Collision of Genres: Three Perspectives on Pamela

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to examine the collision between Ian Watt’s and Levi-Strauss’ perspectives on the novel genre, to critique them and to establish a more properly generic perspective on Pamela. Watt maintained that Pamela is the first novel because it satisfies his premises that the novel rose out of Protestantism and capitalism, and that the novel represents formal realism. But Lévi-Strauss and Northrop Frye consider the novel as exhaustion of myth. Frye considers genre as coming from literary tradition, and, then, realism is not the first novel genre. Pamela is the exhaustion of “Eros and Psyche” and “Cinderella”. Both of these perspectives have their own weakness. One is to sacrifice realistic accuracy for morality and gender ideology, and the other is to exclude the historicity and to present the secret of a forgotten freshness. To tackle these collisions and weaknesses, it is useful to examine another perspective that views as the novel the amatory fictions by Aphra Behn, etc. Though those fictions have been criticized as amoral, the representations of women as desiring subjects and political metaphor lead to requiring that they should be revised and aligned with Pamela as the novel. It will be insisted that the amatory fictions are the first English modern novels, and, then, Pamela is not the first novel but a successor to the amatory fictions.