SOURCE: "The Institutionalization of Conflict (I): Richardson and the Domestication of Service," in The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 357-81.

In the following excerpt, McKeon considers Pamela's struggles in the context of eighteenth-century domestic service and socialization.

… The volatile modernization of feudal conceptions of institutional service can be said to take two forms and to proceed in two directions: "outward," as the robe nobility and career bureaucracy of the centralized state; and "inward," as domestic service within the last bastion of feudal patrimonialism, the family. In eighteenth-century England, the theory of domestic service continued to be dominated by a "medieval" model of personal discretion and submission that was increasingly at odds with the practicalities of wage employment. It is a crucial feature of the love narrative of Mr. B. and Pamela that it is specified to a conflict not only between...