'Pamela' as an epistolory novel

by hiralbpandya (student)

Introduction

The reason why I chose this topic is that during the second year we had it as part as our acquaintances and it was at that time that I had gone through its summary. I loved reading it and wished to know more about it in detail. Thus, when I came across it as a part our syllabus in M.A., I readily took it up as my research topic, as it was not just the novel but the form of the novel as well that particularly interested me. Because epistolary novel is something which I had come across once but was not completely well-acquainted with it. And here was the chance for me to not only read novel but be well aware of it by studying it in a context of its form as well.

So now that I have mentioned the term “Epistolary” and its relation to the novel, I would be starting with an explanation of the epistolary novel form so as to make it easy to be able to relate it to the novel Pamela.

However, in order to understand the term epistolary novel per se, it is essential for us to understand what a “novel” itself is.

The shorter oxford dictionary defines it as,

“A fictitious prose narrative of considerable length in which characters and actions representative of real life are portrayed in plot of more or less complexities.”

And it was until eighteenth century that people began to read and write the sorts of books that we now call novels. And significantly the history of the English novel is said to have started in 1740 with the publication of Richardson’s Pamela.

There are various types of novels that have evolved over the ages like

Types of Novels

Adventure Novel

Allegorical Novel

Autobiographical Novel

Children's Novel

Christian Novel

Detective Novel

Mystery Novel

Dystopian Novel

Epistolary Novel

Erotic Novel

Fantasy Novel

Gothic Novel

Graphic Novel

Historical Novel

Multicultural Novel

Novella

Pastoral Novel

Picaresque Novel

Postmodern Novel.

Psychological Novel

Regional Novel

Romance Novel

Science Fiction

Sentimental Novel

Spy Novel

Utopian Novel

Western Novel

Thriller Novel

The Epistolary novel

The word epistolary novel comes from the Latin word epistola, meaning a letter. An epistolary novel is a genre of fiction, which gained popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is a form in which most of entire plot is advanced by the letters or journal entries of one or more of its characters.

Epistolary fiction is said to have started in the ancient roman times, but the epistolary novel as a distinct genre first gained prominence in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century in Britain. Aphra Behn in Britain and Charles Louis de Montesquieu in France produced works of fiction told through the medium of letters, but many scholars still regard Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) to be the first example of the epistolary novel—and indeed the first mature novel to be written in English. Richardson’s ground-breaking work is marked by a consistent and well-structured characterization, plot and theme that had been missing in the earlier efforts of fiction. The psychological dimension was added by Richardson. His ‘Pamela’ and ‘Clarissa’ are written in epistolary form and dramatic narrative. The epistolary novel enjoyed its greatest popularity in England and France from the mid-1700s to the end of the century, a time when literacy was on the increase and the public sought literary works with more depictions of ordinary experience and greater psychological realism than were found in the old heroic romances. The epistolary novel, being based on subjective points of view, by its very nature, it offers intimate insight into characters’ thoughts and feelings without interference of the author and advances the plot with dramatic immediacy. Generally, epics, novels were written on issues related to morality and were sentimental in nature.

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Female characters in the novel often battle with sexual temptation and moral appropriateness and they realise that the only way to express them honestly and thoroughly is by disclosing their lives to secret friend through letters. Many critics in Richardson's day regarded the letters he wrote in the voices of his female protagonists to be the finest expression of feminine concerns and sensibilities of the period. Genuine female voices are also to be found in the some of the most popular and best-known epistolary novels of the eighteenth century. Mary Davys, one of the first women to support herself through her writing, produced several epistolary works, including The Reform'd Coquet: or Memoirs of Amoranda (1724), which tells of the “taming” of Amoranda, a good but flighty young woman, and Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady (1725), a satire about politics and women's place in society. Fanny Burney's Evelina: or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778) is a novel of manners that explores a young, innocent woman's entrance into society. Marie-Jeanne Riccobini's highly successful Les Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757), an exchange of letters between a simple young Englishwoman and her aristocratic lover, makes clear the division between private and public spheres that were a feature of women's social reality in the eighteenth century. Many women writers of the period in their novels point out women's exclusion from public matters, and often their female characters seek to transcend social barriers by making their own autonomous decisions. While women novelists were certainly read during the eighteenth century, the bias prevailed that serious literary work was conducted by men. The acknowledged great British epistolary novelists of the period included Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollet. And the fact that the important and well-respected novelist Tobias Smolett, who had already achieved fame with narrative fiction, turned to the epistolary form with The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) indicates the popularity of the genre in England in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

Fiction told through the medium of letters was also popular on the European continent, and by the mid-sixteenth century in Spain and Italy letters were often used to tell stories of the trials of illicit and prohibited love. Over the next 150 years, letter-writing became increasingly popular in travel books, news stories, and published personal correspondences. These novels, like their English counterparts, are redolent with sentimental romance and melodrama, and a great deal of attention is paid to questions of morality. Several popular but little-remembered epistolary novels appeared in the United States at the end of the century, just as the greatest vogue of the genre was past in Europe and Britain. As the century drew to a close the novel letter as a form had fallen into disfavour, as readers and writers of popular fiction increasingly turned to Gothic romances, and serious novelists, too, adopted the more straightforward narrative form.

Thus an epistolary novel is written as a series of documents. The letters, however, diaries, newspaper clippings and other documents are also sometimes used. The epistolary form can add greater realism to the story, because it reproduces the workings of real life. Therefore, it is able to demonstrate different points of view without any support of an omniscient narrator.

Pamela: An Epistolary Novel

Richardson has enjoyed a career of successful printer, and was asked to compose guide to letter writing. He worked around central theme and the result was his moral novel Pamela or Virtue Rewarded the story of servant girls’ victorious struggle against her masters’ attempts to seduce her. The work was a never attempted effort so far yet it turned out to be a popular and critical success and gave result to dozens of imitations.

According to, The Oxford Dictionary, the term epistolary means,

“Contained in letters; of the nature of letters; carried on by letters”

And Richards Pamela to a large extent exemplifies this definition. The letters’ use, physical form and properties allows for different plot twists and values which is very much reflected in the characters, especially female characters. In-fact, the very act of writing letters and reading provides entertainment and drama within the text of Pamela. Pamela refuses Mr. B’s advancing and thus possessing and reading Pamela’s letters becomes a substitute for possessing Pamela’s physical body. The relationship between two objects emphasized when Mr. B searches Pamela’s body for her letters:

“For I will see these papers but, perhaps… they are tied about your knees with your graters.” (Pamela, 87).

Favret states that Pamela not only represents male and female relationships but the letter is also feminized because it is so private and domestic. The private self exposed within a letter is now available for consumption, either by those whom the letter is addressed to, or others who waylay it. Just as Pamela is isolated in Mr. B’s country manor, Favret states that other women in the eighteenth century were often alone separated from the larger society and other women. This left letter writing as a crucial form of correspondence and strongly identified with the domestic and feminine sphere.

In the eighteenth century, letters were not only used for personal correspondence and as a form of the novel, but also as a way to provide lessons of conduct for women. Often, these manuals were written by men on the proper behavior of women; this relationship emphasizes the “subjection to regulation” letters are under (Watson 69). Watson asks who has the power to write, edit and publish letters, especially when the subject matter pertains to the education of women. Within Richardson’s novel, Pamela receives moral advice from her father in letter form:

“It may be presumptuous to trust too much to your own strength…the devil may put it into his head to use some stratagem…to decoy you.” (Pamela, 27).

By writing an epistolary novel, Richardson not only conveys conservative judgments on the roles of women and their symbolic and literal regulation by men. Richardson is able, through the form of his epistolary novels, to write “to the moment” (Favret 149). This allows for a great amount of detail, both of extraordinary events and everyday happenings. When reading a novel composed of letters, one may also feel that he/she is privy to the true musings of a character’s heart, a sentimental value useful for both selling novels and conveying moral values.

The epistolary novel was a popular form in the eighteenth century, this contributed to both the feminization of the novel as a whole and the positive moral consequences arising from reading such a text.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Epistolary Writing

In Pamela, the central character reveals in her journal and letters the intimate details of her everyday life in language that is simple, straightforward, and conversational. This approach makes the novel easy to read and understand. Moreover, it creates closeness with the reader, as if he or she were the recipient of the letters or the reader of the journal. There are obvious drawbacks to epistolary narration, however. As in other first-person accounts, the narrator cannot enter the minds of other characters (as in third-person omniscient narration). In addition, the narrator must be present for all the action or report it in accounts she receives secondhand. Finally, since the narrator writer her letters or journal entries after an event, the storytelling loses at least some of its air of immediacy. Nevertheless, Richardson's approach was popular with readers, and the novel sold out quickly.

Criticism

Samuel Richardson's Pamela provides a fundamental account of a servant girl who throughout her ability to uphold her virtue eventually marries her Master. The novel describes "virtue" in an 18th century manner that is foreign to our times. Pamela Andrews is a young maidservant in a rich household. The son of the household visualizes a passion for her and frequently schemes with his servants to take her virtue.

“Pamela fleshes out the emaciated narrative structure outlined in Familiar Letters into a multifaceted as well as intriguing two-.volume epistolary novel.”

(Doody, 75)

It is presented as authentic over which the unidentified Richardson acts as editor, in which the young servant’s experiments at the hands of her master Mr. B. are interrelated. Even as countless early eighteenth-century romances had centered on a central seduction narrative, Richardson claimed a more eminent literary as well as moral design for Pamela. He claimed in the introduction that though the novel would “Divert and Entertain”, it would also “Instruct, and Improve the Minds of the Youth of both Sexes”. AS THE NOVEL’S SUBTITLE SUGGESTS, BY THE END OF THE NARRATIVE VIRTUE IS REWARDED AS PAMELA’S BEHAVIOR AND CHARACTER WIN OVER MR. B. IN ADDITION TO THE COUPLE MARRY.

Pamela is concerning the rights of women. Furthermore not just middle to upper class women, although the lower class women that Pamela corresponds to. She calmly portrays a strong individual that is all about her honesty as well as virtue the only things that she can hold onto. These traits are the just thing that Mr. B cannot take away from her attempt as he might. This is said so because throughout most of her life in the novel, she is constantly threaten with rape.

The novel follows Pamela all the way through her trials and troubles. Pamela as a representation of the humiliating and the low seeing in the story of a servant girl "climbing the ladder" of social class a critical 'leveling' of propensity.

“Pamela has had important collision on the novel as a literary genre, as an research in epistolary form, as a study of ethics, human in addition to particularly women's psychology, along with as a case of early concession between literature as education and literature as leisure.” (Eagleton, 52)

It would be hard to overstate the significance of Pamela. Mr. B.'s wrestles with his gloominess tendencies as well as his forceful persuasion to possess a girl from a lower social class. Pamela also served as a replica for countless later images of women whose power of character can be boiled down to their aptitude to bear by means of an intolerable husband as well as make themselves helpful by their good deeds. Such women became a stock kind of Victorian narrative, particularly in novels by women. Pamela's individuality thus makes available a pattern of behavior that was to be extremely unfavorable to the personal accomplishment of several generations of women.

Pamela is rewarded in the end of the novel for her loyalty to her virtue. Pamela had control or the capability to promote from her relationship with Mr. B. “Pamela” begins with less of female power, her employer i.e. Mr. B’s mother and it ends with her empowerment as a spokesperson in relation to male authority as Richardson portrays the expansion to selfhood understandingly and celebrates the individuality of Pamela, he however suggests strongly that the good wife is in lots of ways the good servant. He raises the query of Pamela's selfhood, as do numerous other authors. He acknowledges several growths, but places it back in a controlled social order that has all the control, giving Pamela none. This then show the way to the third locale of consideration: that of women's prejudice in addition to what role the novel has played in crucial women in the eighteenth-century and into the twentieth-century. This procedure is complicated by a novel such as Pamela for the reason that while it has a female heroine who is under pressure to remain virtuous in a male subjugated society,

“It is in fact written by a man who benefits from the male-centered power configuration.”(Eaves and Kimpel, 53)

Richardson has created Pamela as a virtuous character whose remains and essence move as one and that to refute the body unavoidably diminishes female authority. One instance from the novel that she cites is when Mr. B refuses to permit Pamela to breastfeed. By asserting power over her body, Mr. B is attempting to be in charge of her. Whereas Pamela in the first level has opposed Mr. B's patriarchal influence by means of a claim for her independent worth that relied on the closure of gender as well as class hierarchies, she draws her power from him. His figure as a model husband proves her brilliance as a wife and thus her proficiency as an advisor in domestic matters.

“Pamela's focuses on domain as proof of the heroine’s character, the property that that in cooperation confirms her philosophy of selfhood as well as serves as a material illustration of her inner worth”. (Flint, 489 – 513).

Pamela’s only virtue that she has is her rich standards and her morality as well as moral character for instance; it has been examining that Pamela's virtue in its reference to being a "jewel." Once described as such in the text, Pamela's virtue becomes co customized and is placed into the circumstance of the world of exchange. Pamela represents different forms of property the customs she is used for exchange.

Mr. B's morals are doubtful based on his actions towards Pamela, moral power is the most famous characteristic of Goodman Andrews as well as his wife, Pamela's poor parents. Just as Pamela is caught flanked by class distinctions, she is poor however is favored by her late Mistress and therefore has skills along with clothes above her station, she is as well caught between the moral boundaries of Mr. B and her parents. However Pamela strives to be virtuous, her craving for Mr. B is exposed in the end to the grief of her parents.

Pamela is in the end transferred as of her parents to Mr. B, however she has exercised a great deal of power in this transfer. She has maintained her virtue as well as used her so-called power to assent and refute at various times in the novel. Thus, modesty, manners, the power and failings of emotions remain Richardson’s unchanging themes throughout the novel.