Pamela is not a good book. 600 pages of letters of a teenager fainting until her attempted rapist reforms is not riveting bedtime reading. However, its place in English literature and society, especially in how its two characters represent their genders, remains academic, at least.
For example, as a tale of (cough cough) female autonomy, it remains odd. Professor Judith Hawley recently claimed that Pamela is one of the few novels where when she says “no” to a man, he hears “no”; admittedly she ignores the fact that he gaslights her until she says yes. Mr B, too, is portrayed as the worst of men, but mellows to please the woman he loves; it helps when the woman you love is kidnapped in your house. Thus Pamela is 1 part female psyche and 9 parts chauvinism, 1 part purity and 9 parts leeriness, a strange mix of sexually complex and embarrassingly retrograde.
If it was sensational then, it is problematic today. In an age of recontextualising our educational heritage, of greater understanding of sex and gender, and other questions about our literary and societal foundations, it’s worth asking whether an historic book like this – that doesn’t advocate kidnap and attempted rape, but doesn’t not! – is a book we should treat as foundational. Where does it leave us now, and how should we feel about it? Provoked?
Like when Robert Icke used The Kindly Ones to explore how easily Ancient Greece’s political attitudes translate to now, it’s worth making a provocation of Pamela. It’s a novel about cruelty and tenderness…
***
This is where Crimp comes in – or is it?
Martin Crimp’s new play, When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, is about modern gender politics, traditional gender roles, and role play. Rape is both a threat and a come-on. It’s hard to know if it’s condemnatory or kinky or both. It’s also hard to know whether it’s forwards-facing or stereotypical, given both how formal its gender roles are, yet how fluid they are. Man (Dillane/Blanchett) and Woman (Blanchett/Dillane) play Male and Female roles – master and maid, breadwinner and homemaker, dominant and submissive. He criticises her feminine passivity and she mocks his macho posturing. Amidst this, Man plays Woman and Woman plays Man.
The script, thus, is an odd hodgepodge. Fluid, free and frisky, much of what Crimp writes about is the discourse of 2019. Overtraditional and outdated roles, other parts are from 1740. Costumed and caricatured, and occasionally clearly to be mocked, is it perpetuating these gender stereotypes, or subverting? With Dillane both dominating Blanchett with rape threats, being mocked for his inactivity about rape by her, and him often dressing as her… well, is this fluid masculinity, or is this solid masculinity and performative bewigged femininity? Both characters play both genders, but either gender has such binary, inflexible associations.
Take, for example, the dom/sub relationship. There seems something very fluid about Dillane playing the dominated maid whilst Blanchett, of course, straps on and straps in. With lines like “I’d rather be raped than bored” coming out of Blanchett’s mouth, though, and Dillane emasculated through a sexy French maid costume, therefore, is Crimp saying that it is inherently female to be dominated? Is he saying that people are gender-fluid, or that characteristics are gendered so to be fluid requires roleplay? Certainly, as Mitchell directs, Dillane (dishevelled beard and bald spot) is meant to be comic cross-dressing – why: is it because it’s a panto-dame-Emmanuelle, or because it’s a middle-aged rich man willingly demeaning himself? If we’re meant to be surprised or giggle at a man in a dress and a woman with a willy, everything is gendered, transgressions are possible, roles are conservative – paradoxical provocations. At times, this production asks questions it doesn’t seem to clearly know how to ask, let alone answer.
Then, at others, Stephen Dillane steps forwards and says “fat people are poor and icky”, or Blanchett steps forwards and says “men like girls not women that’s creepy”. Whilst it’s possible to read the gendered, subversive dominance of the end in numerous ways, a line like “Rich people can do anything” really only has one meaning. Mitchell rarely gives Crimp’s questions easy answers – indeed, she often puts the women in sexual situations but the most unsexy context, to distort and make discomforting – but at others, a character stands still and speaks the moral. Regarding gendered roles, Crimp offers no easy answers. Regarding class, regarding pornographicisation of youth, Crimp just lets the words out, sometimes beautifully, often bluntly.
Largely, for this to be coherent, maleness is equivalent to strap-on penises (biological) and power (sociological), whilst femaleness is equivalent to dresses (societal), much of which harks back to literary traditions. Crimp then suggests that Man can be Woman and Woman Man, but by these identifiers, not inherently. There’s deeper this needs to plough into this, unless it’s simply a cute little love story with S&M roleplay and strict binaries, in which case it’s just not well-defined or, well, sexy enough.
There is a strange mix of obviousness and complexity; spelling it out and making nothing clear. Confusing all of this is the possibility that it’s all a kinky game anyway, and inherent in THIS is the fact that the gender roles go back hundreds of years. Around 279 years.
***
So, to Pamela, the book which told women of its day that kidnap is kinky but no means no. Does Martin Crimp update the novel, and bring its problems into modern headlights? Does he leave it where it is and ask us what its legacy means today, a modern day Shamela? Does he simply take topics it tackles? All of these, to some extent – and thus, to some extent, none.
“That’s not my name”, says Blanchett when called Pamela, writing her own history herself on her laptop (another idea of identity introduced, inherent in epistolary Richardson, never completely concluded). Yet just like her Richardsonian ‘namesake’, this woman/girl is locked up, constantly watched, the victim of attempted assaults, so she IS Pamela. Then Dillane is Pamela. Dillane is in a dom/sub relationship today; his sub is Richardson’s girl. So much is in here about legacy of our literature and how we take this on – but so little about Pamela (the novel, the character, the Blanchett) gets into this. It's just there.
By drawing direct parallels between a stale English garage and the first English boudiour novel, with Mr B’s rape threats and landowning amidst Amazon parcels and karaoke machines, Crimp asks us to deliberately draw parallels between now and 1740, but only one speech – Dillane’s “in fifty years… you will be a child and I would still be a man and I would still have the power” – draws any such comparison across time. Again, are these gender roles inherent forever (implied in Dillane’s angry speech, only subverted with his cross-dressing costume) or invented (suggested by Dillane’s need to ‘novelise’ his wife by calling her Pamela and, in an act visualised as rape, dictating her blogging her happiness)? Fascinating question, interesting to analyse its legacy; no conclusions are drawn.
Oddly enough, the show isn’t backwards-looking enough to say where Richardson’s ‘feminism’ ends and where Crimp and Mitchell’s critique thereof begins. Is this, thus, a ‘provocation’ of Richardson’s awful book, or a provocation of where we are now? Again – both, and thus neither.
***
And a brief personal diversion. Pamela is not a famous book, but is an academic one. Firstly, the first novel ever (depending on who you ask), is a fascinating way to discuss society’s fundaments. If this is a provocation of literature’s gendered legacy, why so specific; if this is a provocation of Pamela, why so non-specific?
Secondly, I think Professor Judith Hawley probably known to a couple of you too, based on inference about your uni days (for what it's worth she was a fab teacher). When I studied it a lifetime ago, it was perfectly fine for us to discuss its politics in a flippant way our current culture is challenging. Smarter younger minds than us are taking issue with issues like this and making them known. Our curriculum provokes them, they provoke it right back. If we want to talk about why PAMELA – and not, at random, The Watsons oh please make that transfer – is worth a contemporary provocation, we should look at not just what it said, but what it’s saying now, and to whom – who are the gatekeepers of Pamela, of our cannon?
Crimp’s play is set in a no-man’s-land of time and culture, and thus says too little about Richardson’s then and too little about our now. I wish a historian, and a contemporary student (or Laura Wade and Jane Austen), had collaborated with Crimp. Instead Crimp doesn’t historically locate his critiques historically, nor does he challenge them for 2019. He simply pours them out.
***
The real victims of this are Blanchett, Dillane, and us audiences trying to get a grip on whether we’re meant to feel sorry for Woman, to feel sexy about it, or to see her as simply a cipher. Two mercurial performances by two mercurial performers amount to little when the characters they play need framing. In another confusion, I think Mitchell’s direction never quite makes clear enough where roles end and roleplay begins – when is Dillane, and when is Dillane’s Man, playing female, playing Pamela? This is where it’s hard to give the gendered, dom/sub, ‘literary’ scenes their correct reading. It’s a strange lapse in judgement. Given that it’s impossible to know whether Man and Woman are the same character, are divisions of the self, or kinks, it’s hard to process what this story is – a love story satire, an S&M romance, an analysis of gender norms, a critique of Pamela? I wonder if, like Phantom Thread beautifully and sentimentally managed, this wanted to be a tender love story told via submission and dominance, but failed to stir the emotions. I don’t know which emotions this should have stirred – if its roleplay was a kinky romantic scene, or if its gender roles are torture – but it stirred little.
***
All in all, In the Republic of Happiness 2: Electric Boogaloo is just a bit blah, forgettable. Its lack of focus and definitions means that overall it’s never boring, but never exciting either. Whilst watching it I was never offended, confused, or – for a provocation – provoked. People will remember the ballot more than they remember the show.
Ultimately, thus, the show is a few interesting missed shots. I think Crimp says some really fascinating things about the ways in which money and power have been gendered since 1740’s first novel, ‘roles’, and the need to free ourselves from that.
But I don’t think contemporary gender theory, Crimp, and Pamela make great bedfellows – the first feels at arm’s length, the second could be more provocative and discursive on his own, the third could be challenged more interestingly head on a la Shangela’s Shamela.
Still, it’s a provocation of a provocative book, intended to provoke today. It’s hard to come to one definitive conclusion. All I can say is this is what I pegged it as.
