Assignment Paper 102
This blog is part of assignment of Paper 102: Literature of the Neo-Classical Period.
Table of Contens:
Personal Information
Assignment Details ;
● Introduction
● What is Epistolary Form?
● Brief Introduction of Samuel Richardson
●" Pamela " : As an Epistolary Novel:
● Conclusion
■ Personal Information:
Name : Nishtha Desai
Batch: M.A Sem 1 ( 2024-26)
Enrollment number: 5108240024
E- mail Address:
nishthadesai355@gmail.com
Roll number: 23
Assignment Details:
Topic: "Pamela " : As an Epistolary Novel
Paper & Subject code: Paper 102 : Literature of the Neo-Classical Period
Submitted to: SMT. Department of English, Bhavnagar
Date of Submission: 20 November,2024
■ Introduction:
The evolution of the novel happened over a period of centuries before it took the form we witness today. There have been several landmark contributions to the development of storytelling all over the world. One book, however, which remains ground-breaking in various aspects is Pamela. Written by Samuel Richardson, Pamela is widely regarded as one of the earliest novels in the English language. The author himself was one of the greatest ones in the 18th Century. The novel is also arguably the first novel to introduce Epistolary as a style of fiction writing.
Samuel Richardson was born on 19th August 1689, in Mackworth, Derbyshire, England. Along with Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Lawrence Stern, Richardson was of the best authors of the 18th Century. It was an era that revolutionized the art of storytelling and introduced various genres and styles of writing. Richardson was an established printer and publisher and printed almost 500 different works in his lifetime. These include novels, journals, magazines, and more. His notable works, Pamela, Clarissa, and The History of Sir Charles Grandison are the epitome of Epistolary novels.
■ Brief Biography of Samuel Richardson:
Richardson got his education at Christ’s Hospital grammar school. However, from an early age, he confessed that he had a penchant for letter writing. In fact, Richardson himself admitted that helping people in his community write letters of correspondence for various purposes was one of his most favourite things to do.
Unlike his contemporaries, Richardson did not belong to the higher class of clergy or nobles. Instead, he came from the working class, and this was quite apparent in his writing. He was aware of the social evils present in society, like class discrimination, and the exploitation of the underprivileged at the hands of those belonging to the upper class. In his novels, Richardson tries to depict the problems and usually provides solutions to them, an approach that was quite unique during the period.Samuel Richardson passed away on 04th July 1761, in London, England.
■ What is an Epistolary Novel:
Epistolary literally means ‘in the form of letters’, which is exactly what a novel of this style is. It is a novel written in the form of letters, written from the perspective of one person, or multiple persons. As per the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
"Epistolary novel, a novel told through the medium of letters written by one or more of the characters. Originating with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), the story of a servant girl’s victorious struggle against her master’s attempts to seduce her, it was one of the earliest forms of the novel to be developed and remained one of the most popular up to the 19th century. The epistolary novel’s reliance on subjective points of view makes it the forerunner of the modern psychological novel.”
An epistolary novel is one of the most effective styles in creating deep characters. Letters let the author portray first-hand feelings of a person. This helps the readers to understand the emotional state of the character and the reason behind suffering or happiness. The work of the 20th Century, “The Diary of a Young Girl”, by Anne Frank, is epistolary stylistically.
Other famous works besides Richardson’s Pamela include:
"Fanny Hill" by John Cleland (1748)
"Poor Folk "by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1846)
"Dracula "by Bram Stoker (1897)
"The History of Eliza Wharton" by Hannah Webster Foster (1797)
"Clarissa "by Samuel Richardson (1749)
■ Analyzing Pamela as an Epistolary Novel:
The novel comprises seven volumes of letters of conversations Pamela has with her parents and others. There are 32 letters in the novel.This makes Pamela a purely epistolary novel, and in fact, it is the first original English novel belonging to this type of writing. In her initial letters written to her parents, she describes her state working for the mistress, the knight’s mother, and describes that she is quite happy. When the mistress passes away, Pamela shows her concerns in the subsequent letters, as she would have to go back to her parent’s village and live life in poverty again. When the knight informs the servants that he won’t terminate any of them, she expresses her joy and relief.
● Progressively Intense:
As the story progresses, her letters become more and more intense. With each letter, one comes to know more and more about the characters, especially Pamela. Her feelings, her dilemma, her desire for a financially stable life, her determination to protect her modesty, etc., all her feelings grip the reader, and being letters it come straight out of the horse’s mouth.
● A multiple conversation of Pamela:
The novel also shows multiple conversations Pamela has, like with her parents, and with the man in the unknown town. In fact, with the latter, Pamela exchanged letters by hiding them in sunflower fields, as the meeting wasn’t a possibility. Each conversation gives an insight into her character from a different perspective, which is essentially an important characteristic of an epistolary novel.
■ The letters of Pamela in new city:
Even when Pamela suffers through her worst times in the unknown town, she continues to write letters to her parents, though they never reach them. Somewhere deep inside, by the end of the novel, one realizes the hidden desire she had for the knight, and the only thing that kept her from submitting to his demands was her wish to become a wife rather than a mistress. Subtly hidden throughout the letters, her desire to break from the lower class, and rise up to the higher ones was always there, though not intentionally.
● About the text Pamela:
The length of the text is too large, and the premise of the story is too common and predictable. However, that’s my analysis from a 21st Century perspective. Back in the day, Pamela was ground-breaking stylistically. It paved the way for a number of epistolary novels that followed, and continue to do so even today.
● Pamela : As a Journal writer :
Pamela, in one of her early journals, tells her readers that she writes as a "diversion" from her troubles and indicates that she utilizes her missives as a vehicle for improving her psychological and socio-economic well-being (p. 106). For example, her parents, who often equate dishonor with death, criticize Pamela's choices toward the beginning of the novel. Thus, when B tells her father that Pamela is "in a way to be happy", her father replies, believing her defiled, "What! then is she dying?" (p. 248). In the face of this cruel, opinionated culture, Pamela turns to her art of writing journals to, in a sense, "disappear" from her social reality, at least temporarily, as well as provide some emotional and personal stability in her life.
● Writing of Pamela:
We get a strong feeling that Pamela hardly ever lays aside her quill throughout the entire novel. More importantly, as Morton states in his article, "Theme and structure in Pamela" (1971), her writings are the sole record of her Puritan conscience, which, as B comes to see, can both enjoy and evaluateexperience (Morton, p. 256). And as her fears grow, she writes more frequently and the pace increases tremendously. For example, after letter thirteen, nine letters follow in the next two months, approximately one every week. This number is increased even further in the final two weeks of her stay in Bedford- shire to an average of one every other day. Furthermore, the Lincolnshire section of the novel has a more successful correspondence of form and matter than the first Bedfordshire section and this constitutes Pamela's forty days of spiritual suffering . The final section of the novel, after Pamela's marriage to B, has a sense of emotional climax, reinforced by length and repetitiveness of her entries. Indeed there is a correlation between the frequency of writing and the build-up of emotional tension. The slow and moody nature of some of Pamela's letters clearly illustrates that, throughout the seventeen- month period of the novel, Pamela emotionally evolves greatly, and her conception of virtue grows from a mere legalistic obedience to principles in the first section to charity of mind in the second. She is even able to say of B's first love, Sally Godfrey, "I should rank such a returning dear lady in the class of those who are most virtuous".
● Richardson’s epiztolary narrative style:
Richardson's epistolary form has many advantages to other forms of narrative. For example, it succeeds at situating his reader alongside the heroine while she narrates the plot of her life; some critics call this celebrated Richard sonian technique "writing to the moment". The author himself explains this advantageous "novelistic immediacy" and discusses the benefits of the epistolary format in his "Preface" to Clarissa (1759):
"Letters...written while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects... abound not only with critical situations, but with what may be called instantaneous .Descriptions and Reflections... Much more lively and affecting".
Likewise, Pamela's correspondences (letters and journals) invite the reader to sit next to her as she puts pen to paper. As Roussel points out in his study, "Reflections on the letter: the reconciliation of distance and presence in Pamela" (1987), this technique decreases the narrative distance between author and reader and creates a very close and immediate relationship between the two . For example, Pamela writes: "But I am forced to break off [from writing]. Here comes Mrs Jervis" , "I must write on, though I shall come so soon; for now I have hardly any thing else to do" and "I will now, my honoured parents, proceed with my journal". The directness of the narrative is evident, and this immediate structure helps to eliminate the "foreignness" of the letters.
● Conclusion:
Pamela is not a perfect novel for various reasons. For one, it’s too big to keep the reader engaged. Secondly, the story is too plain. However, in being the first English novel and the first epistolary novel originally written in English, the novel succeeds with flying colours. It has every characteristic of an epistolary and portrays each one sufficiently. With strong characterization, deep conversations, a portrayal of strong emotions, and hidden intentions sprinkled throughout, Pamela is a book that suitably sits among the classics of the early days of the English novel.What it did, is open the door for future authors to present their masterpieces, and enrich the English literature. The Dracula by Bram Stoker is a cult classic, which was published over 150 years after Pamela. Likewise, Jane Austen’s juvenile novel “Lady Susan”, and her magnum opus, “Pride and Prejudice”, take inspiration from the epistolary style of the novel.
Therefore, one should analyse Pamela as a stylistic text which created a new direction, rather than for its content and story-line.
■ My Reference Sources are:
https://www.bombayreads.com/pamela-an-epistolary-novel-by-samuel-richardson/
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a266/6466f9b8e8ab89671da79ce1d65ea04a65fb.pdf
Thank you...
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