PAMELA vs SHAMELA
Richardson's extravagant pride in Pamela's virtue as well as his critics' extravagant praise of the morality of the novel evidently annoyes Henry Fielding, and make him in his first burlesque of the novel, Shamela (1741), take the attitude that this type of virtue was a sham.
Shamela purports to set a record straight by exposing and refuting 'the many notorious Falsehood and Misrepresentations' of the earlier novel; it also puts 'in a true and just Light' the 'matchless Arts' of a calculating female hypocrite. Shamela discourses on what she insistently and distortedly calls her 'Vartue', and proclaims the she is prepared to talk of 'honorable Designs till Suppertime'. Her employer and future hunsband, modestly referred to as Mr. B. in the original, is exposed as the bearer of the same 'Booby', while the once sympathetic Parson Williams 'is represented ina manner something different from what he bears in Pamela'. Shamela systematically debunks both Richardson's moral sententiousness and the essentially subjective nature of his narrative.
When Fielding returned to the attack in The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams in 1742 he rejected the inward-looking epistolary form in favour of a third-person narrative. His narrator is talkative, elubbable, knowing, and manipulative; he speaks urbanely, sharing jokes and educated allusions with the reader, shifting us into a world of sophisticated gentlemanly discourse quite alien to Richardson. Although Joseph Andrews begins as a parory of Pamela, by tracing the complications of the life of Palema's brother in the service of another branch of the Booby family it rapidly transcends the parodic mood by experomenting with a new, neo-classical fictional form. In his Preface to the novel Fielding insisted that his was 'a kind of writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language' and he outlined the concept of 'a comic epic poem in prose'. His ambitions for prose romance were comprehemsive; he proposed to take the wide range of character, incident, diction, and reference from the epic and to the remould this material according to 'comic' rather than 'serious' principles.
This stress on comedy made for a further insistence on the place of 'ridiculous, he affirmed, had a single source in a human affectation which proceeds from either vanity or hypocrisy, Prose fiction could successfully adopt a moral stance without resorting to the cant of a novel such as Pamela; it could, moreover, endavour to laugh away faults rather than to preach against them. To justify his case, Fielding significantly referred to Ben Jonson, 'who of all men understood the Ridiculous the best' and who 'chiefly used the hypocrital affectation'. The implications of this prefatory theoretical discourse are explored in the subsequent narrative, or, more precisely, the two types of theoretical discourse, the epic and the comic, are interpolated within a single text. Joseph Andrews has, as its full title suggests, two heroes, the innocent Joseph and his equally innocent Christian protector, Parson Adams. Adams is a man of learning and good sense but he is 'as entirely ignorant of the ways of his world as an infant just entered into it could possibly be'. Joseph and Adams, cast out as wanderers, engage in a epic voyage of discovery during which they generally seem to encounter selfshness, villainy, and corruption. But the naughty world through which they pass is illuminated not simply by Adams's selflessness but also by the unexpected charity of the humble and meek.
If the novel variously exposes hypocrisy, it also discovers simple honest and ordinary generosity in the interstices of a corrupt society. It is a virtue that does not seek for a reward.