In my brief research on Richardson’s Pamela, I came across BBC Radio 4’s program In Our Time and a segment they did on March 15, 2007 on epistolary literature. The speakers on the program (who included host Melvyn Bragg; John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London; Karen O’Brien, Professor in English at the University of Warwick; and Brean Hammond, Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham), discussed many aspects of the epistolary form, as well as the progression of the form and how it was the logical precursor to the novel as we know it today.
It is that idea of the epistolary form as an instrumental building block to what we understand as a novel that allows me to understand the importance of Pamela better than when I first started reading it. Having never read the novel but knowing the basic plot, I came to Pamela with a lot of baggage. How was I going to enjoy, or even get through, a book that details the continuous sexual harassment of a servant by her master that ultimately ends in a consensual marriage? It just seems too...horrendous.
However, I actually found myself enjoying the reading while still being disgusted by Mr. B. and Pamela’s naive forgiveness and love for her “Master.” I found myself being scared, sad, and annoyed for Pamela, and it wasn’t until I heard In Our Time’s episode on epistolary literature that I remembered our previous class conversations on this idea of empathy and identification with characters. One of the commentators (I’m not sure which one), argued that Pamela is such a landmark work because the way Richardson uses the epistolary form invented a new way of reading based on empathy and an extreme identification with the characters. The personal form of letters works to erase the boundary between fact and fiction in such a way that readers cannot help but identify with Pamela’s journey. The commentators suggested that it is for this reason that Pamela was such a media event that it spurred operas, fans, and paintings, among other things.
In other words, using letters to tell a story allows the reader insight into the mind of the character in a way that other early forms of the novel were unable to do. This extremely close and personal access into the character’s thoughts, motivations, hopes, and fears would, of course, encourage an empathetic reaction and identification with the character and I would argue that this certainly does happen in Pamela. In Pamela’s passionate letters to her parents, the reader sees her sincere fear of losing her virtue, as well as her desires to go home, her love of her family and humble background, and even her admiration of Mr. B. Despite how unlikely we as modern readers may find Pamela’s motivations, it is difficult not to believe she as a character is sincere in them and thus, we as readers feel for her in her struggles.
I want to note a couple of other interesting things the guests on this radio program pointed out both about Pamela and the early epistolary novel. First is the actual logistics of what an epistolary novel means, mainly in that the characters are the writers and creators of the narrative, and they become the true organizers of the plot. I think that is very interesting and liberating, especially in someone like Pamela who as a woman and a low class servant, could become an author. Secondly, one of the guests noted that as an epistolary novel, Pamela is different than those that came before it in that previous epistolary novels were usually “seduction” tales where the woman’s secret was a loss of her virtue. The letters would expose her lack of innocence, while in Pamela the letters expose her complete innocence. The guest noted that this really exposes a difference between the perceived values of the aristocracy and the bourgeois. Indeed many of the morals of Pamela seem to align more with the middle class than the aristocracy.
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