Detachable Pockets and Letter Folds: Spatial Formalism and the Portable Interiors of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Novel Detachable Pockets and Letter Folds: Spatial Formalism and the Portable Interiors of the Eighteenth-Century Novel JULIE PARK Since its eighteenth-century English inception, the novel has functioned as a textual space for portraying internal experience in the context of everyday life. Throughout eighteenth-century England, commentators identified the new genre as an exchange of the fantasy spaces and objects that filled romances for the everyday furnishings of “real Life” (Anonymous 152). The novel, as Clara Reeve put it in 1785, “gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes” (353). At the same time that new standards of probability distinguished the novel from its predecessor, romance, so too did its desire to “paint the inward mind” and to “dive into those recesses . . . lay[ing] them open to the reader in a striking and intelligible manner,” wrote Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding in 1754 (116–17). These eighteenth-century commentaries reveal that realism was recognized in the early novel as a portrayal of everyday life in its interior as well as exterior registers. Consistent too in these summations is a tendency to see the novel, despite its outward manifestation as an object, as a spatial entity, like the mind itself. The merging of internal psychological experience with external events, objects, and spaces defines the experience of interiority specific to the novel as a new literary genre and, as I will show, the material culture of everyday life in eighteenth-century England. It was with the 1740 publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela that literary history saw in narrative art the full integration of psychological interiors with physical ones. While Richardson’s narrative tracks the movements of its heroine’s thoughts and feelings in response to the events and circumstances around her, it takes pains to show that they happen within the spatial interiors of daily domestic life. Ian Watt has most forcibly articulated the equation between novel characters’ “private experience” and domestic space: “[T]he two go together—we get inside their minds as well as inside their houses” (175). Is this always true? Does going inside minds always mean going inside houses? If we consider how, under the influence of empirical formulations of consciousness, the space of the mind was being construed as a home during the time period in which Pamela was written, we might also recognize that homes for eighteenth-century novels and their readers were more diverse and movable than what now standard conceptions of domestic space might indicate. I suggest that mental homes, the space of interiority itself, warrant more recognition in theories and histories of the novel as being deeply embedded in material environments. Such homes were located not just within the architectural edifice of a house but also in everyday spaces that extend and move outside it. Watt’s own model of the conjunction of psychological spaces with domestic ones emerges from an argument about what makes the novel distinct as a literary genre. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 50:1 DOI 10.1215/00295132-3854251  2017 by Novel, Inc. Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS 9 The technique of “formal realism” he delineates as the novel’s unique method all but explains how the novel came to be the definitive genre of the everyday. With formal realism, fiction in the eighteenth century began to represent individual subjective experience within its temporal and spatial framework in a more “immediate” and “minutely discriminated” fashion than other literary genres (32, 22). In this way, eighteenth-century fiction not only conformed to John Locke’s notion that individual identity is constituted by its specific location in time and space but also obtained its characteristic “closeness to the texture of daily experience” (22). The novel’s individual characters can only be individuals at all “if they are set in a background of particularised time and place” (21). In this, fiction demonstrates not only a new “philosophical realism” but also psychological realism. Particularized space itself is not the only new factor—so too is the direction in which one approaches such space. The direction that eighteenth-century fiction’s realism moves is inward to the spaces of mind and home alike, even as it remains rooted in the external features of quotidian life. This essay decisively recasts Watt’s premises by regarding the temporal and spatial environments of formal realism not so much as givens of real life that are simply described by novels but rather as changing creations of imaginative practice as well. Whereas in Watt’s view “the writer’s exclusive aim is to make the words bring his object home to us in all its concrete particularity,” I contend that the “particularised” objects of textual representation themselves, especially of characters’ physical environments, so often regarded as inert “background” elements of narrative, actively shape internal and external realities and their interrelationships. At stake in my approach is a fundamental redefinition of formal realism to mean making real desired realities with the resources of form afforded by the materiality of language, things, and spaces alike. Such acts of formal realism, reconceived in terms of what I will call spatial formalism, take place in the interactions between textual creations and their historical relationships with the material world of everyday life. To focus on Richardson’s first novel is to return critical attention to the very work that makes it even possible to speak today of the novel as both a genre and an artifact of the everyday.1 Its innovative usage of such common forms of diurnal writing as the letter and diary as well as presentation of a servant girl as the writer of those letters certainly contribute to its quotidian aspects. An equally significant feature of its status as a classic narrative of the everyday is its setting in household life. Following Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction, scholars have assimilated Richardson’s novel to the subgenre of “domestic fiction.” Indeed, the labels domestic fiction and domestic realism have been used for the kind of fiction that Pamela represents, though not by Watt.2 He never employed the term himself but indicates implicitly that narratives using the domestic interior as a setting initiate a “more elaborate representational technique than fiction had ever seen before” 1 See William Warner’s cultural analysis of the novel as a pivotal genre of the everyday in its status as a new medium for popular entertainment in eighteenth-century England. 2 This stands in contrast with Armstrong, Vineta Colby, and Helen Thompson, who use the label “domestic fiction” in their studies of novels focusing on women and their roles in the home. For Colby and Armstrong, Richardson’s Pamela lays the groundwork for Victorian literature. Published by Duke University Press Novel 10 NOVEL MAY 2017 (204). While the claim has been broadly accepted, no critic has yet attended to just how the detailed delineation of domestic space leads to a greater sense of what it is like to inhabit a character’s consciousness. Richardson’s critics have almost always equated the domestic settings of his work with his realism. So close was his attention to the material details of his characters’ living environments, Anna Laetitia Barbauld in 1804 famously compared Richardson’s style with “the accuracy and finish of a Dutch painter” who “is content to produce effects by the patient labour of minuteness.” In proclaiming this, she praises Richardson’s style for its “property of setting before the reader, in the most lively manner, every circumstance of what he means to describe” (cxxxvii). By virtue of comparing Richardson’s writing with seventeenth-century Dutch painting, Barbauld creates an intermedial relationship between his novels and a celebrated visual tradition of domestic interiors that preceded and anticipated them.3 Following suit in his 1804 review of the work in which Barbauld’s quotation emerges—her biography of Richardson and collection of his letters—Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review identifies in similar terms “the great excellence of Richardson’s novels” as lying in “the unparalleled minuteness and copiousness of his descriptions” (43). Yet Jeffrey names the effect of intimacy to which Barbauld only gestures with her visual reference to Dutch painting when he compares the effect of reading Richardson’s fiction with the experience of visiting someone’s home in which an “appointment” must be made and in which we might “see and hear only what we know has been prepared for our reception.” In contrast, no such appointment is necessary when reading Richardson; with his works, “we slip, invisible, into the domestic privacy of his characters, and hear and see every thing that is said and done among them, whether it be interesting or otherwise, and whether it gratify our curiosity or disappoint it” (ibid.). The imagery that Barbauld and Jeffrey both develop is one not only in which realism is tied directly with the privacy of domestic life but also in which the novelist’s creation serves as an alternate home for the reader’s mind. The fact that it is as much the reader’s mind as the fictive home that is “slip[ped], invisible, into” suggests that the essential movement that accompanies the experience of reading novels is one of entering interiors that move. The movement is as much a function of the basic portability of minds themselves as it is of the material form in which the novel’s domestic interiors appear: the book.4 But other portable interiors are entered into, sent, and carried throughout Richardson’s novel as well as the reader’s experience of reading the novel, whether Pamela or the genre. What remains to be unpacked are the concrete affordances of such interiors—the detachable pockets of eighteenth-century women’s dress in particular—and why they allow the objects to serve as domestic spaces, housing the owner’s personal possessions as well as her mind’s contents, even when they are at first perceived as things. 3 See Ruth Bernard Yeazell on the background of Dutch Golden Age painting in nineteenthcentury realist novels. 4 See Warner’s discussion of the novel’s small format as an essential feature of its predominance as a popular genre. Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS 11 Revisiting Richardson’s Pamela as a site of “spatial formalism,” this essay maintains that the notion of the domestic interior as a setting conducive to psychological interiority requires further materialist analysis. It demonstrates that the novel’s production of psychological interiority yields an inwardness that models itself as much on the mobile qualities of Pamela’s detachable pockets as on the allegedly fixed spaces of country house estates. These spaces include the dressing rooms, writing closets, bedrooms, and gardens of the stately home that also feature in the novel and have received critical attention.5 I argue that the interiority of Pamela hinges less on characters’ emotions than on its ability to move between different spatial interiors, from those of domestic architecture to those of spaces that initially register as objects, such as detachable pockets as well as books and letters. Unrecognized is the fact that the mobility of interior spaces that Pamela stages is integral to the work’s standing as a paradigmatic text in the history of the novel. Tracing the novel’s movements of situating spaces of interiority in things as well as rooms— and, in doing so, turning things into rooms of their own—sheds light on its formative role in articulating the concept of a materially realized interiority that is central to the modern novel and its experience, if not to modernity itself. The notion of dwelling, which so often “carries an aura of snug, well-wrapped localism,” needs to accommodate the “primacy of movement,” as Tim Ingold points out, and the ways in which “humans and non-humans make their ways in the world” (12). By examining the interpenetrations between the portable spaces of interiority in material culture and a work regarded as the prototype for domestic fiction—the very fiction of dwelling—this article contributes to the project of incorporating mobility in the concept of dwelling that Ingold formulates. Moreover, placing emphasis on the materiality of interior life in Richardson’s fiction sharpens an understanding that Armstrong first made possible: the novel as a genre and Richardson’s novel in particular render the interiorized female subject the paradigmatic subject of the middle class and of the modernity it constitutes.6 My analysis of Richardson’s novel in effect redefines C. B. Macpherson’s “possessive individualism” in terms of gender and materiality. A concept originating in seventeenth-century political discourse, possessive individualism views the individual as “the proprietor of his own person or capacities,” or, more simply, “an owner of himself.” If “the human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession” (3), then Richardson’s Pamela demonstrates this notion of freedom that underpins liberal democracy’s possessive individualism when she declares to her “master,” Mr. B., after he pretends to confuse her with someone else: “O sir. . . . I am Pamela. Indeed I am Pamela, her own self!” (89). I will demonstrate that, ultimately, Pamela lays claim to her selfhood not through such words alone but also through effecting a dynamic whereby her movable possessions—her letters and her pockets namely—become spatial 5 See Robert Folkenflik; Tita Chico; and Karen Lipsedge. Counterintuitively, the landscape gardens of country house estates also qualify as domestic spaces of inwardness and warrant further critical attention in literary criticism. 6 She writes, “[I]t is also reasonable to claim that the modern individual was first and foremost a female” (66). Published by Duke University Press Novel 12 NOVEL MAY 2017 territories of the self that challenge the authority of land ownership conferred to her social superiors. During the course of the narrative she effects, in other words, a shift in social relations as defined by property as well as (infamously) by marriage through her ability to transform the interiority afforded by her everyday possessions into an estate of the self, or, as she puts it, “her own self.” Property’s Forms: Space, Mind, and Body in Motion The novel’s rise as a popular literary genre coincided with a period of transition for notions of property in English political-economic history. While landed property prevailed throughout the eighteenth century as England’s “dominant social, political, and ideological paradigm,” the movable properties of a rapidly expanding market economy—its “commodities, stocks, credits”—created a new one (Schmidgen 7). Unlike the nineteenth century, however, during which landed property’s social and political influence waned, England in the eighteenth century supported a close relationship between state and society, with landed property as its medium. Through landed property, “private right and public legitimacy” remained integrated in eighteenth-century England. At the same time, property in Western society has traditionally been viewed as “both an extension and a prerequisite of personality” that gives its owner the means for autonomy and independence (Pocock 103). Of particular interest in the seventeenth-century background is the fact that property and propriety were interchangeable. In this way, property was a “juridical term before it was an economic one” and held both meanings of “that to which one properly had a claim” and “that which was properly one’s own” (56). The semantic continuity between propriety and property that J. G. A. Pocock identifies in seventeenth-century political writing pertains to Richardson’s eighteenth-century narrative insofar as it presents virtue as a female’s right to own, which in turn has economic and narrative consequences. Not merely reflecting views on the nature of property, Richardson’s novel engages with the wider discourse on property of his time, especially the distinction between “movable” and “immovable” forms of property.7 Whereas landed property may be viewed as representing “older conceptions of identity and wealth” and movable property the products of eighteenth-century England’s new commercial economy, neither, Wolfram Schmidgen maintains, should be viewed as entirely distinct from each other (12). At the same time, rather than a decisive rupture, as some historians suggest, with movable property wholly supplanting immovable as the basis for social and political power, eighteenth-century England occupied a 7 For Pocock, the relationship between immovable and movable property was more “dialectical” than the “unidirectional transformation of thought” that Macpherson describes in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism as causing “market assumptions” to condition ideas and attitudes in seventeenth-century political discourse and “economic man” to prevail (Pocock 59, 71). At the same time, Pocock’s claim about the “confrontation between real and mobile property” is more nuanced. Rather than being based on the “marketable” quality of mobile property, the conflict had to do with the fact that mobile property entailed dependence on government support, thus threatening the “independence and virtue” that landed property had originally conferred (68). Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS 13 moment of economic and political transition (11). It would not be until the Victorian period that movable property would so thoroughly displace immovable property as the basis for wealth, independence, and influence.8 Taking Schmidgen’s point that the boundary between movable and immovable properties was more elastic than others have allowed—“commodities can be immovable, land can be movable” (8)—we see that the interchange between these forms of property also accounts for the transformative energies that create narrative and social-political movement in Pamela.9 The fluid relationship between movable and immovable properties and the question of what constitutes such properties as well as who has the right to own, access, and inhabit their spaces illuminate the political stakes of interiority in its diverse locations throughout Richardson’s novel. Servants and workers in eighteenth-century England, like Richardson’s heroine, commonly used locked boxes and trunks to contain their belongings and safeguard their privacy in shared accommodations, as Amanda Vickery has shown. Indeed, as I will show, having the ability to keep something private if one chooses is what turns an entity into property, whether movable or immovable. At the same time, privacy itself was a basic component of individual identity. As such, it entailed “the safety of one’s defences, the separateness of one’s concerns and the preservation of the things of one’s own” (Vickery 46). The spread of such devices as keys and locks throughout the period not only registers the intricacy of legal attitudes toward what constitutes theft or burglary (only locked premises could be viewed as being “broken into”) but also suggests greater investment in securing one’s privacy as a form of property in itself. This continuity in the relationship between privacy and property is critical to understanding the material basis of individuation in Pamela and its key feature of portability. “Portable” in the eighteenth century meant both movable and handheld. Whereas Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia in 1728 defined portable as “something easy of carriage,” Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary in 1755–56 defined it in its first entry as “manageable by the hand.” Both senses of “portability,” its mobility and its manual, handheld qualities, are operative in my argument. Designating the space of interiority in a portable object such as Pamela’s detachable pockets, this essay makes more legible in Richardson’s novel the unceasing movements of inanimate yet movable goods that drove eighteenth-century England’s thriving consumer culture. The novel was a literary genre written for and read by those same middling classes that fueled England’s increased mercantile activities and propelled the motion of movable properties. In its printed manifestation in the eighteenth century, with its small duodecimo or octavo format, the novel was a handheld object that could be carried 8 Testifying to this notion, John Plotz’s study covers commodities only, thus implying that landed property, by the Victorian period, had ceased to be the main referent for the term property. 9 In contrast with Schmidgen, who argues against making a distinction between spaces and objects and subsumes landed property under the category of “object,” I insist on space as the prevailing category. For Schmidgen, Mr. B.’s Lincolnshire estate would function economically and politically in a manner similar to Pamela’s detachable pockets as objects might. Yet Mr. B.’s Lincolnshire estate functions very much as a space, as does the pocket itself throughout the novel. Published by Duke University Press Novel 14 NOVEL MAY 2017 close to the body and that, when read, detached the reader from her immediate surroundings to an intimate space that lived inside her own head. Deidre Shauna Lynch has also remarked on the diminutive physical features of the eighteenth-century novel as a critical aspect of its experience and popularity.10 “What was rising in the early eighteenth century, in early eighteenth-century eyes, was not so much a distinctively novelistic fiction as a distinctively portable fiction,” she writes (126). She also argues that literary history, especially after the Romantics, has overemphasized the eighteenth-century novel’s properties as a genre devoted to the portrayal of inner life in private domestic spaces. Such overemphasis comes at the cost of recognizing another equally pervasive movement: the “emergent idiom” of commercial exchange, vehicular transport, and social mobility that also attended the novel’s generic development and reception (123). I suggest, however, that focusing on the mobility and portability inherent in the commercial practices and material features of the eighteenth-century novel need not preclude the qualities that critics have noted ever since its emergence: its apparent predisposition to “domestic realism and the exploration of private spaces and psychological depths” (125). Placing novels and individual selves in commercial relationships and exchanges may seem to place them in motion, definitively taking them outside the spaces of inner life or home. Yet the evidence of material culture explored in this essay shows that those spaces of inwardness and interiority also travel and move along with the novel and its reader in both their outward and inward trajectories, especially in the practice of novel reading.11 In the same work in which Barbauld extols Richardson’s narrative technique by comparing his skill with that of a Dutch painter, she demonstrates his popularity by recounting that “those who remember the publication say” that “even” at the pleasure garden Ranelagh, “it was usual for ladies to hold up the volumes of Pamela to one another, to shew they had got the book that every one was talking of” (lviii). On one hand, such descriptions of the novel’s social impact support Lynch’s argument by showing that it functioned as a form of social currency between readers. Significantly, it was a currency that manifested literally, not just metaphorically, in that eighteenth-century readers carried and held up physical copies of the book to signal its basis for social exchange. On the other hand, the fact that such an anecdote appears in the same work that emphasizes Richardson’s intimate portrayal of domestic life reveals that the private spaces of homely existence—its dressing rooms, libraries, and kitchens—can be brought out and carried to the public ones of pleasure gardens. Even in eighteenth-century fiction not generally recognized as proper domestic fiction, the idiom of domesticity emerged as one of the standards by which commentators measured its realism, its ability to seem like life itself. For instance, Tobias Smollett, who conceived of his picaresque fiction as part satire and part romance improved, articulated the novel’s destination in moving “near” and “nearer” to its readers as “home.” He writes in his preface to The Adventures of 10 Warner also analyzes the small dimensions of novels as key features of their popularity in eighteenth-century England. 11 For an account of the mobility of reading practices in eighteenth-century England, see John Brewer. Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS 15 Roderick Random (1748), “Of all kinds of satire, there is none so entertaining, and universally improving, as that which is introduced, as it were, occasionally, in the course of an interesting story, which brings every incident home to life” (88–89).12 Not only is the destination rendered as domestic and intimate, despite the picaresque genre of Smollett’s fiction, so are “familiar” scenes represented “in an uncommon and amusing point of view” (89). A later commentator on the novel genre, publishing under the pseudonym Thomas Thoughtless in 1793, echoes Smollett’s domestic idiom when he claims “the Impression upon the Mind, which Truth invariably gives to Narrative, by bringing every Incident home to Life, must, out of all Reach of Comparison, be greater” (76). In his reformulation of Smollett’s notion of fiction as a vehicle for bringing incidents “home to life,” Thoughtless presents truth as the factor that allows narrative to make an “Impression upon the Mind.” He also makes plain that the act of “bringing every Incident home to Life” in its function of conflating the space of the home with that of the mind is nothing short of a definition for the workings of narrative realism. Richardson produced verisimilitude through noting the “particulars” of the domestic settings in all three of his novels, from Mr. B’s Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire country houses and Clarissa Harlowe’s family mansion to Grandison Hall in Sir Charles Grandison. In Pamela, Richardson is just as attentive to the “ink in a broken china-cup” hiding in Pamela’s closet (150), her carefully selected and organized bundles of clothing, and Mr. B’s library and “elbow chair” as he is to the initial impression of Mr. B’s Lincolnshire home on Pamela’s freshly aggrieved mind: “About eight at night we entered the court-yard of this handsome, large, old, lonely mansion, that looked to me then, with all its brown nodding horrors of lofty elms and pines about it, as if built for solitude and mischief. And here, said I to myself, I fear, is to be the scene of my ruin, unless God protect me, who is all sufficient” (146). Almost every aspect of this short passage, with its temporal and spatial specificities, displays the properties of Watt’s formal realism. Beginning with a specific indicator of what time of day it is, the passage reveals the appearance of Mr. B.’s country house estate not so much as it is but as Pamela, the fictional character, perceives it to be. Her perceptions of the house, with its “nodding horrors” of “lofty” trees and orientation toward “solitude” and “mischief,” can only belong to someone in her particular situation. In this passage, she has recently discovered that she has been kidnapped by Mr. B. instead of being transported back to her parents’ home, as he had promised her would happen. The house she is encountering is indeed a prospective “scene of [her] ruin.” At the same time, the interior utterances that accompany her viewing of the house indicate that such a perception is rooted in the context of a broader narrative. “And here, said I to myself, I fear, is to be the scene of my ruin.” Viewing the image of Mr. B.’s Lincolnshire home through her eyes, we have entered the space of a different home, the 12 Smollett was not the originator for this turn of phrase. An Eighteenth-Century Collections Online search reveals that two other works used the locution before Smollett published The Adventures of Roderick Random. They include a dictionary of moral precepts, The Universal Monitor (London: Hartley, 1702), and the conduct book The Ladies Library, “written by a lady” (London: Tonson, 1714). Published by Duke University Press Novel 16 NOVEL MAY 2017 space of Pamela’s mind, and yet that home is in motion and stands in exterior relationship to the house that it perceives, which is not yet her home. Indeed, the shaping of Pamela’s identity as eventual mistress of the home that she first views as a prison—the very narrative force that allows such a circumstance to happen— depends on her occupying the outsider perspective in relation to the property. A diary written in 1762 by a young man named John Parnell visiting southern England from Dublin reinforces the notion that interiority in the eighteenth century develops through regarding the domestic setting from the outside. During his trip, visiting many local country house estates, Parnell used another notebook for writing his impressions of the houses, especially their landscaping, and occasionally accompanies his detailed descriptions with sketches (see figure 1). The following captures the prosaic quality of some of his observations: “Shipton is an ugly old town, remarkable for nothing as I could find, but good Bread and Butter” (Parnell). Demonstrating the way the original notebook functioned as a portable receptacle for his mental impressions, he explains that the material in the final version of the diary was copied out of notes he made in another notebook while in the moving enclosure of a coach. Most compelling is the statement he makes when visiting one of the great houses in Richmond: “Ill not pretend to go through the appartments [sic] regularly but just mention what struck me most as I make it a rule to set down nothing here from any other person’s observation as my own” (Parnell). This statement indicates that just as he recognizes the character of each house he visits and as he assiduously notes the physical traits that create the house’s character, he comes into his own character by writing down his subjective responses to “what caught his eye” in his notebook, which he carries with him wherever he goes. The fact that the houses he contemplates and explores belong to someone else matters little when he has ownership of the thoughts that emerge out of his encounters with them. Stories and portable notebooks are not the only textual form in which the space of private property (the house) and the space of private consciousness (the mind) interpenetrate each other around this time in England. Throughout An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, so widely influential in the eighteenth century, Locke uses metaphors of domestic architecture and household management to describe consciousness and its operations. The understanding, for instance, is an activity of “getting”: it “get[s] all the Ideas it has,” even as ideas also simply “come into the Mind” (104). The objective for such “getting” is to “furnish” and “stock” the understanding “with Ideas” (150). Through reflecting “on its own operations,” the mind deepens the “impressions” of ideas so that they turn from “floating visions” into “clear distinct lasting Ideas” (107). Such deepening aids the retaining faculty that turns the mind into a “Repository,” the space of memory itself, for the “laying up of our Ideas” (150). Most decisively representing the understanding and memory as domestic space, Locke writes that it is there ideas may be “lodg’d” (153). Before such lodgers arrive, the mind is a “yet empty Cabinet” (55). In his signature image of the mind as a sheet of white paper, Locke also presents the mind as the ultimate destination for the material world’s stock taking: “Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS 17 any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety?” (104). The mind is as much an interior space to “furnish” and “store” with ideas, as it is a flat surface on which to write with “Characters” or paint (106, 104). The very equivocation between paper and room is a critical model for the work that eighteenthcentury novels accomplish in their designs of everyday life and its interiority. With Pamela, Richardson experimented with a textual strat- Figure 1. “An account of the many fine seats of noblemen,” 1763 egy of transforming the (Parnell). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library flat substance of an inscribed sheet of paper into the empirical structure of mind as a fully dimensional room, storehouse, or chamber. This textual strategy was epistolary narrative. For him, as for his own characters, Pamela and Mr. B., the seemingly flat medium of letters is an extension for the interior chambers of a female mind and body. The implements of the pen and printing press—each penetrating and covering surfaces with characters—effect the metamorphosis of white paper into interior space. Within this space, the materials of daily experience, such as the lists of objects denoting Pamela’s interior motivations as well as physical circumstances, are stockpiled. The act of such stockpiling transforms writing into rooms filled with objects—arranged into sentences, shelved into rows of paragraphs, and ultimately housed inside book covers—that document experience and internalize it while making it available for public consumption.13 Throughout Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke depicts the acquisition of knowledge as a process Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse proclaim to be “remarkably parallel to the acquisition of private property” (460). Such ideas ushered in the modern subject in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. When 13 See Cynthia Wall for a history of description in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Published by Duke University Press Novel 18 NOVEL MAY 2017 defining what it means for this subject to be modern, Armstrong and Tennenhouse use terms of everydayness that are similar to Watt’s for identifying the novel’s characteristics. For example, generating the novel’s form are minds belonging to “uniquely individuated and yet conspicuously ordinary” characters (458). After Locke, this form of subjectivity would emerge in the household, wherein the “power of the state ended and that of the private individual began” (463). According to Armstrong and Tennenhouse, the ordinariness of the individual subject that developed at the time registered in her gender: “[S]o ordinary [is the mind issuing the novel], in fact, it could eventually be housed within a female body” (458). Such a claim coheres with the change in the meaning of “virtue” that occurred during the time Pamela was written. Pamela plays out the cultural development whereby virtue transforms from a civic trait upheld by men of property to a condition previously known as female chastity.14 Virtue, in other words, mutated from a general moral quality to a sexual one that young women in particular had great incentive to uphold as a qualification for entering the marriages that would allow them economic and social survival and advantage. As such, it operated as a form of movable private property both for the families of the young women and for the young women themselves.15 Locke’s ideas are crucial in the relationship they draw not only between land and body as forms of property but also between body and mind as the interrelated domains of the individual self. For Locke, as his exploration of consciousness and its relationship to the body in a state of sleep reveals, the body is the permanent container for the mind, which continues in a state of movement and activity even when the body remains still (114). The connections between property and body, mind, room, writing propel the narrative movement of Richardson’s Pamela as they do Locke’s theory of mind. Whereas countless episodes in the novel demonstrate this, perhaps the most direct and evocative are the two separate times Mr. B. enters Pamela’s chamber at night to spy on her. He does this once at his Bedfordshire estate when she is still employed as his servant and once at his Lincolnshire estate when she is his prisoner. While Mr. B.’s intrusion in Pamela’s private space is a measure putatively undertaken in an attempt to rape her, his reactions to the experience reveal he garners more than the possibilities of sexual conquest. He as much seeks possession of her thoughts as he does possession of her body, acquiring them as if he were to fill the contents of his mind with hers. Whereas throughout the novel he attempts to acquire those thoughts through the movable medium of her letters, in the attempted rape scenes he does so by entering the room where she reveals her thoughts in speech and dialogue. Because such revelations take place where and when she removes her clothes in preparation for bed, the act of speaking candidly about recent past events is equated with the act of undressing, and the architectural function of the bedroom, encoded as “private,” is its medium. 14 See April Alliston as well as Watt for a history of the transformation of “virtue” into a gendered property. 15 See G. E. Mingay on the marriage market as a critical element of the eighteenth-century landowning system. Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS 19 The “textual world” of Pamela enacts the tense interactions between immovable and movable property in vying to be the basis of ideological control. The fact that the novel’s central tensions concern ownership—over Pamela’s body and letters as her own property, namely—further makes debatable notions that because the novel takes place within a domestic context, it removes its female subject from the “public” arena of politics to which men belong.16 Certainly, the fact that movable property—Pamela’s material possessions and her virtuous body—could function as a significant form of property at all presents a marked challenge to Mr. B.’s basis of power over her and those of her class and gender—his ownership of the putatively immovable property, the landed estate, where she is employed. Without some form of conflict, there can be no narrative. Arguably, it is the yet unresolved conflict between these movable and immovable forms of property that drives Richardson’s narrative forward. Pockets of Interiority In Pamela, the material object that functions as a container for interiority while mediating both public and private spaces is not so much her collection of handwritten letters that, on their own, too easily become dispersed but rather her pair of detachable pockets. What scholarship has overlooked is the way in which the transfer of Pamela’s letters from her pockets to Mr. B.’s pocket in the novel facilitates the intersubjective exchange that causes Mr. B. to begin viewing Pamela not as his sexual prey to consume but as an individual subject worthy of becoming his wife.17 Thus Richardson shows that the whole estate of Pamela’s personhood and the interiority it entails are best maintained when kept inside her pockets. Indeed, the narrative continually tracks what things such as letters, money, and keys go into and what they come out of: pockets. They are used to carry things as well as hide and protect them from view. When preparing to return to her parents, Pamela writes, “I shall probably bring to you what I write in my pocket” (114). Not just Pamela but other characters own and use pockets. To take things out of and to put things into pockets are narrative actions that might go unnoticed, but they are critical to creating the layers of interiority that make up Richardson’s domestic realism and its perpetual dramas of concealment and exposure. Just as objects come out of and go into pockets throughout the novel, bodies enter and leave rooms and closets, with doors opening and shutting in correspondence, to accomplish similar functions of controlling access to states of interiority in the domestic environment. Since at least the last quarter of the seventeenth century, women of all classes in eighteenth-century England and America wore pockets that were not sewn into their garments as they were for men. Instead, they were hung from a fabric ribbon that was tied around the waist, hidden from view. In costume history, these pockets 16 I am indebted to Armstrong for this idea. She writes that the novel’s rise as a “respectable” genre, beginning with Richardson’s Pamela, entailed the creation of “a cultural fantasy” concerning “a private domain of culture that was independent of the political world and overseen by a woman” (98). 17 See Chloe Wigston Smith for a recent study of the significance of dress in Pamela. Published by Duke University Press Novel 20 NOVEL MAY 2017 are called either “detachable pockets,” “detached pockets,” or “tie-on pockets.” The fact that the pockets were sewn onto a ribbon as opposed to the clothing itself meant that the wearer could choose to put them on and take them off when desired as well as wear them with different garments. Detachable pockets were worn mainly in pairs, but sometimes they were made as a single pocket. Earlier, from the Middle Ages to the end of the sixteenth century, European men and women wore bags visibly hanging from girdles. One costume historian claims that it was the brief appearance of the bustle on women’s gowns in the late seventeenth century that first afforded the hidden space for detachable pockets in a woman’s dress construction (Van de Krol 13). Consequently, detachable pockets were brought into being and worn for most of the remainder of the eighteenth century before being replaced by reticules from 1790 to 1820, which in turn gave way to the handbags that replaced detachable pockets entirely in 1840. This moment in European costume history, in which detachable pockets worn concealed under skirts became more popular than the external bags, receptacles, and purses that enjoyed favor both before and after, coincided with a new concept of femininity wherein interiority and private property were interlinked. Furthermore, the particular placement of pockets in a woman’s traditional attire offers a rich model for the material dynamics of interiority in the daily lives of eighteenthcentury women. Detachable pockets were placed between the outer and inner garments of a woman’s dress. This means they were worn at an intermediary position: under the outer gown and upper petticoat, above the under-petticoat and shift. The Lady Clapham doll in the Victoria and Albert Museum shows where the pocket was situated within the multiple layers of a woman’s standard dress. Slits in the outer skirt and petticoat gave women access to the pockets themselves. Just as pockets were accessed through slits, they themselves had slits for the hand to enter so it could retrieve the items stored inside them. The passageway created by the imperceptible overlaid slits suggests how eighteenth-century women always had hidden in the folds of their skirts a channel to the inner regions of their attire as well as their selfhoods. Of course, some will point out that with their slits, oval or flasklike shape, and proximity to a woman’s private parts, they also resemble the inner regions of a woman’s sexual anatomy. The satirical mezzotint “Tight Lacing, or Fashion before Ease” conveys the sexual implications of such propinquity as it shows the woman’s pocket in use and, in its state of pear-shaped fullness, worn hanging against the thigh, with its long slit facing the viewer (see figure 2). Considering their closeness to the body, costume historian Ariane Fennetaux goes so far as to describe women’s detachable pockets as organic objects. In evocative language, she writes, “Made in soft materials, and worn close to the body, pockets were in direct contact with the wearer’s body warmth and scent with which they would have come imbued. Soft and warm when worn, they became almost organic extensions of the self” (329). The stains on the block-printed pocket of 1720–30 from the Winterthur Museum suggest this while at the same time indicating the ways in which the pockets—and any historical garment—are organically extended from their environment (see figure 3). While it is impossible to determine Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS 21 whether the browncolored stains were made from contact with the original wearer’s hands reaching into the pocket or from subsequent handlers, they certainly indicate how the pockets are connected to the environmental element of air, which would deepen the stain’s color and seal it into the fabric.18 Visually, the organic qualities of women’s detachable pockets are reinforced by the floral patterns and motifs that were often stitched onto them even though no one else could see them. With the pockets they frequently made and embroidered themselves, eighteenth-century women designed and plotted secret gardens to wear between their skirts. The affordances of Figure 2. “Tight Lacing, or Fashion before Ease,” ca. 1777. detachable or tie-on Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University pockets hold metaphysical meanings. The distinction between the alternate names given to eighteenth-century women’s pockets by costume historians suggests their complexity as go-betweens for interior and exterior worlds and self and other. When called “tie-on pockets,” they are construed as creating an attachment between the material object and the subject. When called “detachable pockets,” they are construed as distancing the object from the subject. Just as they mediated between the outer and inner garments of a woman’s attire in the eighteenth century, so too did they mediate between privacy and publicity, functioning in effect as their interface. It is this interface as opposed to the domain of privacy and solitude—which is the more customary view—that characterizes the experience and location of interiority in eighteenth-century England. In their liminal qualities as private garments that could be worn in public 18 I am grateful to Leigh Wishner of LACMA and Linda Eaton of Winterthur for answering my questions about this issue. Published by Duke University Press Novel 22 NOVEL MAY 2017 places and house interior spaces for the ephemera of daily life, pockets resemble the eighteenth-century novel as equally liminal objects carried close to the body and housing interior worlds accessible only to the reader. Considering that women’s pockets were 13–15 inches long and close to 8 inches wide, one could imagine novels (7 · 53⁄4 inches in duodecimo format) easily fitting inside them. Indeed, one of the sentences presented in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia to demonstrate the usage of the word portable uses the duodecimo (12mo) book and its ability to fit into pockets as an example: “Books in 12mo are valued for their being portable, Figure 3. Lady’s pocket. England, 1720–30. easily put in the pocket.” Barbauld’s Cotton, linen, block printed, 17 · 11.5 in. description of how women at Rane(43.18 · 29.21 cm.). Museum no. 1960.0248. lagh held up “volumes of Pamela  Winterthur Museum to one another” further suggests how novels might have accompanied readers in their pockets throughout their daily activities. Secret worlds as well as gardens were carried by women’s pockets. The detachable pockets found in historical costume collections tell stories about how they mattered as objects of design, inscription, and use. Whether they were made of preprinted fabric or fabric created explicitly for the purpose of making the pockets indicates the level of care and intention with which they were created. A pair of pockets at the Winterthur Museum, remarkable for having both pockets intact on their original tie, comes from England and is dated 1735–45, the time in which Pamela was written (see figure 4). Its block print floral pattern, with the flowers running off the edges of the pockets, indicates that the fabric design was conceived separately from them. In contrast, the pattern on the pockets in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art costume collection was “embroidered to shape,” meaning that their maker “plotted” the embroidery to the shape of the pockets (see figure 5a). This practice suggests an approach to materiality that regarded detachable pockets as a medium of graphic design. The crudeness of the stitching suggests the pockets were made by a young girl to demonstrate her needlework proficiency. This was a common practice for young girls in the eighteenth century; doing needlework was a form of education. As such, the pockets are also a medium for individual talent as well as possession and authorship, which the plotting of the floral pattern, initials, and dating of the needlework indicate (see figure 5b). The resonances between this form of needlework plotting and narrative plotting emerge especially in Richardson’s novel when Pamela stays longer on Mr. B.’s estate than she needs in order to finish Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS 23 Figure 4. Pair of lady’s pockets. England, 1735–45. Cotton, linen, block printed, 16.87 · 11.37 in. (42.85 · 28.88 cm.). Museum no. 1969.3102.  Winterthur Museum “flowering” a waistcoat for him (72, 75, 79–80). Though a skeptical reader might view this as an excuse on Pamela’s part induced by her unconscious attraction to and desire for Mr. B., despite her protestations that his sexual advances have made employment by him unbearable, the excuse of needing to finish the waistcoat embroidery design is what advances his and the narrative’s plots. By staying longer, Pamela has made herself more susceptible to Mr. B.’s own plot to kidnap and imprison her in his Lincolnshire home instead of returning her to her parents’ home. Just as the fabric and embroidery of detachable pockets—and gentlemen’s waistcoats—tell stories and make them happen, so too do the contents of the pockets. While costume collections cannot show what was carried inside the pockets, Old Bailey proceedings reveal they frequently carried, in addition to notebooks, letters, and money, household goods. From 1739 and 1740, the same period of time in which Pamela was written and published, the contents of stolen detachable pockets included such everyday objects as a little brass lamp, a half-pint mug, or a pair of steel scissors—or, in the case of “a strip’d Cotton Pocket,” a collection of things: “a Pair of Spectacles, three Brass Thimbles, an Iron Key, and 11 s. in Money.”19 19 These stolen items are listed in the following Old Bailey documents: Johanna Baker, Theft, 9 July 1740; Elizabeth Davis, Theft, 9 July 1740; Elizabeth Green, Theft, 3 September 1740; Theft, 5 December 1739 (Proceedings of the Old Bailey). Published by Duke University Press Novel 24 NOVEL MAY 2017 Figure 5a. Woman’s pockets. England, 1753. Wool, cotton, silk, linen, 13 3/4 · 8 1/4 in. (34.93 · 20.96 cm.). Museum no. M.67.8.90a–b (Mrs. Alice F. Schott Bequest). Los Angeles County Museum of Art < www.lacma.org > Figure 5b. Detail of woman’s pockets. Photograph by the author One might argue that as organic extensions of the self—as well as of the environment—the value of eighteenth-century women’s pockets lay in their function not as objects but as spaces. Their critical feature was their capaciousness, as indicated both by the information from the Old Bailey proceedings and by their size, which allowed them to carry many other things and turned them into storehouses or portable cabinets, like Locke’s figure for the perceiving mind. Pamela, for instance, uses her pockets to hide the writing instruments that her fellow servant Mr. Longman gives her. These include “above forty sheets of paper, and a dozen pens, and a little phial of ink; which last I wrapped in paper, and put in my pocket, and some wax and wafers” (131). Moreover, she places the material of her pockets into the earth, thus distributing the fabric of her selfhood across Mr. B.’s landed property and appropriating the property in that way as her own space, an outcome certainly borne out later in the novel. Another commonly used female accessory, a fabric sewing roll, which might contain such needlework and domestic tools as a thimble, pincushion, scissors, and knife, was called a “housewife” or a “huswif,” hence “hussy.” During her captivity on Mr. B.’s Lincolnshire estate, Pamela mentions that she dropped her “hussy” in the garden one day on purpose to distract the maid from seeing her hide a letter for Mr. Williams to retrieve: I went towards the pond, the maid following me, and dropped purposely my hussy, and when I came near the tiles, I said, “Mrs Ann, I have dropped my hussy; be so kind as to look for it: I had it by the pond-side.” She went back to look, and I flipped the note Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS 25 between the tiles, and covered them as quick as I could with the light mould, quite unperceived; and the maid finding the Hussy, I took it, and sauntered in again, and met Mrs Jewkes coming to seek after me. (161) This moment is significant not only because Pamela uses the hussy as a different kind of practical accessory altogether from its customary usage, but also because Richardson presents the hussy—a variant of the woman’s pocket—as equivalent to the letter. For Barbauld, the innovation of Richardson’s representational technique lies in his use of the familiar letter to construct his narrative, which “gives the feelings of the moment as the writers felt them at the moment” (xxvi). Furthermore, as we recall, Richardson’s style of writing his fictional letters has the property of “setting before the reader . . . every circumstance of what he means to describe” (cxxxvii). The contents of the familiar letter were as everyday as the contents of a detachable pocket in the eighteenth century. They were materials that were as voluble as they were ephemeral, internal, intimate, and raw. Epistolary Containment: Folding, Enclosing and Archiving the Self From the letter format, Richardson was in fact borrowing additional forms of interiority. With the size and folding of paper sheets, the spaces between lines of writing, and the flow of mind in the context of daily life, epistolary culture offered qualities of interiority that novels like Pamela attempt to capture. The following demonstrates epistolary technique’s fusion of the letter-writing medium and its materiality with the active mind that discharges the writing: “Though I dread to see him, yet do I wonder I have not. To be sure something is resolving against me, and he stays to hear all her stories. I can hardly write; yet, as I can do nothing else, I know not how to lay down my pen. How crooked and trembling the lines! Why should the guiltless tremble so, when the guilty can possess their minds in peace?” (221). Watt sees Richardson’s imitation of real epistolary practice in Pamela’s “very garrulity,” which brings us intimately close to “Pamela’s inner consciousness.” This “train of thought” marked by being “ephemeral and transparent” is necessary to create the impression that “nothing is being withheld.” Accordingly, this “very lack of selectiveness” brings the reader into “a more active involvement in the events and feelings described” by requiring her or him to distinguish “significant items of character and behaviour” from “a wealth of circumambient detail” (193). The novel’s principle of heterogeneity and inclusiveness not only “induces” in readers a “kind of participation” with it but also makes them feel they are “in contact not with literature but with the raw materials of life itself as they are momentarily reflected in the minds of the protagonists” (ibid.). In a real-world corollary, the actress-singer Mary Linley Tickell wrote to her sister Elizabeth Ann Linley Sheridan (also a singer and playwright Robert Brinsley Sheridan’s wife) nearly every day over the course of two years, from 1785 to 1787, the year Tickell died. Tickell’s letters offer a chance to assess the forms of interiority Richardson was borrowing from the letter form around his time period. Furthermore, as post-Richardson documents, they suggest what letter writers might Published by Duke University Press Novel 26 NOVEL MAY 2017 be borrowing from the epistolary forms offered by his novels.20 One letter, in its irregularity of format, transmits visually the multidirectional flow of mind in the context of daily life that novels such as Pamela attempt to capture. Here, unlike in Tickell’s other letters, in which she observes epistolary conventions, she seems to begin and end quickly three different notes—perhaps deciding that she will say only one small thing, then deciding to add another on the same sheet, thus suggesting intrusions and breaks in her act of writing. In the center portion, she is saying she is sending her sister a ticket of admission to the “little Theatre,” which seems to be the original main part of the letter. Beneath it, in horizontal scrawl spanning the whole length of page: “You are an ungrateful woman about the papers for I have never miss’d them one night—& whenever I have sent old ones it has been for you to read the Debates which kept them so long before they came out.” On the vertical axis of the page, she writes yet another line: “again to the Pantomime last night—it has been play’d twelve nights & to never less than 200£” (see figure 6). This particular letter shows that many directions of the mind— outward, inward, then outward again—are displayed in this letter, and signaled graphically by the directions of the very lines of writing themselves. At the same time, the impulse to continue using the sheet of paper until the space becomes filled with writing not only suggests the relative high cost of paper in the time period but also evokes the Lockean notion of the white sheet of paper as a storehouse for the impressions of daily life as they enter the mind. The practice of letter writing demonstrates the mobility of interiority in conveying the subjective experiences of the letter writer to another in a distant location. The very act of presenting one’s account of daily life sets boundaries of enclosure around the self and its world, as all happenings, circumstances, and qualities that are presented pertain to the writer’s subjective experience alone. The moment such lines of enclosure are drawn around the world as an aspect of the self’s perceptions and experiences, the individual is created. Within those lines the space of interiority lies. It also lies within the lines created by the letter’s folds of paper. These folds, taken for granted by scholars as features of the letter as a flat sheet of paper, were in fact created in the early modern period to turn the sheet of paper on which the letter was written into its own enclosure.21 The folds of the letter, in other words, are what allow paper to turn into a form of housing for the letter’s written contents as it is transported to a different location. In MIT conservator Jana Dambrogio’s words, the folds of early modern letters are what enable a two-dimensional object to function as a three-dimensional one (Dambrogio and Smith). One might add that the letter’s multidimensional capacities, of switching from a two-dimensional object to a three-dimensional space, models Locke’s conception of a sheet of paper that turns into a three-dimensional storehouse once the characters of writing 20 See Susan Whyman’s case study of Jane Johnson (1706–59), an upper-middling-class provincial woman whose correspondence reveals an interactive relationship with Richardson’s novels. 21 According to Daniel Starza Smith, “Open and flat for being written and read are how we think of the letter.” Smith presented this view in his lecture at the Workshop on Early Modern Letterlocking, which he led with Jana Dambrogio (Dambrogio and Smith). Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS Figure 6. Letter from Mary Linley to Elizabeth Ann Sheridan, undated, ca. 1785–87 (Linley). Photographs by the author. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library Published by Duke University Press 27 cover its surface. The letter’s overlooked threedimensionality is critical in establishing how it functions as not so much an object as a space that captures and stores the passing events of thoughts in everyday life. Eighteenth-century letter writers themselves persistently made claims for the apparently raw and unpremeditated quality of epistolary correspondence, as if the spaces of their letters were paper bedchambers. For instance, in a November 1712 letter to John Caryll, Alexander Pope declared, “[M]y style, like my soul, appears in its natural undress before my friend” (155). A month later, he elaborated on this metaphor by describing how his “thoughts just warm from the brain without any polishing or dress, the very déshabille of the understanding,” fill his letters to Caryll (160). For Thomas Keymer, however, such metaphors for letterwriting style as a state of undress are a ruse, for letter writing is “a rhetorical act.” In fact, “far from being undressed . . . the letter is likely in the first place to be dressed or adorned in conformity with the writer’s chosen Novel 28 NOVEL MAY 2017 image of himself, and moreover to be addressed to a reader on whom it will pursue specific designs” (12). Indeed, in Pamela, we see an example of this rhetorical maneuver cast literally as a sartorial one when the heroine locks herself up in her “little room” to “trick [herself] up” not in her dead mistress’s handed-down finery but in her own humble-seeming new garb: And so, when I had dined, up stairs I went, and locked myself into my little room. There I tricked myself up as well as I could in my new garb, and put on my roundeared ordinary cap; but with a green knot, however, and my home-spun gown and petticoat, and plain leather shoes; but yet they are what they call Spanish leather. A plain muslin tucker I put on, and my black silk necklace, instead of the French necklace my lady gave me; and put the earrings out of my ears, and when I was quite equipped, I took my straw hat in my hand, with its two green strings, and looked about me in the glass, as proud as any thing. (87–88) This moment in the novel is remarkable for dramatizing Pamela’s enterprise of fashioning herself as if she were her own doll—like a living Lady Clapham.22 More interesting still is how the passage demonstrates the way in which epistolary narrative functions as a series of containers for the disparate objects of daily life. Not only is it a perfect specimen of the prosaic imaginary, but it also demonstrates the fundamental qualities of prose as a remarkably elastic and capacious form of writing that, by virtue of its lack of metrical structure, readily incorporates thoughts and things as they occur. While the passage conceivably narrates an important moment in the heroine’s daily life, the moment is made up not so much by a set of remarkable actions as by the singular act of creating a collection of objects she has deemed her own. Complicating Watt’s assertion that the epistolary medium lacks selectiveness, the recurring act of selection and enclosure in this passage at once mobilizes those objects, marshals them, and turns them into narrative itself, not just the subject matter of narrative. Here, we see a conception of containment that is dynamic and transforming. The spatial entities of things, in other words, are threaded together to stand in for the temporal dimension of actions in this passage. At the same time that Richardson uses a rhetorical strategy of presenting homely material objects as temporal entities that constitute pockets of time in everyday life, he presents pockets themselves as mediators for narrative drama. They do so insofar as they contain the written form of containers, namely Pamela’s personal letters. Nearing the end of volume 1 and Pamela’s imprisonment at Brandon Hall, Mr. B. demands to know where she has hidden her “written papers,” her “saucy journal.” While he guesses they may be “about your stays,” or “tied about your knees with your garters,” and reveals he has “searched every place above” and in her closet (270–71), he is emphatic in his apparent belief that they may be in her pockets: 22 In The Self and It, I explore this aspect of the passage in more detail as an example of reverse anthropomorphism; Pamela turns herself into an object, her own doll, to generative effect (Park). Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS 29 “But, indeed,” said he, “you will not have it; for I will know, and I will see them!” “This is very hard, sir,” said I; “but I must say, you shall not, if I can help it.” He then sat down, and took both my hands, and said, “Well said, my pretty Pamela, if you can help it! But I will not let you help it. Tell me, are they in your pocket?” “No, sir,” said I, my heart up at my mouth. “I know you won’t tell a downright fib for the world. . . . Answer me then, are they in neither of your pockets?” (270) Indeed, Pamela is not fibbing. The papers are not in her pockets but are rather sewn to her underclothes, as she reveals earlier in her captivity. “But I begin to be afraid my writings may be discovered; for they grow bulky: I stitch them hitherto in my under-coat, next my linen” (168). While such a tactic secures her writings from being stolen without her knowledge, it makes it impossible for Pamela to relinquish them without being stripped by Mr. B., or undressing herself in front of him. Both scenarios are intolerable to her. “I could not bear the thoughts of giving up my papers; nor of undressing myself, as was necessary to be done, to untack them,” she writes (271). Yet, undressing herself in private to untack the papers and hand them to Mr. B. without removing her clothes is preferable to being undressed by him or undressing herself in front of him. The affordances of her detachable pockets allow this. The narration of Pamela’s next movement curiously enacts for the reader what might otherwise have been enacted by Mr. B. in his attempt to read the contents of her writing by stripping her of her clothes. After writing, “So I took off my under-coat, and with great trouble of mind unscrewed the papers,” she proceeds to renarrate the events we have already experienced with her in the earlier portion of the novel (272). Undressing herself and “unscrewing” the letters from her under-coat equates with providing access to her past inner experiences. Her whole being seems made up by stitched-together material, revealed as a repository, an archive, for those very experiences. She has turned herself into a book. If Pamela has turned herself and her experiences into a book by doing what a bookmaker might—sewing disparate sheets of paper together to form a whole entity—she reverts to the original conception of her experiences as detachable epistles by gathering her papers into two parcels and using her detachable pocket as their container and binder when delivering the papers to Mr. B. In this way the distinction between sewn-in letters and letters placed in pockets speaks to differing forms of containment, mediation, and remediation that the novel sets in motion. Richardson, as a master printer—as someone actively involved not only in the making of books but also in the making of his own books—would have been aware of this. In addition, the distinction speaks to differing levels in the security of one’s interiority and the ability for one to exert autonomy. Expecting her to bring him her papers in the garden after their negotiation, Mr. B. says to Pamela when she arrives, “But where are the papers? I dare say, you had them about you yesterday, for you say in those I have, that you will bury your writings in the garden, for fear you should be searched, if you do not escape. This,” added he, “gave me a noble pretence to search Published by Duke University Press Novel 30 NOVEL MAY 2017 you; and I have been vexing myself all night, that I did not strip you garment by garment, till I had found them. And I hope that you come now rather resolving to trifle with me, than to give them up with a grace; for I assure you, I had rather find them myself.” (274) As her response to such teasing and the continued threat of being stripped, Pamela reports, “I did not like this way of talk; and thinking it best, to cut it short, pulling the first parcel out of my pocket, ‘Here, sir,’ said I, ‘since I cannot be excused, is the parcel, that goes on with my fruitless attempt to escape, and the terrible consequences it had like to have had’” (ibid.). It is around this moment too when the narrative shifts, and Mr. B. transforms from fiendish libertine to Pamela’s loving suitor. The action of taking her parcel out of her pocket silences Mr. B. as rake: “He was going to speak; but I said, to drive him from thinking of any more, than that parcel, ‘And I must beg of you, sir, to read them with favour’” (ibid.). In doing so, she distracts him from breaking the seal of her body by drawing his attention to the seal on the parcel: “‘[B]ut if you will be pleased to return them, without breaking the seal, it will be very generous: and I will take it for a great favour, and a good omen.’ He took the parcel, and broke the seal instantly” (274–75). Despite such impertinence, Mr. B. begins to show receptiveness to the idea of internalizing Pamela as an individual subject when he puts the parcel into his own pocket. From this moment on, he assumes the position not just of the suitor but also of the sympathetic reader. As such, he assumes a position that readers of the novel are meant to have had all along, of the “powerful vicarious identification of readers with the feelings of fictional characters” (Watt 206). Beginning to read Pamela’s writing in front of her in the garden, Mr. B. retraces the steps she describes taking, both with his body—by walking to the side of the pond where she threw in her clothes—and with his heart. He reveals the latter not only by saying, “O my dear girl! you have touched me sensibly with your mournful tale, and your reflections upon it,” but also by putting the papers in his pocket again (276). With this gesture, Mr. B.’s conversion from rake to future husband begins, and the contours of the domestic novel become legible as the marriage plot. Simultaneously, if the original meaning for “plot” was a comprehensive description of a country house manor, then the plot turn also takes place in the way Mr. B. can only regard the different parts of his estate from the perspective of Pamela’s past experiences. Her letters have effectively replotted his estate through her interior perspective and thereby made it hers. This conversion of both of Mr. B.’s plots is triggered by the activity of reading Pamela’s letters, an activity mediated not only by pen and paper but also by the very space that contains pen and paper and carries the letters to him, the mobile and expansive environment of Pamela’s pockets. Thus one of the novel’s many metamorphoses takes place when a material object such as Pamela’s pocket transforms into a space of privacy. As such, it becomes a space of intimacy and movement. When it does so, it functions much like a portable library or writing closet—two of the most private spaces in a country house that are sites of narrative action in the novel. Recognizing how the novel’s movements situate spaces of interiority from rooms to things—and, in doing so, turn things into Published by Duke University Press Novel PARK DETACHABLE POCKETS AND LETTER FOLDS 31 rooms of their own—makes it possible to evaluate a critical aspect of the novel’s role in the conjoined histories of subjectivity, material culture, and the history of the novel genre. Pamela led a pattern of movement in the novel-reading experience in which the novel as a readable object transforms into a materially realized internal space of everyday life. This movement colludes with the social and political developments in the status of property in eighteenth-century England. Literary criticism might, in this light, reenvision the meaning of such categorical terms as “domestic fiction.” In capturing the spatial dimensions and temporal rhythms of the everyday, domestic fiction allows a new form of homemaking to take place whereby the internal world that the novel creates introjects the reader so deeply into its space, it becomes another home in itself. It does so, above all, as a portable space of interiority. Through the strategic use of her pockets as well as her “hussy,” Pamela finds a way for herself in the world that brings her both a role and a dwelling as lady of the manor. Hence the analysis of the pocket as one of the novel’s primary spaces of interiority—and as a cultural-historical counterpart to the novel’s own role as an object that functions also as a space—allows us to view domestic containment and its experiences of interiority as a mobile, portable, and expansive condition of everyday life. This is the condition not only of modern subjects and their diverse modes of possessive individualism but also of novel readers themselves. * * * julie park is associate professor for research in English at Vassar College and the author of The Self and It (2010). Her current book project, “My Dark Room,” considers how novelistic interiority emerged through the experience and design of built environments in eighteenthcentury England. Works Cited Alliston, April. “Female Quixotism and the Novel: Character and Plausibility, Honesty and Fidelity.” The Drift of Fiction. Ed. Julie Park. Spec. issue of Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 52: 3–4 (2011): 249–69. Anonymous. Excerpt from “An Essay on the New Species on Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding: With a Word or Two upon the Modern State of Criticism.” Nixon 188–90. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. 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