Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1
Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran
2
MA Student, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran.
3
B.Sc graduate, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran.
10.22080/jlab.2026.31274.1013
Abstract
The traditional reading of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) as a celebration of female virtue is reconsidered in this article as a celebration of female virtue as power, as agency, and as the formation of a subject in the world. The article argues that Pamela's chastity is not a virtue, in the sense of a moral essence, but, a strategically manufactured identity, sustained through repeated performed acts. The Richardson novel, Pamela, functions as a critique of the celebration of female virtue as an ideal feature of a given social order. Richardson is projecting Pamela's virtue as a means of awakening the reader to the more troubling aspects of the order Pamela personifies. Using Judith Butler's gender performativity and the transformation of the subject as a framework (though not historically, but contemporarily), this study focuses on the constructs of virtue within the letters of Pamela as the primary site of virtue formation, virtue negotiation, and virtue consolidation. Although absent in the 18th century, these concepts drawn from Butler provide a framework for the study's aims. Lastly, the article argues that Pamela's marriage fiction does not eliminate the power relations of the patriarchal divide; rather, it encapsulates the contradictions and, thus, the power of the systems which are the invisible enforcement of normative conduct.
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