Virtue Rewarded

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Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded - Sexuality and the Morally Didactic Novel

We have difficulties as a modern audience appreciating the social anxieties reflected in Pamela, especially those surrounding morality and valuation of individuals within the social framework. The radical stance of even using phrases such as virtue and 'fortune' to denote Pamela's virginity are themselves loaded with a questioning of the social stratification in which she resides. The term 'Fortune' is perhaps the most playful but problematic. In it the issue of the commodification of Pamela's virginity is implicated, while at the same time gaining its authority within the framework of the novel through a Protestant ethic of internal individual worth apart from social …show more content…

Yet his philosophical position was much less clear cut. If Justine is abused, it is for persisting with her policy of virtue, not for her gender. Her sister proved to have no such illusions when Sade told The History of Juliette in 1797. There she not only prospers in vice but becomes one of his greatest fiends. In Sade's world, obscenity and cruelty are the prerogative of the strong, irrespective of gender. ("Introduction" xxvii; emphasis added)

Is Sade a part of literature or the property of science, social psychology, and psychoanalysis? He himself is not a satisfactory case subject (there are always certain difficulties in psychoanalysing the dead), though his catalogue of psychopathological impulses is without equal. Nor is Sade a body of work, for, like Freud and Marx, the Great Unreadable is also the Great Unread. ("Introduction" vii; emphasis …show more content…

("Introduction" xvii)

Works Cited & Additional Readings Acra, Adrienne. "Two Textual Applications of Marxism." Textual Applications of Marxism. Online. 14 Oct. 2000. <http://courses.lib.odu.edu/engl/cbrooke/aacra/m4.htm>
Cleland, John. Fanny Hill; Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1989.
Coward, David. "Introduction." The Misfortunes of Virtue: and Other Early Tales. By Marquis de Sade. 1992. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. vii-xxxvii.
Evans, David. The English Novel in the Eighteenth Century. Vancouver: UBC Access, 1994.
Frye, Northrup. "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility." Backgrounds to Eighteenth Century Literature. Ed. Kathleen Williams. Scranton, PA: Chandler Publishing Co., 1971.
LaCorte, John. "Marquis de Sade and the Aesthetics of Suffering." Marquis de Sade. Online. 12 Oct. 2000.

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