Personal Information
Name : Aarti Bhupatbhai Sarvaiya
Batch : M.A. Sem. 1 (2022-2024)
Enrollment N/o. : 4069206420220027
Roll N/o. : 01
Subject Code & Paper N/o. : 22393 - Paper 102: Literature of Neo - Classical Period
Email Address : aartisarvaiya7010@gmail.com
Submitted to : Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English – Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University – Bhavnagar – 364001
Date of Online Submission : 06 November, 2022
Date of Offline Submission : 07th November, 2022
Criticism on Samuel Richardson's novel 'Pamela' :-
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, first published in 1740, is widely regarded as the first English novel. It was certainly the first bestseller, hyped, saluted, and scorned in equal measure.Considering current events, it should also be noted that the novel is about sexual harassment: its fifteen-year-old protagonist, a maidservant, is continually threatened with sexual assault by her boss. By fending off Mr. B., Pamela Andrews’s virtue is rewarded… with marriage to Mr. B., as her goodness transforms him from beast to charming husband.(Wills)
Subtitles of the Assignment :-
Introduction
About the Novelist
About the Novel
Criticisms on the Novel 'Pamela'
Conclusion
References
Introduction :-
In this Assignment I'm going to discuss Samuel Richardson's novel 'Pamela' and its adaptations and Criticisms. In this Assignment I discuss the above topics.
About The Novelist :-
SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689-1761)
Richardson belongs the credit of writing the first modern novel. He was the son of a London joiner, who, for economy's sake, resided in some unknown town in Derbyshire, where Samuel was born in 1689. The boy received very little education, but he had a natural talent for writing letters, and even as a boy we find him frequently employed by working girls to write their love letters for them. This early experience, together with his fondness for the society of "his dearest ladies" rather than of men, gave him that intimate knowledge of the hearts of sentimental and uneducated women which is manifest in all his work. (Long)
Moreover, he was a keen observer of manners, and his surprisingly accurate descriptions often compel us to listen, even when he is most tedious. At seventeen years of age he went to London and learned the printer's trade, which he followed to the end of his life.
When fifty years of age he had a small reputation as a writer of elegant epistles, and this reputation led certain publishers to approach him with a proposal that he write a series of _Familiar Letters_, which could be used as models by people unused to writing. Richardson gladly accepted the proposal, and had the happy inspiration to make these letters tell the connected story of a girl's life. Defoe had told an adventure story of human life on a desert island, but Richardson would tell the story of a girl's inner life in the midst of English neighbors. That sounds simple enough now, but it marked an epoch in the history of literature. (Long)
He is best known for his three epistolary novels: Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Richardson was an established printer and publisher for most of his life and printed almost 500 different works, including journals and magazines. (Long)
About The Novel :-
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded was written by Richardson in 1740. Originally published in two volumes, it is what is known as an epistolary novel. (Basdeo)
Pamela is Samuel Richardson’s great masterpiece. Since the initial publication of Pamela in 1740, it has received extensive attention. It’s generally accepted that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is a prime example of the epistolary novel. However, the first rise of the psychological novel as a genre is said to have started with the sentimental novel of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Many factors contribute to the success of Pamela, the most important one is the vivid description of the heroine's psychological activities. It had a profound impact on the later writers and played a significant role in world literature. Pamela’s inner world is incompatible, she suffered a lot from the upper class and she was longing for an independent life and social position. Also she could not cast off the shackle of the patriarchy society. Recently, most researches are focused on the novel’s moral value, the epistolary form, feminism, history and religious perspective. However, this paper will mainly focus on the heroine’s inner world and intend to conduct a psychological analysis of Pamela. (Zhang and Fan)
Criticisms on The Novel 'Pamela' :-
Pamela as a Worst Novel :-
The plot recounts the tale of Pamela, a servant in the household of an upper-class man, Mister B. He falls in love with Pamela, and makes repeated attempts at seducing her. In this novel, readers seem to like him as he hides her in a room at some point and watches her undress and it could be wrong of course. She resists these attempts until finally, as the title suggests, her virtue is rewarded and he marries her, having been so impressed by her moral goodness. (Basdeo)
The tale literally takes place inside one household. That literally is it.
Here is an example of some of the language in the novel:
LETTER VIII
DEAR PAMELA,
I cannot but renew my cautions on your master’s kindness, and his free expression to you about the stockings. Yet there may not be, and I hope there is not, anything in it. But when I reflect, that there possibly may, and that if there should, no less depends upon it than my child’s everlasting happiness in this world and the next; it is enough to make one fearful for you. Arm yourself, my dear child, for the worst; and resolve to lose your life sooner than your virtue. What though the doubts I filled you with, lessen the pleasure you would have had in your master’s kindness; yet what signify the delights that arise from a few paltry fine clothes, in comparison with a good conscience?
These are, indeed, very great favours that he heaps upon you, but so much the more to be suspected; and when you say he looked so amiably, and like an angel, how afraid I am, that they should make too great an impression upon you! For, though you are blessed with sense and prudence above your years, yet I tremble to think, what a sad hazard a poor maiden of little more than fifteen years of age stands against the temptations of this world, and a designing young gentleman, if he should prove so, who has so much power to oblige, and has a kind of authority to command, as your master. (Basdeo)
Now, whilst the novel was a commercial success, with Pamela motifs appearing all over in prints, and ceramic decorations, not everyone was convinced of this tale of a virtuous young woman who manages to tame a ‘wild’ aristocratic suitor. Least of all was Richardson’s fellow novelist Fielding. Rather than seeing Pamela as a tale of bourgeois virtue winning out against aristocratic immorality, he saw it as a tale of ruthless ambition. Pamela was not virtuous but scheming and manipulative, and wrapped Mr. B. around her little finger. (Basdeo)
So in 1741 Fielding wrote, and I quote the full long version of the title here:
An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. In Which, the Many Notorious Falsehoods and Misrepresentations of a Book Called PAMELA, Are Exposed and Refuted; and All the Matchless ARTS of that Young POLITICIAN, Set in a True and Just Light. Together with A Full Account of all that Passed Between Her and Parson Arthur Williams; whose Character is Represented in a Manner Something Different from what he Bears in Pamela. (Basdeo)
Criticism on the Protagonist 'Pamela' :-
The heroine, a young servant girl, is pursued by her master, Squire B., but maintains her virginity in spite of his repeated and ingenious efforts, until the would-be seducer, driven to desperation, marries her. Thus is Pamela’s virtue rewarded. (Mambrol)
Pamela contains many powerful scenes that linger long in the reader’s memory: the intended rape scene, the sequence in which Pamela considers suicide, even parts of the marriage scene are the work of a powerful writer with a keen sense for the dramatic. (Mambrol)
Pamela is two quite different characters. On one hand, she is the attractive and convincing young girl who informs her parents that her recently deceased mistress had left her three pairs of shoes that fit her perfectly, adding that “my lady had a very little foot”; or having been transferred to Squire B.’s Lincolnshire estate, laments that she lacks “the courage to stay, neither can I think to go.” On the other hand, she is at times a rather unconvincing puppet who thinks and talks in pious platitudes and values her “honesty” as a very valuable commodity, a character—in Joseph Wood Krutch’s words—“so devoid of any delicacy of feeling as to be inevitably indecent.” (Mambrol)
Reception and controversy :-
The novel’s democratic inclinations spoke to its time. Its heroine figured on fans, on china, in epigrams and poems, and its story was dramatised almost immediately. Pamela was a hit – perhaps the first ‘best-seller’. This meant that it was subjected to rigorous refutation, criticism and mockery. Pamela Censured thundered against its sexual subject matter and ‘Amorous Scenes’. Charles Povey in The Virgin in Eden (1741) tries to uphold a perfect allegorical chastity, a rather Spenserian virginity unlike the ‘Immodest Romances’ of Pamela’s letters. Eliza Haywood published Anti-Pamela: or, Feign’d Innocence Detected in June 1741, two months after Henry Fielding’s great attack in April. (Doody)
Fielding is the earliest of famous contemporary writers to attack Pamela with verve and success. His Shamela changes the very ground of the novel’s story, turning the youthful heroine into a sexually experienced plotter who has already borne a bastard. Shamela is the daughter of an Irish Roman Catholic prostitute in Drury Lane. Mr Booby is ignorant and silly, letting himself be played upon by sexual attraction and specious talk of virtue. One can see in Fielding the old Etonian outraged by an attack on the privileges of masculinity itself as well as on upper-class rule. Shamela, her mother and Parson Williams are all in a conspiracy against the gentry’s entitlement. Dangerous ‘levelling’ is gaining ground. After all, we don’t want to encourage young gentlemen to marry their mother’s waiting-maids! Shamela herself represents everything that Fielding fears: clever women, self-motivated sex-workers, an uppity proletariat, the Irish, and Roman Catholics. Such forces are enemies of orderly hierarchical marriage and counter the regulating effects of Anglican Protestantism, which encourages respect of British masculine rights and liberties. Pamela’s own interpretation of Protestantism, however, gives her a sense of herself strong enough to resist Mr B’s attempt to own her. (Doody)
Richardson's Characterization of Mr. B.
For or over two hundred years critics—whether defenders or de tractors helped place Samuel Richardson in the anomalous position of a novelist whose power of psychological analysis is universally acknowledged but whose knowledge of his own sex is generally disparaged. The reality accorded his heroines was denied his heroes -Mr. B., Robert Lovelace, and Sir Charles Grandison--and his own masculinity has often been questioned. "Grandison is an in consistent angel, Lovelace is an absolute devil, and Booby is a perfect ass," concludes a detractor in 1754 and attributes Richardson's failures in male characterization either to "a weakness of the head or abadness of the heart." Echoes of this caustic verdict are still heard today, although the cause of authorial failure is now ascribed to male hormone deficiency, which produced "essential femininity of nature and interests." (NEEDHAM)
During the last thirty years, however, especially in the past decade, we find (concurrent with an increase in Richardson studies) this traditional attitude increasingly challenged. Explanation of Richardson's analytical power has now shifted to an exploration of his conscious and unconscious psyche, with a growing emphasis on his self-identification with the rakish make-up. Morris Golden, for example, asserts that Richardson's men, more convincingly projected than his women, are expressions of the author's fantasies, and that Lovelace is his "best realized character." (NEEDHAM)
Pamela and the Duplicitous Body of Femininity :-
Pamela is a Novel Split by Samuel Richardson's impulse to reproduce and mimic contradictory aspects of the ideology of gender, particularly the ideology of femininity. Its narrative is, in part, constituted by and even promotes a model of femininity it explicitly repudiates. The novel seems to set itself against hypocrisy and duplicity, as well as disruptions of gender identity, but it cannot do without them. In fact, feminine duplicity's transforming powers and numerous attractions pervade a novel which represents itself as the defender of female truth and virtue. (Tassie)
Duplicity, of course, is one of the cardinal sins in the traditional model of femininity that Richardson both employs and questions; it recurs as a basis for attacks on women throughout history. Although the dichotomy between body and mind has been attributed to both genders, women have been seen as most duplicitously responsible for, and most damagingly constituted by, that split. In the Restoration and the eighteenth century, accusations of feminine duplicity, while traditional in nature, also directly reflect contemporary concerns. (Tassie)
Kath arine Rogers sees the Restoration impulse to attack women's deployment of artifice as part of a more general "stripping away of idealization" arising from the "neoclassical emphasis on reason as opposed to misleading appearance and sentimental illusion." (Tassie)
According to Rogers, the analysis of women's deceptive appearance revives the classical philosopher Lucretius' "conviction that, since romantic love is irrational, no woman's attractiveness can survive a keen analysis by reason"; Lucretius directs the man who would escape love to the dressing room, thus becoming a source of the "lady's dressing room" poems so popular in the Restoration and earlier eighteenth century. (Tassie)
On the other hand, historians and literary critics have also seen in the course of the eighteenth century a movement away from the overt misogyny of using women to exemplify monstrous physicality and toward the "Cult of True Womanhood." This ideological change has been linked to women's presumed loss of productive work and to an increase in leisure under capitalism, and thus to the new status of women as "consumers rather than contributors to the household economy." (Tassie)
Marlene LeGates argues that the idealization of womanhood enabled the shift to capitalism: "The idea of the morally superior woman contributed an ideological prop to the family seen as a means of social consolidation in an increasingly class-conscious society." (Tassie)
Family and Class-order in Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded :-
In seeking to explain the contemporary popularity of Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, critics often point out that as a master printer, pious Protestant, strict family authoritarian, and political conservative, Richardson, and by extension his art, perfectly embodied a bourgeois class that was consolidating its power, challenging aristocratic institutions of control, and transforming cultural as well as economic means of production. Terry Eagleton, for example, argues that Richardson participated in a revolutionary practice which had to engage in "a fierce conflict over signs and meanings." The novels "are an agent, rather than mere account, of the English bourgeoisie's attempt to wrest a degree of ideological hegemony from the aristocracy in the decades which follow the political settlement of 1688." (FLINT)
Certainly Richardson's stories show the imprint of a cultural revolution involving the rise of a bourgeois class. Yet Pamela's history, while it registers the exhilaration of classascent, also stresses the anxieties accompanying radical change, seeking, in the end, to forget what it first appears to celebrate by obliterating the ground upon which its class and family drama operates. (FLINT)
For Richardson the problem of classrelations is always allied with the government of families, and it is within the family that the "revolutionary" actions of his heroines are enacted. Pamela's and Mr. B's paths converge in the existing world of marriage contracts, family alliance, and the productive management of estate. By the end, Pamela comes to see her whole life justified by the final end of family continuance and beneficence. (FLINT)
COMPOSING PURPOSE IN RICHARDSON'S PAMELA :-
In 1740 the English printer Samuel Richardson anonymously published his own Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, comprised mostly of a series of letters from a young servant to her parents, commencing at the time of her mistress' death, continuing through attacks on her virtue by her mistress' son, and concluding with her incredible marriage to this very same "Profligate" turned "Puritan." (JANE)
Richardson intended his work to be an engaging source of education and edification, and the enthusiastic response that he received indicates that he achieved his goal.' He did so primarily because his overtly moralistic narrative provides a great deal of entertainment through conflict and characterization, suspense and sentiment; as Ian Watt has observed, Pamela permits "readers to enjoy the attractions both of fiction and of devotional literature at the same time and in the same work" (152).
In Pamela, many of these moments reveal that Richardson's protagonist has her own purposes for composition. Depending on the occasion, Pamela's writing can be anecdotal, confessional, explanatory, diversionary, defensive, or persuasive; and her meta-narrative, as well as Richardson's, merits attention and analysis since it offers insights about her character and her relationships with other characters.(JANE)
Conclusion :-
This novel is significant as the very first work to deal with sexual assault as a central issue in itself and to treat it with psychological realism – rather than use it as a symbol or signal of change in male government, as in the Roman story of the rape of Lucretia. Pamela consistently warns us of the abuse of power.
References :-
Basdeo, Stephen. “The Worst Novel I've Ever Read: Samuel Richardson's ‘Pamela’ (1740).” Reynolds's News and Miscellany, 28 June 2015, reynolds-news.com/2015/06/28/the-worst-novel-ive-ever-read-samuel-richardsons-pamela-1740/.
Blanchard, Jane. “Composing Purpose in Richardson’s ‘Pamela.’” South Atlantic Review, vol. 76, no. 2, 2011, pp. 93–107. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43050924. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022.
Doody, Margaret. “An Introduction to Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.” Discovering Literature: Restoration & 18th Century, 21 Jan. 2018, www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-pamela-or-virtue-rewarded.
Flint, Christopher. “The Anxiety of Affluence: Family and Class (Dis)Order in Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 29, no. 3, 1989, pp. 489–514. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/450652. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022.
Gwilliam, Tassie. “Pamela and the Duplicitous Body of Femininity.” Representations, no. 34, 1991, pp. 104–33. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2928772. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022.
Long. “English Literature by William J. Long.” Project Gutenberg, 1 Jan. 2004, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10609.
Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Analysis of Samuel Richardson's Novels.” Literary Theory and Criticism, 29 May 2019, literariness.org/2019/05/29/analysis-of-samuel-richardsons-novels/.
Needham, Gwendolyn B. “Richardson’s Characterization of Mr. B. and Double Purpose in Pamela.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, 1970, pp. 433–74. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2737862. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022.
Wills, Matthew. “Why the First Novel Created Such a Stir - JSTOR DAILY.” Why the First Novel Created Such a Stir, 11 Jan. 2018, daily.jstor.org/why-the-first-novel-created-such-a-stir/.
Zhang, Nija, and Yanhong Fan. “An Analysis on the Psyche of Richardson’s Pamela.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies , Feb. 2015, www.researchgate.net.
Word Count :- 3174
Images :- 2
References :- 10
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