My final essay will try to unmask the true face of Pamela Andrews. The question that is continuously coming up to my mind is the following. Is Pamela Andrews truly virtuous or a convincing hypocrite?

Pamela regards her virtue very highly, but there are many understatements in her behavior when it comes to her relation with Mr. B. From one side as the title says virtue rewarded, reader could say that she is really a pure person without any sins, but then there is the other side when you take a closer look up that may seems that Pamela  is simply playing around and hiding her true personality. She seems to be really virtuous young woman that was thought very well about being righteous by her parents. Maybe church and what family will say are the most important and she values that the most. Then there is a question if she really just acted out virtuous and she wasn’t like that at all? Would she get to the place where she ended at the end of the book? Would she get married with Mr. B? If she was so easy at the beginning and let her master do whatever he wanted with her he might just get bored and live her alone. She would be just one of many mistresses that he’s ever had. So this is a topic that has to be closely analyzed.

The other book that will help me to analyze my problem is the publication of Shamela. After Pamela’s book came out, Henry Fielding published Shamela which was a parody of Richardson’s novel. Fielding believed that Pamela didn’t resist her master’s attempts because of fear, morals and virtue, but because she thought she might get more out of him if she’ll play hard to get.

In the end what’s the truth about Pamela? Is she a real example of virtuous young lady or is she just plotting a plan of seduction of the prince? Is she just a hypocrite? We’ll see the result after I’ll try to analyze each case separately.

“The Castle of Otranto” is the first Gothic novel that greatly creates sublime emotions for its readers. Warpole, already in his preface suggests that the story is filled with many unrealistic, supernatural elements. He demonstrated for a reader how regular person would act in this extremely extraordinary event and realistically believe that this unrealistic event was true. This behavior relates to astonishment. Edmund Burke describes astonishment in” A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful (1759)” as a “state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror”.

At the beginning of a novel, on the night of the wedding, horrible tragedy has happened. Conrad, Manfred’s son was being crushed to death by gigantic helmet covered with feathers. Servants were the first ones in the courtyard that spotted the whole incident. Their immediate reaction was horror and fear “The company were struck with terror and amazement” (28). They didn’t know what to say. They were horrified and stoned to death. Then they start screaming, crying “Oh! My lord! the prince! the prince! the helmet! the helmet!” (Warpole 28). The witnesses were paralyzed, somehow beguiled by the supernatural event. Manfred was captivated as well as the rest of viewers “his silence lasted longer than even grief could occasion (Warpole 28). He was speechless, stoned and enthralled. This supernatural event is linked to the part “Of the passion caused by the sublime” when Burke talked about astonishment.  All these people were “suspended”. I could picture this event when something that horrific has happened, that nobody could say a word. Their hearts climbed up to their throats that unable any words to come out. They experienced passion caused by the astonishment due to unusual situation.