The Domestic Dungeon: Representing the Carceral in Pamela

Abstract

This essay argues that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela represents carcerality not only through Pamela’s physical confinement within Mr. B’s household, but through the formal structures that govern her ability to testify to her experience of confinement. Mr. B’s combined authority as head of the household and justice of the peace collapses domestic and legal power into a single figure, foreclosing Pamela’s access to legal recourse and transforming her letters into a constrained substitute for legal testimony. Yet because those letters are written under conditions of surveillance, the epistolary form becomes implicated in the novel’s carceral structure. This dynamic produces a form of conditional realism: Pamela’s suffering may be real, but the narrative through which it is represented cannot emerge independently of the coercive conditions that govern its production. This instability is reinforced by the marriage between Pamela and Mr. B, which converts her unresolved injury into a change in social status, ultimately replacing public vindication with marital resolution. By tracing this movement from legal exclusion, to constrained testimony, to status conversion, the novel’s treatment of Pamela’s incarceration destabilizes the presumed realism of the epistolary novel.