The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [103]
The early history of the novel in English, interestingly, could be described—if inelegantly—by a reverse formulation as “the memoir—er, novel.” The original title of the 1722 Defoe novel we call, for short, Moll Flanders, was The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders, &c.: who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu’d variety for threescore years, besides her childhood, was twelve year a whore, five times a wife (whereof once to her own brother) twelve year a thief, eight year a transported felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv’d honest, and died a penitent: written from her own memorandums.17 In other words, the claim of truth or reality was part of the publishers’ apparatus and, presumably, part of the appeal: written from her own memorandums. Moll’s story of suffering and redemption, even if it does not include cohabiting with wolves, seems to fit in rather nicely with the preferred narrative of the modern best-selling memoir. Yet Moll’s first-person narrative was written by a man, and one whose own personal adventures did not resemble hers.
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (more properly The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe; of York, mariner: who lived eight and twenty years, all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque, having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself: with an account how he was at last strangely deliver’d by pyrates in two volumes, written by himself, published in 1719) had likewise presented the author as editor of a “true” account: “The Editor,” Defoe wrote in his preface, “believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.”18
The first edition of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela (1740) credited him as the “editor” of what was presented as an authentic set of letters, with only names and places altered. Nothing else, it was claimed, was done to “disguise the Facts, marr the Reflections, and unnaturalize the Incidents.” As a result, what was offered to the public was “Pamela as Pamela wrote it, in her own Words, without Amputation, or Addition.”19 Here the claim to historical accuracy, coupled with the immediacy of the letters’ apparent composition (Pamela “breaks off” writing when interrupted, her tears fall on the page, etc.), created a form in which it became problematic to separate truth from fiction—or, as Michael McKeon describes it, “the epistemological status of Pamela is difficult to disentangle from that of Pamela—from her claims to, and her capacity for, credibility.” Since Pamela’s story was that of an attempted rape by a wealthy squire (“Mr. B.”) of a young female servant in his household, the plot is, and was, sensational enough to elicit accusations of licentiousness. The only side of the story we hear is Pamela’s: her account of her employer’s initial kindness, the attempted seduction, her imprisonment in his country house, the illegitimate child he had with a former lover. Pamela periodically talks about her writing supplies—her pens, paper, ink, and wax—especially when she is imprisoned and worries that her access to writing will be curtailed.
I don’t want to overemphasize the commonalities between the emergent-novel form of the eighteenth century and the resurgent real-life memoir of the twenty-first. But there are some striking connections. Richardson’s Pamela was modeled on the conduct books of the time, forerunners of today’s self-help manuals (and yesterday’s etiquette books). Like the memoir, these genres now appear with great regularity