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Title: Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson, Thomas Keymer, Alice Wakely ISBN: 0-19-282960-2 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: June, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.87 (15 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Spamela
Comment: As a writer, Samuel Richardson is completely honest about his intentions. His novel "Pamela" serves an explicit purpose, announced on its title page as intending "to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the YOUTH of BOTH SEXES [sic]," and this self-righteous statement invokes a suspicion, almost a conviction, that the book's value is instructional rather than literary. Can it be both, and can it still be enjoyable? Yes, it is both, and no, it is not very enjoyable.
Richardson's heroine, the fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews, a girl so lily-white and virtuous she almost rides into the story on a unicorn, works as a maid for a wealthy young man discreetly called Mr. B. He is attracted to her and treats her most ignobly, kissing her despite her protests, grappling her like an octopus, feeling her up, calling her a slut, reading her mail, deceiving her poor parents, and finally having her kidnapped and imprisoned in his rural house. This much of the novel is epistolary, in which Pamela wails about her distress in letters to her parents, who are concerned but unable to help her aside from giving her advice filled with platitudes about minding her virtue.
The second part of the novel is in the form of a diary, in which Pamela relates how her virtuous resistance to Mr. B's salacious persistence culminates in his offer to marry her, which she accepts. Okay, so now what? Richardson's next step is to introduce class warfare. Mr. B's sister, Lady Davers, admonishes her brother about the impropriety of his marrying a vulgar wench like Pamela when he should be seeking a girl of the aristocracy. The dignity with which Pamela responds to Lady Davers's snobbish attitude shows that while Richardson may have been high-minded about morals, he was definitely not a supporter of elitism.
The challenge in reading this novel is to try to take it seriously without discarding modern notions about proper gender relations. It may be argued that Richardson is really pointing the finger of scorn at Mr. B, but since Pamela is the focus and the voice of the story, it almost seems that the burden of remaining virtuous is being placed on her and not on her immoral aggressor, who knows better but thinks his privileged social status gives him license to do as he pleases. And then one day he realizes the iniquity of his character, reverses his behavior, makes an honorable overture to his lady, and suddenly everything's wonderful. Sure.
"Pamela" basically fuses together two genres, the morality tale and the Cinderella story, and a formula like this was bound to invite waves of adoration, commentary, and controversy. Fans loved the book's optimism; puritanical detractors accused it of being merely prurient. Henry Fielding, possibly inspired by the book's humorless earnestness, even wrote a parody ("Shamela") in which the heroine really *was* a slut. Whether "Pamela" deserves to be read in the twenty-first century is difficult to judge; it can't quite be recommended on the strength of its narrative, but readers who feel the need to see an example of "virtue rewarded" could do a lot worse.
Rating: 4
Summary: Lots of Fun
Comment: This book is almost impossible to rate. It is didactic, tedious, chauvinistic, dogmatic and implausible. But boy, is it fun! I've read it twice and both times have been amazed at how quickly I was sucked into Richardson's world. And both times I came away thinking, Is this book really as psychologically complex as I think it is or am I reading too much into it?
In a way, the novel Pamela strikes me the same way as Shakespeare's play Taming of the Shrew. Yes, the sexism is irritating (not to say, frightening when looked at in historical context: Pamela really doesn't have a chance), yet the characters live in their own right. Mr. B is less clearly delineated than Pamela, and Pamela comes off as incredibly sanctimonious in parts, but the tension and drama between them and the other characters is real and vital.(For instance, Richardson explores the sibling rivalry between Mr. B and his sister in highly charged scenes that could take place in any modern novel.)
The book suffers towards the end. Pamela becomes even more sanctimonious (and less aggressive), and Mr. B becomes less witty. Mr. B is a villain you hate to love (or a hero you love to hate) until he turns "good" and then he just gets boring. Who was it said, "The snake has all the lines"?
If you find, as I do, that Clarissa (Richardson's better known novel about a womanly woman's virtue) is a tad daunting, give Pamela a try.
Rating: 2
Summary: "...you must read it for its sentiment."
Comment: Samuel Richardson penned this as an older man after a lifetime in the printing business. Personally, he was a decent, respectable, rather squeamish fellow living a decent, respectable and circumscribed life. He knows almost nothing of women, of course, but pens many pages about what he would *like* to see in one. Pamela's trembling and teary eponymous heroine has one outstanding characteristic: an iron clad, if decidedly tedious, virtuousness. As she stumbles through a variety of tried and true insults, she remains spotless, pure, and oh so dull. One wishes, on about page 300, that she'd fall once or twice just to make things a bit more interesting. But then, I fear Mr. Richardson, no Fielding, would have never been able to bring himself to write such a scene. Books, in his orderly and earnest mind, should be uplifting and instructive.
In the beastiary of 18th century female heroes, poor one-dimensional Pamela doesn't do well, and the book itself, with its static narrative and repetitious tub thumping on virtue, with the magical "Happy Ending", ages poorly. Defoe's crafty, bumptuous Moll Flanders, for example, although not a psychological study by any means, continues to amuse with her businesslike narrative on getting ahead with what one's got. Fielding's pastiche, Shamela, a take-off of the Pamela (as is Joseph Andrews) published shortly after Richardson's book, turns the book inside out and, like most good satire, is shorter and easier to read. Later, more durable (because more complex) heroines were penned by Fanny Burney and Jane Austin. All have aged well because all are vigorously human, warts and all.
After Pamela was published to great acclaim, the elderly author gained a coterie of older women fluttering about him, and became something of a literary lion. The book was shoved into the hands of young misses in the hopes of moral instruction, who were probably bored to tears with it. It was touted from the pulpit and a big hit with male tastemakers who, even if they couldn't make their way through the thing, felt their preconceptions of female virtue to be amply bolstered. Poor plotless Pamela, forever the victim, is hardly more than a set of platitudes waiting to be rescued by a paradigm - as Samuel Johnson once said "If you try reading Pamela for its story, you would hang yourself; you must read it for its sentiment" - but at least Richardson troubled to give her a voice. His great contribution to literature was his expansion of the epistolary style, and this book continuous to be read, but for its sentiment, or its curiosity value, is hard to say.
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Title: Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Penguin Classics) by Henry Fielding, Judith Hawley ISBN: 0140433864 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1999 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Evelina : or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World by Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Fanny Burney ISBN: 0375758054 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 04 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (Penguin Classics) by Samuel Richardson, Angus Ross ISBN: 0140432159 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: February, 1986 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Tom Jones (Oxford World's Classics) by Henry Fielding, John Bender, Simon Stern ISBN: 0192834975 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: July, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe ISBN: 048629093X Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 03 July, 1996 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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