[파멜라] 혹은 빛의 형식: 순수, 오염 그리고 계몽의 외설적 이면

Abstract

By focusing on obscene stain evoked in Pamela, this paper aims to examine the way in which Pamela impressively embodies the obscenity seeping into the idea of the light in the educational Enlightenment novel. Inspired by Zizek’s notion of obscenity and Jean Starobinski’s concept of transparency and veil, we define the obscene not simply as lustful and salacious sensations or ideas, but as excessive enjoyment that the symbolic stage or form cannot fully represent. Samuel Richardson elevates Pamela’s virginal body as a symbol of his educational and religious ideology in the age of Enlightenment, creating a double-layered ero-graphy composed of the pure (educational) surface of Pamela’s virginity and, on the obverse side, the obscene gaze that provokes an ulterior but intense sexual fantasy. In fact, Richardson strongly wishes to differentiate Pamela’s purity from any type of contamination, and he would never have admitted that his novel effuses a sense of obscene enjoyment. Ironically, however, it is the obscene stain that makes Pamela from an insipid and monotonous heroine who passively reflects an educational idea to a more “educational and seductive” figure with a lustrous body that stimulates ulterior desire of readers in the realm of their unconsciousness. Of importance here is that the fascinating Richardsonian ideology of light, which aims to create Pamela as the icon of a pure virgin in the Enlightenment, entails a strong kind of violence against the female body that is no longer sexually and morally pure. This obscene stain which makes the surface of light more lustrous in Pamela, resuscitated in diverse forms in other great educational novels of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, such as Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise and Goethe’s Elective Affinities, could be a crucial theoretical tool for revealing the obverse of light, a realm in which obscenity and violence are deeply and surreptitiously inscribed.