Virtual Rewarded: What #MeToo Can Learn from Samuel Richardson's Pamela
2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/scr.2019.0011
ISSN1549-3377
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoVirtual Rewarded:What #MeToo Can Learn from Samuel Richardson's Pamela Diana Rosenberger (bio) In May of 2017, as part of her podcast The Heart, Kaitlin Prest released a four-episode mini-series entitled No. Using her previous sexual interactions as material, Prest builds a semi-autobiographical narrative around questions of consent. Throughout the podcast, Prest repeatedly returns to a confusing and coercive encounter with her longtime friend "Jay." The two platonically "snuggle" on the couch. Prest refuses Jay's advances. Jay persists. To end the discomfort, Prest "compromises": the two masturbate beside one another. The podcast foregrounds this particular example to demonstrate the ambiguity of sexual boundaries, especially when they are navigated behind closed doors, and between intimates. As Prest reflects on this encounter, she vocalizes the difficulties of telling this story: "The problem is we don't have a vocabulary that would let me describe with any sense of legitimacy the totally invisible things that happened between us that night."1 Much of the recent writing on #MeToo also explicitly deals with the question of language, or more precisely, its unavailability. In an interview published on the online blog Vox, Stephanie Coontz frames the problem as a historical one; the success of #MeToo is contingent upon the ability to "get at the root of why women, for so long, did not feel able to express [the details of their harassment or assault]."2 In her article for The Nation, tellingly titled "What We Don't Talk about When we Talk About #MeToo," JoAnn Wypijewski maintains our reaction to the movement is characterized by fear, fury, and overall panic, causing us to confuse the proliferation of #MeToo stories with capital-T "Truth" and subsequently "reduce a many-layered story of sexism and human weakness to a bleached tale of monstrosity and cowering."3 Lauren Berlant's "The Predator and the Jokester" is perhaps most closely aligned with Prest's podcast, especially in its exploration of the efforts to name sexually-informed power dynamics, as well as the uneasiness they result in. In the article, Berlant recalls a confession from one of her acquaintances—"he toyed with my body"—and the peculiarity of this diction: [End Page 17] I knew even then that "toy" was a complicated verb. She meant, I wasn't raped. She meant, I'm already bargaining and I might not be telling you the truth. She meant, I might have been raped. She meant, I might just be using the only verb I have to make the incident utterable. "He toyed with my body." She meant, he just did enough to enjoy himself without breaking the law as he understood it. She meant, he didn't know what he was doing either, because he was pretty young, though significantly older. She meant, he had deniability. She meant, not much happened. "He toyed." She meant, we were playing around and it got weird.4 Berlant was on the receiving end of this declaration in 1975, well before social media made available a "public world for turning around the horrible privacy sexual violence pushes you into."5 And while Prest's podcast is embedded within the same digital environment that enabled #MeToo, No was released five months prior to Alyssa Milano's inaugural tweet on October 15, 2017.6 While Berlant and Prest's work is certainly prescient, my intention is to drag #MeToo even farther back into the past, with specific attention to the eighteenth-century novel. #MeToo demonstrates our present attunement to gender dynamics, even those that second (or third or fourth) wave feminism cannot quite provide a vocabulary for on the level of individual experience. I argue that in 1740—to use Berlant's words, "even then"—Samuel Richardson similarly attempts to imagine a gendered interiority, while simultaneously accounting for the inadequacy of available tools for doing so. By charting the early novel and the hashtag in a trajectory of "formal" experiments, we can view both the novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded and #MeToo as projects that rely on storytelling to distend, subvert, and reimagine the autonomous individual, and subsequently force us into different ways of reading subjectivity. Literary scholars have long read...
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