornographic, Lubey argues that sex scenes provide ‘instructive moments that call on readers to imagine sex acts in multiple ways …’. Adding to these important queer readings, I explore how Richardson’s temporal politics in Pamela contributed to the emergence of heteronormativity in eighteenth-century anglophone culture.