We frame our question differently at different times. But it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest of a sigh—Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? With the different perspectives associated with the novel, the definition as it emerged in the 18th century included many facets. Different definitions of the novel include: an imaginative re-creation of reality, a history, a scary conveyor of truth that demanded scrutiny, a biography, a harmless amusement, a travel narrative, a romance, a tale of spiritual journey.
Despite the contradictions that exist within these varying perspectives on the 18th century novel, several key features among them can be picked out as components of the novel as a new textual medium. Contamporaneity became a common theme within the novels, writers were more inclined to show the life of the present day versus life as it was in the past.
Characters and events were made to be believable, as if to mirror the people and events in the every day world of the time, lending the novels credibility. Characters within the stories were presented in a manner similar in social rank to the people reading the novels, not as kings or queens; this afforded a level of familiarity with the readers.
With familiarity, readers were able to identify and empathize with characters in the novel. Writers also began to reject traditional plot types; stereotypical plots such as those found in earlier aristocratic stories were avoided.
Instead, writers paid greater attention to self-consciousness and the process of thought. As a result, stories reflected more of their individualism and subjectivity. They were engaging ideologies and composed with a guiding design that created presiding themes.
On occasion novels would digress, but in a way that operated under the pattern and design guiding the plot. Why was the novel scary? First, it demanded scrutiny; it appeared to look into the very reality of the reader himself. Secondly, it conveyed a scale of truth. Whose truth was conveyed?
Ultimately, with its variety of definitions and various features, the novel emerged as a literary form about people and experiences familiar and to its readers.
In the 21st century, where the novel is quite possible the most popular form of literature, it is hard for one to believe that its form is relatively novel for the world. Before discussing the novel itself, it is important to examine its evolution.
A more sophisticated model of virtue than Pamela, Clarissa is philosophical in an old-fashioned sense, teasing out maxims about human nature from everyday observation.
For her, morality begins with the attempt to remove the taint of self-interest from her judgments. For is not this to suppose myself ever in the right; and all who do not act as I would have them act, perpetually in the wrong? She denies it, but, from Johnson on, the critical consensus has mostly held that she is lying to herself.
I confess I tend to part ways with Johnson et al. Still, she winds up doing exactly what the Harlowes most dread. Afraid that they will force her to marry Solmes and manipulated by a less than wholly truthful Lovelace, she panics and runs off with her dashing admirer. Here the novel takes a turn. Clarissa and Lovelace seem at first to be, like Pamela and Mr. B, a familiar if well-rendered example of a virtuous woman and a marriage-resistant playboy, but their fully elaborated inner worlds begin to transform them into beings far more ambiguous.
Clarissa vacillates between attraction to and moral revulsion toward Lovelace, who is as slippery a character as fiction has produced.
Of his designs, Clarissa knows less than the reader—who has access to his letters to Belford—but she picks up on things all the same. She writes to Anna:. He says too many fine things of me, and to me.
True respect, true value, I think lies not in words. The silent awe, the humble, the doubting eye, and even the hesitating voice, better shew it. The man indeed at times is all upon the ecstatic; one of his phrases. But, to my shame and confusion, I must say, that I know too well to what to attribute his transports. Some critics condemned Pamela as a representation of the undignified and the low, seeing in the story of a servant girl "climbing the ladder" of social class, a pernicious 'levelling' tendency.
Pamela has had significant impact on the novel as a literary genre, as an experiment in epistolary form, as a study of ethics, human and particularly women's psychology, and as a case of early negotiation between literature as education and literature as entertainment.
Samuel Richardson, the author of the novel, spends a lot of breath at the beginning of the novel trying to convince the readers that Pamela is based on a true story. The connection between truth and literature was meant to persuade the readers that the moral of Pamela's character's story is "real," and therefore an efficient tool of ethical edification of young women, who were at the time devouring all kinds of prose, regardless of its moral turpitude.
By the standards of polite society, Samuel Richardson was scarcely better off socially than his narrating heroine. Richardson , son of a respectable working-class man, had a little schooling and always loved reading. However, by the standards of his contemporaries he was not an educated man he had no knowledge of Latin and Greek , and he was certainly not a gentleman. In Rivington and Osborne, booksellers, asked him to produce a little book of sample letters, a known sort of helper-book at the time, which provided models of business and personal correspondence to assist the semi-literate.
The 'letter-writer' had been a minor genre of popular literature for over a century, and it was customary for their authors to indulge in a certain amount of character-drawing and humor, especially in capturing the speech of the country folk and the working classes. Richardson became unexpectedly fascinated by his new project, and a small sequence of letters from a daughter in service of a young and sexually aggressive gentleman, asking her father's advice when she is threatened by her master's advances, became the germ of Pamela.
Familiar Letters on Important Occasions was put aside until the novel was finished. Fiction by Women. The novel is split into two parts or volumes. The author begins the novel with thirty-two letters. Sadly, after Pamela is forbidden to write her parents, she begins a journal, detailing her activities and persecutions. The letters and journal Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded study guide contains a biography of Samuel Richardson, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded essays are academic essays for citation.
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