For Monday: Richardson, Pamela, Letters 25-31(pp.60-98)

NOTE: As you're reading Pamela, carefully distinguish between what she's writing, and what she's transcribing from other conversations (it can be tricky, since it all runs together). Her letters contain three kinds of narrative: (a) her own thoughts, (b) remembered conversations with others, such as Mr. B and Mrs. Jervis, and (c) second-hand conversations told to her by someone else, which she is re-telling in her letter. The letters can make everything sound like absolute truth, but remember that there a few degrees of separation here, especially since she's writing the letters after the fact.

Answer two of the following:

Q1: Even in Richardson's day, there were many pioneering works of early feminism floating about, such as Mary Astell's work, Reflections Upon Marriage (1700), where she famously declared, "if all men are born free, how is that women are born slaves?" Do we hear any of this feminist sentiment in Pamela, or in the character and ideas of Pamela herself? How much of this novel is an indictment of the sufferings of lower-class women at the hands of powerful men?

Q2: How seriously are we supposed to take this work? Though the subject matter is certainly serious and Pamela is constantly in danger, is Richardson aiming for pathos, or bathos? Where might we find echoes of Chaucer and Shakespeare in some of the struggles between Pamela and Mr. B? (you might keep "The Miller's Tale" and "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in mind).

Q3: Do you feel that there's any truth to Mr. B's assertion that "with all her pretended Simplicty and Innocence, I never knew so much romantick Invention as she is Mistress of. In short, the Girl's Head turn'd by Romances, and such idle Stuff, which she has given herself up to, ever since her kind Lady's Death" (93)? Is she writing her own 'romance' through these letters, which Mr. B is a somewhat unwilling participant? Or is he just gaslighting her and her family throughout? 

Q4: After Pamela's verses in Letter 31, the "editor" briefly takes over the work, and introduces a rare letter from Mr. B himself. Why do you think Richardson disrupts the narrative scheme of Pamela's letters? Is it distracting to be suddenly torn away from her first-person perspective, especially since it quickly reverts back to it? Or does it serve a useful narrative purpose?