The emergence of capitalism and its effects upon eighteenth-century English society have particularly strong implications for women. Having had virtually no rights and no power until this period in history , the question arises as to what power women have acquired in a marketplace economy, if any. Samuel Richarson's Pamela provides a basic account of a servant girl who through her ability to maintain her virtue ultimately marries her Master. What Richardson does in this novel is bring into question how much control Pamela actually has in the union. Is she a free agent with the ability to consent or deny the advances of her Master? Or is she merely a piece of property on the open market with certain attributes that make her very desirable to a prospective buyer?

My attempt in the following outline is to explore these issues from three perspectives. Certainly, the issue of women as property for exchange is one aspect that needs to be analyzed in detail. For a starting point, I feel that Gayle Rubin's essay, "The Traffic in Women," provides the central focus from which all the other articles branch off. Specifically of marriage, she states the following: "If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it...If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage. The relations of such a system are such that women are in no position to realize the benefits of their own circulation" (174). Rubin argues that unless women are able to prosper from their unions with men in a marriage-contract, then they have no power or agency of their own. She also states that "kinship and marriage are always parts of total social systems, and are always tied into economic and political arrangements" (207). It is this social system which is uniquely explored in Pamela.

	Naked in nothing should a woman be;  But veil her very wit with modesty:  Let man discover, let not her display,  But yield her charms of mind with sweet delay.  Edward Young, 1744
Samuel Richardson, letter in hand, before a painting of his favourite correspondent, Lady Bradshaigh

The second area is related to the novel, Pamela, and the various critics who have considered whether Pamela had power or the ability to benefit from her relationship with Mr. B. Most telling in regard to this question is the statement made by Robert Folkenflik in "Pamela: Domestic Servitude, Marriage, and the Novel." Folkenflik writes that "rather than representing the rise of female authority, Pamela begins with the loss of female authority in the person of Mr. B's mother, Pamela's employer and teacher, and it ends with Pamela empowered as a mouthpiece for a reinscribed male authority, precisely the relation she bears to her author as well. Mr. B remains her 'Master.' If Richardson portrays the growth to selfhood sympathetically and celebrates the individuality of Pamela, he nevertheless suggests powerfully that the good wife is in many ways the good servant" (268). He raises the question of Pamela's selfhood as do many of the other authors. He acknowledges some growth, but places it back in a restrained social order that has all the power, giving Pamela none. This then leads to the third area of consideration: that of women's subjectivity and what role the novel has played in defining women in the eighteenth-century and into the twentieth-century. This process is complicated by a novel such as Pamela because while it has a female heroine who is struggling to remain virtuous in a male-dominated society, it is in fact written by a man who benefits from the male-centered power structure.