Cοurse paper Theme: Henry Fielding parodies on Samuel Richardson's novels

II.2. Analysis of "Shamella" novel.
An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews by Henry Fielding is an insightful and rather high-quality parody of Samuel Richardson’s popular epistolary novel Pamela (1740). Shamela was published on two April 1741, less than 5 months after the first edition of Pamela had regarded and three weeks after the third version used to be released. Fielding’s well-timed textual content used to be highly topical, a thing which contributed drastically to its success.At the heart of Fielding’s parody used to be the improbable trajectory of Richardson’s Pamela, in which Pamela’s terror at Mr B’s advances is hastily converted into love when he proposes marriage. Shamela exposes the unreliability of Pamela’s account of events. Instead of portraying Pamela as a martyr to virtue, Fielding creates an choice narrative which casts Pamela, or Shamela as she is now known, as a shameless gold-digger organized to exchange her feigned innocence for wealth and an accelerated social position:... nothing under a regular taking into keeping, a settled Settlement, for me, and all my Heirs, all my whole Lifetime, shall do the Business – or else crosslegged, is the Word. (p. 15) Not only does Shamela satirise the story of Pamela; it also pokes exciting at the self-aggrandising letters of suggestion that Richardson covered at the start of his second edition: Happy would it be for mankind, if all other books were burnt, that we might do nothing but read thee [Pamela] all Day, and dream of thee all Night. Thou alone art sufficient to teach us as much Morality as we want. (p. 3). This ironic praise for Richardson’s Pamela appears in the introduction to Shamela, in a letter written from the fictional Parson Tickletext to Parson Oliver, the apparent editor of Shamela. Tickletext’s enthusiastic yet blasphemous and ironically sexualised enjoyment of the novel was indicative of the ‘epidemical Phrenzy’ (p. 4) with which Pamela was received in mid 18th-century society. Parson Oliver soon rebukes Tickletext by asserting that ‘the whole Narrative is such a Misinterpretation of Facts, such a Perversion of Truth’ (p. 7).Fielding also lampoons Richardson’s ‘to the moment’ epistolary style by highlighting the absurdity of using a first person narrative in a letter format to describe events as they unfold:Odsbobs! I hear him just coming in at the Door. You see I write in the present Tense, as parson Williams says. Well, he is in Bed between us, we both shamming a Sleep, he steals his hand into my Bosom, which I, as if in my Sleep, press close to me with mine, and then pretend to awake. (p. 15).(1).Whenever a new literary form appears on the scene, there are two most important approaches in which it can try to legitimate itself. Either it can point to its very newness as the supply of its value, or it can enchantment to tradition. It can declare excitedly that the world has not considered the likes of it before; or it can define what it is doing as a variation on already well-established procedures, for this reason hijacking some of the authority of the past for its own purposes. In the case of the novel, the very identify of the genre suggests that it is its newness which is its most striking feature. Samuel Richardson is proudly aware that he has invented a new species of writing—one which, as he remarks in his preface to Clarissa, is ‘to the moment’, recording ride as it absolutely takes place like a news photographer’s camera. In Book two of Tom Jones, Henry Fielding likewise describes himself as ‘the founder of a new province of writing’, and goes on to factor out with mock self-satisfaction what freedom this confers on him: ‘so I am at liberty to make what legal guidelines I please therein’. The image is a political one, resonant of Crusoe on his island. Fielding is the governor of a newly established domain, and as a kind of absolutist monarch can make up the policies as he goes along. He is, to be sure, a benevolent type of dictator: he will, so he promises us in Tom Jones, mercifully spare his subjects/readers the more tedious bits of his narrative by the fundamental gadget of missing them out. Those readers who pass by the boring bits of novels will get on famously with Fielding, due to the fact he saves them the hassle by means of doing it for them. Yet even though he is paternally worried about the welfare of his subject-readers, often arresting the narrative of his novels to test out how they are doing, he remains firmly, if good-humouredly, in control. One of the quite a few components of Richardson’s fiction which Fielding finds distasteful, and which he sends up in Shamela, his hilarious spoof of Richardon’s Pamela, is the reality that a supposed innocent like Pamela is fairly obviously working for her very own elevation, even if solely unconsciously. Chastity for Pamela really skill that she will solely exchange in her virginity to the best possible bidder. Fielding rejects what he sees as the middle-class utilitarian view that advantage will convey you worldly epistolary. (2). Goodness have to no longer be just another form of self-interest. It ought to be entirely for its personal sake. The notion that advantage is the certain avenue to happiness, he writes in a delightful sentence in Tom Jones, is ‘a very healthy and satisfied doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, particularly that it is not true’. Virtue, then, has to be its very own reward, since it is unlikely to win any other in a society as shabby as this. If Tom Jones have been actual life, Tom would no doubt have ended up hanged and Blifil might have turn out to be prime minister. He is honestly unsavoury adequate for the job. It is only because they are in a novel that these characters can acquire their simply deserts.Signs, despite Richardson’s intentions, do now not succeed in nailing down reality. Language is a sort of supplement or addition to reality; yet with the ‘non-event’ of the rape, it is almost as although the physical is only a variety of supplement to writing. After being raped, Clarissa extra than once refers to her own body as ‘nothing’; and although this might also nicely register guilt and self-loathing, it need to be taken collectively with her assertion ‘I am nobody’s’, which rebuffs all patriarchal claims over her person. The violated body of Clarissa slips thru the internet of writing. The rape, so to speak, is the Real which resists representation. Indeed, one mildly fanciful critic has questioned whether it ever befell at all. (3).On the one hand, letters are intimate revelations of the private self, torn from the individual’s internal depths still dripping with emotion. Letters in Richardson are residues of the body: they come damp with tears, blotted with sweat or creased in haste or rage.Yet they also mark the factor at which that personal sphere borders on a public regime of power, property and patriarchy. In the letter, intimacy and political intrigue merge into one. It is as a consequence now not surprising that letters emerge as a variety of metaphor of sexuality itself, even if the real physique is necessarily absent from them. Pamela wears her text round her waist, and Mr B. threatens to strip her to discover it; and the libertine Lovelace is a literary voyeur who swears that ‘I shall never rest until I have observed where the dear creature puts her letters’. In fact, he will never find out ‘where the dear creature puts her letters’, in no way lay naked the sources of her subjectivity.The truth that an unprotected maidservant wishes to preserve a cautious eye on her virginity makes such innocence impossible. Pamela does indeed make a fetish of her chastity, but it is the culture of patriarchy which is subsequently responsible for this. She is pressured to deal with herself as a sexual object in order to keep away from being treated as one via others. She is ‘pert’ and devious, with a speedy strategic eye to her own interests; however her ‘sauce’ and impudence are amongst different things a spirited defiance of upper-class authority. We are allowed to see that Pamela may properly be ‘unconsciously scheming’, as William Empson put it, (4).however that she additionally desires to seem to be sharp for herself. Besides, in a hanging innovation, the lively, racy language in which she expresses herself is the speech of the common people, positioned here at the centre oThe truth that an unprotected maidservant wishes to preserve a cautious eye on her virginity makes such innocence impossible. Pamela does indeed make a fetish of her chastity, but it is the culture of patriarchy which is subsequently responsible for this. She is pressured to deal with herself as a sexual object in order to keep away from being treated as one via others. She is ‘pert’ and devious, with a speedy strategic eye to her own interests; however her ‘sauce’ and impudence are amongst different things a spirited defiance of upper-class authority. We are allowed to see that Pamela may properly be ‘unconsciously scheming’, as William Empson put it, (5).] however that she additionally desires to seem to be sharp for herself. Besides, in a hanging innovation, the lively, racy language in which she expresses herself is the speech of the common people, positioned here at the centre of ‘polite letters’ almost for the first time. We have heard some thing of this idiom in Defoe, however with a whole lot less spice and texture f ‘polite letters’ almost for the first time. We have heard some thing of this idiom in Defoe, however with a whole lot less spice and texture.Clarissa represents an marvelous act of rebellion in opposition to the entire social system—patriarchy, upperclass licence, middle-class individualism—on the part of a solitary young woman whom that system has hounded to death. The critic Ian Watt feedback that Clarissa ‘dies rather than recognise the flesh’, (6)] however the reality is that she dies because she acknowledges it solely too well. What makes this act of absolute refusal even extra strong is the fact that the female who performs it is no revolutionary however a dutiful servant of the lifestyle which destroys her. Deliberately withdrawing her physique from circulation, Clarissa succeeds, Samson-like, in confounding her enemies, bringing them low with the aid of her personal self-immolation. She is a forerunner of those Henry James heroines who vanquish by turning their faces to the wall. Closing his ears to the clamours of these readers who begged him to let his heroine live, Richardson knew that realism demanded that she die. On the other hand, he thinking them excellent for nothing if they left out their home duties, and denied that they ought to be impartial of their husbands. As often takes place with writers, the creative truth of his novel surpassed his own real-life beliefs. Many critics have spoke back to his heroine through defaming her. Clarissa has been pilloried as morbid, naive, narcissistic, self-pitying, self-deluded, masochistic and—from a girl critic—‘a ripe temptation to violence’, (7) meaning that she deserves what she gets. Richardson himself has been simply as roughly handled. ‘His idea is so very vile a mind’, wrote Coleridge, ‘so oozy, so hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent’.