Henry fielding

CONCLUSION
Shamela can be read without reading Pamela first. You may need to slow down a bit when you read it and the spelling and punctuation seem erotic by our standards. To me it is a very funny very well written book that anyone with a sense of humor and a little patience with the sentence structure of another era will enjoy. I see it as totally deserving of a place on the Women Unbound Challenge. We can learn as much from it as we can from the very poltically correct works of the 21th century. Shamela is also a fool for Pastor Williams. It looks like Shamela will outgrow the Pastor as she ages and settles into her role of wife of a squire. She is into The Reading Life and this has helped he develop her self-consciousness and her insight. Our first guess and hope is Shamela will long outlive her husband and will go own to have lots of adventures, use the squires money to buy books and fancy clothes for herself and her mother. I think maybe Shamela will always have a weakness for an attractive but somewhat wicked young man of the lower gentry but she will learn to have fun with that. Pamela will end up a widow also but she will not be able to escape the roles society has imposed on her. Shamela is a woman with a much greater sense of freedom in her life than Pamela and is much more in control of her life than Pamela. Shamela is a very funny Novella. Pamela is often portrayed as an anti-hero by feminist critics. She is seen as a near fool whose whole purpose in life is to get a wealthy near rapist to marry her. Her conditioning does not allow herself to enter into any sort of romantic encounter with a man she does not love so her economic needs force her to deceive herself into thinking she is in love. Once married, it is obvious to everyone but Pamela that her future husband will abuse her and lose interest in her as she ages. Now the question becomes if Pamela is the feminine anti-hero is Shamela a hero? Is Shamela an 18th century woman asserting her rights who has the intelligence to see through the claims of the squire to love her? Shamela knows what she is doing with her master, Pamela is in bad faith and either does not know what she is doing or more likely has it buried very deep in her consciousness. (It has been about 15 years since I read Pamela and Clarisa. There is a great deal of depth and artistry in these works. Both of them have lot to tell us about issues related to this challange. Richardson was not, as he is often portrayed, a literary oppressor of women. Clarisa is one of the longest novels in history). There are letters by several different persons in this work. Each person has their own style of writing. The spelling and punctuation were different in 1741 than they are now of course. Shamela is depicted as an avid reader and has educated herself well above her station. She is a very smart woman treated without condescension by Fielding. Her mother has learned some hard lessons and tries to pass them along to her daughter. Her mother knows Shamela is a fool for a handsome well-spoken man like the Parson and tries to guide her daughter without browbeating her over her mistakes. Clearly the mother has made some mistakes of her own. The mother does profit from the marriage as was part of her intention all along, of course. As the marriage proceeds we see how Sham is preoccupied with finding ways to be with Pastor Williams. She presents him to her husband as her spiritual adviser. We see, Shamela alas does not, that the Parson cares nothing for her other than as a source of gratification (that is really not a big deal for him as it can easily be obtained) and hopes to find a way to use her marriage to the squire to extract large donations to the church. Shamela is both the shammer and the shammed.