The Trial Narrative in Richardson’s Pamela: Suspending the Hermeneutic of Happiness

"Happiness is a new idea in Europe," declared Saint-Just in 1794. Historians have by and large concurred with his assessment, despite its revolutionary hyperbole. The eighteenth century, they claim, confers respectability on secular happiness as no other period before it. Not satisfied with legitimating a merely private happiness, eighteenth-century thinkers spelled out for the first time the radical possibility of a "right to happiness" and oriented their political reforms towards "public happinessw-a phrase always on the lips of Rousseau, Jefferson, Chastellux, and others.' These historical observations are unimpeachable, and yet there is something fundamentally wrong with the picture of an eighteenth century committed to the utopian promise of happiness. When it came down to it, confronted with the opportunity to write their visionary politics into law, the period's revolutionary thinkers balked. The American and French revolutions produced constitutions that are astonishingly reticent about happiness. Kant invented an ethics radically free of the concern for happiness. After the eighteenth century, happiness, which once signified the highest good imaginable, is easily dismissed as sappy, sentimental, even banal. Historians have generally failed to make sense of this confusing picture of the role of happiness in eighteenth-century culture because they have not paid attention to questions of narrative form. The eighteenth century did not invent happiness, as Saint-Just believed, but it did effect a fundamental transformation in the narrative structure of the idea of happiness. Only by making visible this narrative transformation in the period will we be able to understand the eighteenth century's paradoxical attitudes towards happiness. Crucial to the process of transforming the period's narrative imaginary is the emergent novel. In this essay, I will show how Richardson's Pamela develops an unprecedented narrative form-the trial narrative-that wreaks havoc on the narrative underpinnings of the idea of happiness. The trial narrative is not unique to Pamela; indeed, it becomes something like the narratological unconscious of the eighteenth century, insinuating its logic into discourses as disparate as sentimentalism, Kantian