Started out pretty cute, became very predictable and cliche around the 40% mark. 13 year old me probably read this exact story on wattpad, including the odd cheating double standards: she cheated but it’s okay because she was hurt but when she is cheated on it’s treated like a genuine warcrime. Also, where tf did the SWAT team come from??

I have complicated feelings on this, so instead of writing a review, please enjoy the literary analysis I wrote for class on this book, which somehow got me a 100/100 score.

The Surveyed Individual: Private Correspondence with Expectation of Surveillance in Richardson’s Pamela

“[T]he cult of familiar letter-writing … provided Richardson with a microphone already attuned to the tones of private experience.” (Watt 192). With rising literacy rates, the increasing importance of the individual, and the practice of casual correspondence through letters, Ian Watt is not surprised about the success Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded experienced upon its publication in 1740. The narrative focus at the time had already been changing, a “reflection of a much larger change … the transition from the objective, social and public … to the subjective, individualist and private” (Watt 175). Watt lays heavy emphasis on the aspect of interest in the private life, reasoning that its epistolary form allows a much more personal look into the life and mind of the characters, Pamela in particular (174-176). Paradoxically, while allowing the readership such a deep and intimate view of Pamela’s life in form of her letters, it also adds a layer of censorship. Pamela writes with the knowledge that someone—mostly her parents—will read and evaluate her words. Instead of retelling the events or narrating in first person as they happen, Pamela, a 15-year-old girl, experiences them and then puts them to paper with the conscious knowledge that her parents will be reading them.

The framing of every letter Pamela sends includes a particular choice of words, which Pamela uses to construct the image she wants her parents to perceive her as. Every time she bids her parents farewell, she includes a descriptor of herself and her condition, usually strongly influenced by the events that are described in each respective letter. In her first few letters, Pamela refers to herself with variations of “Your most dutiful Daughter” (10), until she pivots with “Your sad-hearted Pamela” (19) and “Your most afflicted Daughter” (20). Changes in how she refers to herself especially occur when Pamela is trying to convince her parents of her words. At the end of Letter III, in which Pamela assures her parents of her unwavering virtue after they had proclaimed “a Grief that [they] could not bear” (12) at the thought of her losing her virtue, she signs with the promise, “Your dutiful Daughter till Death” (13). Not only is her signature intended to reassure her parents, but also to inform the readership of her resolute morals. Her framing of letters communicates to the reader—both her parents and the novel’s readership—her feelings about the developing situation instead of leaving them up for interpretation. Pamela gets ahead of any misconceptions by directly stating how she feels and by extension, how the reader should judge the events occurring.

Beyond the framing of letters, Pamela’s manner of recounting the events of the story also navigates the issue of relaying events without risking judgement. Watt argues that the conversational and almost convoluted style of narration in her letters can serve to involve the reader in the creative process, forcing them to become active participants in picking out the important details from a slew of information (192). However, Pamela’s narration does emphasize important events already. She marks highly emotional and important events with emotional exclamations, such as “Oh!” (11) “alas!” (29), and also whole sentences, like “O how I was sham’d!” (10). Such exclamations usually occur when expressing her outrage or shock and emulate the style of speaking rather than written word. They mark a reaction she would have had in the moment but not necessarily while writing. Still, they are added to highlight not just the event itself but also her negative reaction. Throughout the novel, the words chosen by Pamela consistently work to negate her own involvement in any situation which might have compromised her parents’ image of her. As such, she describes that Mr. B “by Force kissed [her] Neck and Lips” (29) and adds immediate explanations to actions which may have otherwise compromised her virtue: “[he] kissed me (much against my Will; for his very Breath was now Poison to me!)” (81). In every letter, Pamela can tell her parents about all that has happened in detail, without leaving any room for speculation through denial within the same breath.

It is the existence of those same letters, which Watt attributes with so much importance, that adds another layer to the filter Pamela places on her own words. While the relationship between Pamela and her parents may be one important aspect in how she constructs her language, another is the constant threat of her letters getting into the hands of someone else. In the very first letter, Pamela describes how she attempted to hide a letter in her bodice from Mr. B, but he retrieved and read it anyway (10). Through the attempt of secrecy, the act of writing letters is linked with the private and personal from the very beginning, while the act of retrieving it physically from her chest is thus linked with voyeuristic violation of the mind but also the body. From the beginning, the possibility of her letters being discovered and used against her is established. Only during her imprisonment, Pamela learns that Mr. B had been reading her letters before sending them to her parents all along (110). Although Pamela did not expect this invasion of her privacy and experiences shock at the revelation, to a reader familiar with storytelling techniques, surveillance might have been an inevitable event after it was openly shown to be a possibility. Richardson has constructed a dynamic in which the narrator is aware that she is narrating her own story and constructs it fitting to the intended in-text audience; her parents. This sacred and almost isolated narration becomes part of the story, however, when the established arrangement is revealed to have been broken by Mr. B’s overreach. Pamela may have been constructing her language in a certain way, thus having control over the narrative to some degree, but the reveal that all along she had another reader, Mr. B, whom she did not account for in her writing, is once again a violation of her mind and body.

The importance of the letters transcends the mere epistolary form in Pamela, as they add another dimension to the construction of story, character, and language. Pamela’s letters are written with a purpose in mind: to inform her parents about the events unfolding. However, this complicates the trustworthiness of her account. The readership not only has to reflect on the events themselves but is also forced to consider the dynamic between Pamela and her parents, which influences the way in which she constructs her recollection. Additionally, Mr. B’s transgressiveness gains a new dimension as he is revealed to have been a voyeur of her thoughts and feelings all along. But the relationship benefiting the most from observing how Pamela constructs herself while navigating privacy and self-construction, is the relationship between Pamela and Richardson himself. Richardson and Pamela, as author and narrator respectively, pursue the same goal with the choice of words, which is to relay the events unfolding in the story without allowing blame for any improprieties to befall Pamela. Even though Pamela is unaware of Mr. B’s role of voyeur, Richardson is not. He ensures that Pamela’s narrative, when read by her parents, Mr. B, and the readership respectively, will not compromise her virtue and truthfulness. Under consideration of this aspect, every line and paragraph gives indication for how Richardson intended Pamela to be read and perceived. At the same time, it also places the readership in the rule of voyeuristic observer, as Richardson allows a deep look into not just Pamela’s letters but also her journal. Similarly to Mr. B, the reader becomes an observer Pamela did not account for as Richardson constructs her private life for consumption and ensures that Pamela’s virtue is not compromised to any of the intended and unintended readers of her correspondence.

Works Cited Primary Literature Richardson, Samuel (1740). Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded. Edited by Albert J. Rivero. Cambridge University Press, 2011. Secondary Literature Watt, Ian (1957). The Rise of The Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. The Bodley Head, 2015.

Thank you for your attention.