Pamela and Shamela are the books where the same character is portrayed in a radically different ways. I have chosen these two books for my final paper. My aim in the paper will be to convince you that Henry Fielding’s parody is more than an inversion of Pamela, it  is an exposure to Samuel Richardson’s use of unreliable language to show the realistic image of virtue.

 Pamela is a book written in an epistolary form where our protagonist is displayed as virtuous, young yet courageous. It is a widely popular story where a young maid falls victim of sexual harassment by her master who belongs to an upper social class. With the series of the epistles, she walks us through numerous innocent attempts of her that results not only in the successful transformations of an evil rich squire into a gentlemen but also a life of poor fifteen year old maid that ends with happily ever after. On the other hand, Shamela is although written in an epistolary form, however consists of letters from characters involved in and out of the story. The same girl Pamela by Samuel Richardson is unveiled as the exact opposite by Henry Fielding. Shamela is exposed as a crafty, cunning, unfaithful and wholly designing gold digger.

Henry Fielding is painting a picture of a young and so called virtuous servant whose resemblance to Pamela is slim to none. However, I think Fielding’s parody of Richardson’s Pamela is not what it seems in the public eye. It could be said that Henry Fielding is urging his readers to come to senses that the one deceiving the world isn’t Pamela but Samuel Richardson.

In Pamela, Richardson follows a technique where the heroine of the story writes letters in the present tense. This is Richardson’s style of “writing in the moment”. I will be using excerpts from Fielding’s Shamela to show the falsity in the idea of “writing to the moment” that Richardson follows . As Pamela is a collection of number of letters, it simply sugar-coats the vulgarity in the form of romance or disguises it without the use of an explicit language. I will be analyzing it deeper and interpreting the real meaning of it in the words as mentioned in Fielding’s Shamela. Moreover, taking characters just as it is from Pamela with slight changes in their names or persona such as Shamela instead of Pamela, Mr. Booby instead of Mr. B, old righteous mother of Pamela into conniving woman which is another way of Fielding’s stripping away the characters to help readers deal with the recognition problems.

Furthermore, Henry Fielding’s Shamela to me is a representation of erotic romance novel to some extent more than just a parody. I think it is Fielding’s striking way of bone picking with Richardson. The use of explicit language within the story and morally undermining Shamela as an anti-heroine invokes the idea of how strongly Fielding is disturbed by the unrealistic concept of virtue that Richardson has abused to fool his readers.