Pamela, Or, Virtue Rewarded

I can't remember which exam was focused on 18th Century Literature. I think it might have been the Associate Diploma, but it could have been Grade Seven.

Anyway, it kind of caught me napping because I'd never read an 18th Century novel, and suddenly I had to use one for a rather central part of an exam. I'd have to memorise a passage, read some of the book on sight at the whim of the examiner, and answer whatever questions the examiner might ask concerning the book.

Previously, I'd almost managed to get past the third chapter of Robinson Crusoe two or three times, but quite frankly the book refuses to be read. Have you ever tried reading Robinson Crusoe? The first few chapters are ridiculously boring. I mean, more boring than Island of the Blue Dolphin, which bored the pants off be both times I read it, but I still managed to finish the book (once when I was in High School, and once when I had to teach it for a class).

Anyway, since I didn't have the time to read several novels in order to have the luxury of choosing one, I just picked a title at random and decided to roll with it. My one criteria was that it not be Robinson Crusoe, so that left the field pretty open.

I ended up grabbing Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded off the shelf for one reason and one reason only - I knew Richardson would give me something to talk about, and it seemed to be the only thing he had written that was less than sixty-seven volumes long. Okay, I'm exaggerating slightly, but have you seen how much space Clarissa takes up on a shelf?

Pamela, then became the first book I ever had to read for assessment purposes which I didn't finish. It wasn't from laziness - I just couldn't take it any more.

To give it its due, the book isn't boring. It's just very, very, very annoying.

I present a synopsis, but cannot guarantee my memory of events:

We have a sixteen year old girl, Pamela, who is employed by "Mr B.", a jerk she calls "my Master" throughout the entire book. I have no idea how old Jerkboy is, but he is probably at least ten years older than she is. Maybe much more. Jerkboy comes onto her in the garden (because a servant is little more than a whore, right?), and she refuses him. At this, she worries that she might loose her job. She writes to her parents who write back to say they're more worried she might loose her virginity, and she should probably chuck the job and come home.

At this point, she nobly chooses to stay working for Jerkboy so she can send money home to the folks, even though they clearly regard her "virtue" to be more important. Jerkboy comes onto her again, and again she refuses. He takes the next logical step and abducts her.

Having shoved her into some form of conveyance against her will, he whisks her away to his house in some unidentifiable locality where no-one will know where she is in order to rescue her. The next few chapters consist of her trying to escape and him trying to either seduce her or rape her. As his methods of seduction leave a little to be desired (somewhat closer to "you, pants off, now" than anything, well, appealing), there's a very fine line between the seduction attempts and the rape attempts. She bravely wards off the seduction (yeah, like that was hard), and manages to avoid the rape by fainting - which, I guess, takes all the fun out of it for Jerkboy.

Pamela is hampered in her attempts to escape by a) the fact that she is COMPLETELY USELESS, and b) Jerkboy's housekeeper, who seems to believe it is one of her duties to help Jerkboy deflower unwilling sixteen-year-old girls.

Meanwhile, the novel progresses as she writes letters to her parents, which she despairs of ever being able to send. At one point, she thinks she finally has managed to get word out of her predicament, but it turns out that Jerkboy manages to intercept the letters and read them.

Now, all this time, Pamela is still referring to him as "my Master", when I think any female character who wasn't written by an obnoxious fifty-one-year-old bloke (who thinks he's doing womankind a favour by giving them a good example to follow) would probably be calling him something like, say, "Jerkboy".

Oh, but wait - did I mention this was a Romance?

That's right, after abducting her, keeping her prisoner, intercepting her letters to her parents and repeatedly attempting to rape her, Jerkboy decides he can't live without her and she has proven herself to be virtuous enough to be his wife, so he proposes. She at first sees this as another plot to get into her pants, then takes all of five minutes to accept. The book then changes tack to talk about how wonderful Jerkboy is and how lucky she feels to have won him - and all along she still calls him "my Master".

It was at this point that I threw the book across the room and refused to read any more. I made sure the passages I had to cover for my exam came from the two thirds of the book I had actually read, and I found a synopsis of the damn thing so I could answer questions about the rest of the story without having to actually put up with one more sentence of Richardson's dross.

Turns out that, after deciding to spend the rest of her life with her beloved Jerkboy, Pamela discovered he had a child by another woman. So, as any good, dutiful wife would, she insisted on meeting this other woman, and TAKING HER CHILD to raise as her own - after all, who better to raise her husband's child than a virtuous, married woman, as opposed to some poor, wretched slut who didn't have the good sense to faint every time he tried to climb into her bed...?

Yeah, Pamela is never going to make it into my list of favourite books. I have to say I'm more likely to read chapter five of Robinson Crusoe than ever finishing Pamela.

But, hey, the story has a great moral, right? If you put up with someone unconscionably obnoxious for long enough, you may get to put up with them for the rest of your life! Yay!?

H.G. Wells

Hey!

It's the Birthday of H.G. Wells! He's one of my favourite authors!

He's also dead, so I guess there's no point in sending a card...

Cataloguing people

At some point, a few years back, I read an article somewhere about a library that was playing with the concept of cataloguing people.

That is, they would put "living" resources in the catalogue, by listing people who were experts in the field or had relevant personal knowledge.

I really, really wish I could find that article now, but the only terms I can think of using are coming up with useless rubbish.

Do you know what you get when you try to look for "cataloguing experts"? You get people who are experts at cataloguing. Looking for "cataloguing people" gets you nothing but people who catalogue, and "catalogue people" gets you sentences like "after looking at a catalogue, people tend to browse the shelves..." Looking for similar phrases will provide you with similar results.

Nothing on cataloguing people, though.

Slessor

Two chronometers the captain had,
One by Arnold that ran like mad,
One by Kendal in a walnut case,
Poor devoted creature with a hangdog face.

I was going to write a "spoof" of this stanza for a post comparing two cookbooks I had bought recently, when it occurred to me that the number of people who knew Kenneth Slessor's poem well enough to recognise a spoof could probably be numbered on one hand... and they probably don't read this blog.

Which suddenly made me feel very sad, and prompted me to put off the post concerning cookbooks in favour of a post concerning Kenneth Slessor. For anyone who would like to read the whole poem, you can find it here.

It's actually an excerpt from a longer poem called Five Visions of Captain Cook, but invariably these five stanzas on the chronometers end up being published in anthologies, while the rest of the poem is left out. I don't believe I have ever read the whole poem myself, only various excerpts like "Two Chronometers".

Kenneth Slessor was an Australian poet who wrote in the first half of the 20th century. Yes, believe it or not, Australia does have more than one poet on the books.

I know about him because I took Speech and Drama classes as a child (and as a teenager, and as an adult), and had to cover Australian poetry on more than one occasion. Most people, though, have probably never heard of him. Just like they've never heard of Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall or Mary Gilmore.

I'd like to point out that Mary Gilmore is quite a noteworthy poet - literally. She's on the current Australian $10 note, on the opposite side to Andrew Barton (Banjo) Patterson.

Ah, you've heard of that one, have you? Waltzing Matilda, The Man from Snowy Mountain and Clancy of the Overflow are Australian poems you may actually know about?

Hmm.

Meanwhile, how many $10 notes have you seen in the last ten years? Did it ever occur to you to ask who the chick on the other side was?

Anyway, I mentioned those poets in particular because they are, believe it or not, quite "famous", as far as Australian poets go. Pick up any book on Australian poetry and you'll find a number of poems by these writers.

Slessor's "Two Chronometers" excerpt is the first poem in the most ubiquitous book of Australian poetry in existence - This Land, an anthology selected by another famous Australian poet, Judith Wright. You can pick up Wright's anthology in any second-hand book store or charity op-shop in the country, I expect. I think I saw six copies of it at the last book fair.

Oh, come on. Of course you've heard of Judith Wright. Why, she and Bruce Dawe are considered to be among the most important poets in Australian literature, and are practically responsible for every anthology of Australian anything that you've ever read...

What? Oh, sorry. I hadn't realised you've never read an anthology of Australian poetry. No, no, it makes perfect sense. Quite frankly, if it wasn't written by 'Banjo' Paterson or Henry Lawson, there's no reason why an Australian would even dream of reading Australian poetry on purpose.

What? You've never read any of their poems either? What about Waltzing Matilda? Surely you've read that one? No? You've just sung the chorus on occasion. Okay. That makes sense, too. No one would actually think a song about a homeless bum who steals a sheep and commits suicide would make a good national anthem if they knew the lyrics.

Look, it's not like Australian poetry is particularly bad. I think quite a bit of it is really good. That Slessor poem, for example, does lovely things with rhythm and pace and is a brilliant poem to recite. I mean, if you've read any British or American poetry, you wouldn't think the Australian poetry was in any way inferior...

Oh. You don't read poetry as a general rule. Okay. No, no. Don't worry about it. That's perfectly normal behaviour for an Australian. Poetry is, after all, for wusses and toffy-nosed gits who can't get a real job. I think it's pretty normal behaviour for most people in the Western World, isn't it?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go somewhere and cry.