PAMELA OR VIRTUE RETARDED

•  If pamela in the contemporary time , will the story take any changes ?

   Pamela and vritue rewarded  novel written by Samuel Richardson . published in 1740 and based on a story about a servant and the man who, failing to seduce her, marries her.pamela was the main character in the novel . And pamela in the contemporary time, will the story take some changes . 

      Pamela Andrew  is a 15year old servant. On the death of her mistress, her mistress’s son,Mr. B, begins a series of stratagems designed to seduce her. These failing, he abducts her and ultimately threatens to rape her. Pamela resists, and soon afterward Mr. B offers marriage an outcome that Richardson presents as a reward for her virtue. The second half of the novel shows Pamela winning over those who had disapproved of the misalliance.

     

    Pamela is often credited with being the first English novel. Although the validity of this claim depends on the definition of the term novel, Richardson was clearly innovative in his concentration on a single action.

    Moreover, Pamela, despite the controversies, shed light on social issues that transcended the novel for the time such as . The action of the novel is told through letters and journal entries from Pamela to her parents.Pamela famously concerns a poor servant girl who is sexually menaced by the noble son of her dead mistress until he undergoes a reform of character that leads the pair to fall in love and marry.

   By giving direct access to the feelings of a common person through epistolary form, Richardson opens up a new dimension in fictional narrative: the concern withhumanconsciousness that will preoccupy the realist novel from Austen to James to Woolf to Bellow to today. As Margaret Anne Doody notes in her introduction to my Penguin Classics edition, Richardson begins the novelistic project that in many ways culminates in high modernism with stream of consciousness narration.

  Richardson blundered into writing a novel his initial goal was to write a set of model letters for young ladies. The novel is relentlessly didactic, instructing us over and over and over again about God’s Providence, the importance of virtue, and the necessity of social forms. The only well-developed characters are Pamela herself, Mr. B., his sister, and his grotesque servant Mrs Jewkes. The latter is perhaps the novel’s most vital character, a sharp-tongued and cynical woman who is possibly we are never quite sure, because Pamela is not a former procuress or bawd and who harbors homoerotic designs on the heroine. Alas, she repents too by the end no one is spared the novel’s culminating reign of virtue. Most other characters blur together, insufficiently developed. Also, while I grasp the novelty of Richardson’s emphasis on emotion, the novel’s endless effusions, and the ocean of tears shed by every character in it, become tiresome.

  

   This time has completely changed now all the trouble with Pamela has changed a lot today so many changes are seen in the present time.