4. Pocket

Abstract Revisiting Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), a foundational site of novelistic interiority and domestic realism, this chapter maintains that interior spaces need to be understood in terms of sartorial interiors, not just architectural ones. The narrative tension in Pamela derives as much from the slippage between the architectural and sartorial meanings of fabric (originally meaning “building” or “contrivance”) as from the servant girl heroine’s attempts to defend her virtue against her master’s sexual/textual intrusions. Critics have noted how Pamela’s writing closets function as critical spaces of interiority and self-expression. Such interiors do not give her protection from her master; he owns the houses in which the closets, the precarious settings of her private reflections, are built. The interiors of Pamela’s pockets—garments worn close to the body and detachable for women in the eighteenth century—function as portable sites for hiding the letters that Mr. B. attempts to steal from her closet. As movable enclosures for women’s interior life, detachable pockets resembled the portable camera obscuras that were available at the time. What appears a material object serves as a movable space of interiority and thus a mobile form of private property for a subject born without access to landed property.