Discover Top Posts Tagged with #shamela

Possible proto Mr Collins?

You may know that I am reading the whole works by both Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, who are important authors from mid 1700 that were also Jane Austen’s favorites.

As I was reading, I came across two characters that could have been a possible inspiration for Mr Collins, the ridiculous parson in Pride and Prejudice.

Mr Williams, from Shamela (1741)

Shamela (by Henry Fielding) is a parody of Pamela (by Samuel Richardson, 1740) (and infinitely a more enjoyable read, if I may add), that is considered the first English novel etc etc.

One of the characters parodied is Mr Williams, a parson who writes long, redundant, pompous letters to Pamela (reminds you of someone?)

Mr Murray, from Pamela II (1741)

Pamela II is the sequel to the aforementioned Pamela by Samuel Richardson.

Mr Murray is a young bachelor that happens to court a friend of Pamela, Miss Polly Darnford. Unfortunately, Polly did not fancy him and declined his addresses. What happened after that is the interesting thing.

As Polly writes in one of her letters:

“The good man loved me most violently, nay, he could not live without me: life was no life, unless I favored him: but yet, after a few more of these flights, he is trying to sit down satisfied [...] and to transpose his affections to a worthier object, my sister Nancy. (from Letter XXXI)

Reminds you of someone?

Furthermore, she adds:

“So fancy you see Polly Darnford abandoned by her own fault; her papa angry at her; her mama pitying her, and calling her a silly girl; Mr Murray, [...] growling over his mistress, as a dog over a bone he fears to lose; Miss Nancy, putting on her prudish pleasantry; [...] and I laughing at both in my sleeve [...]” (from Letter XXXI)

Reminds you of someone else?

I’m not sure if JA ever read Shamela or Pamela, but we do know she was a big big BIG fan of both authors.

Alas, I am still reading Pamela II, so I cannot tell you what will be of the protagonists of this love-triangle. I will let you know if we ever arrive to Rosings Park.

#jane austen #samuel richardson #Henry Fielding #mr collins #conspiracy theories #english literature #pamela #Shamela #i should be studying german #pride and prejudice

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726, marked the beginning of this movement. Not long after its publication, readers started to imagine its hero, Lemuel Gulliver, in circumstances that either were only briefly alluded to in the text or they themselves invented; the more shocking the revisions, the better. Many stories took the form of what was essentially “fan art.” For example, the famous engraver William Hogarth provoked and amused with a graphic representation of Gulliver getting a Lilliputian enema. Though outrageous, Hogarth’s rendering was consistent with Gulliver’s character, a play on the original hero’s delight with the size of his own excrement in contrast to the miniature world of the Lilliputian people. From the start, artists were using the form to explore social taboos and sexuality. Hundreds more fan-authored works followed, including a touching if bawdy series of poems by Alexander Pope in which the shipwrecked adventurer’s wife—barely mentioned in the original—complains that her husband is never at home to do his duties by her. When Gulliver returns from his final adventure, he has become so disgusted with the human race that he hides from his family. The fan-written Mary Gulliver was, understandably, put out by her husband’s newfound abstinence. In the 18th century, as now, fan fiction was usually more explicitly sexual than its source material. There was plenty to set the imagination on fire in Samuel Richardson’s 1740 classic novel, Pamela, about a lady’s maid on an isolated country estate who resists the overtures of her boss. But readers also liked to envision scenarios where she gave in wholeheartedly. One reader who was particularly obsessed with reconceiving Pamela Andrews as unchaste was Henry Fielding, Richardson’s fellow novelist. Critical of Richardson’s puritanical overtones, Fielding resolved to imagine his own Pamela, who was only pretending to be a shrinking violet to increase the desire of her lord. In Shamela, Fielding constructed an alternative set of letters where, in true sexy-supervillain fashion, Pamela and her mother lay out their plans to entrap the squire of the manor. Apparently unsated, Fielding went on to write Joseph Andrews, a full-length gender reversal in which Pamela’s naive brother resists the seduction attempts of an older, landowning lady, the original squire’s sister.

“Fan Fiction Was Just as Sexual in the 1700s as It Is Today“ from The Atlantic

#reading list #the atlantic #fanfiction #gulliver's travels #shamela #joseph andrews

Just read: Shamela, Henry Fielding

I feel vindicated.

#shamela #henry fielding #pamela #samuel richardson #english literature #is mr williams mr collins?#when the parody is 10000 better than the original

Henry Fielding truly is a model because yes, I too, would start writing two fan-fictions about a work that I found preposterously bad the same year they were published. Out of pure indignation. And publish them in less than two years.

#Henry Fielding #Joseph Andrews #Shamela #Samuel Richardson #Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded #18th century #Richardson must have felt ashamed to go out in public after that #I just know it

The best circumstances for reading Shamela are definitely when one is slightly delirious at 1am after ingesting an immense amount of strong coffee. I haven’t laughed so hard in months.

#shamela #late night reading #coffee #pamela #yes i’m sitting on the desk again it’s a thing

Rise of the Novel: September 26, 2017

I thought Voyant’s graph tool would be useful in gauging the frequency of clothing throughout Pamela and Shamela, and by comparing the general trends of their instances, I hoped to see differences in the ways the novels treated its production with regard to social mobility. I compiled a rough list of clothing-related words that I found in Pamela and Shamela, listed in the results below:

Just from numbers alone, Pamela places a greater emphasis on clothing and its heroine’s craft of it. When looking at the trends, accessory pieces of clothing (stocking, coat, shoes) decreased over time and peaked near the beginning; primary articles (dress, suit, cloth(es)) consistently peaked multiple times throughout time; and sewing materials (lace, cotton, silk, linen, needle) echoed the pattern of accessories in that their highest frequencies were concentrated in early segments. On the other hand, Shamela’s little graphical data about its iterations of fashion were concentrated towards its ending when she profits from her marriage and receives a new wardrobe. In fact, lace was the only word related to the crafting, not articles, of clothing in Shamela that yielded results and only 2. Last week, we talked a bit about sewing and its function as an important technology in social climbing, a domestic, female labor that can destabilize sociopatriarchal hierarchies through fashion and the external appearance of illusory social rank it exudes. If Pamela utilizes this subversive production of clothing as a way of expressing social identity and elevates the process of her craft to an art form, Shamela, fixated more on the materialism of couture, is all about that $$$. She’s not one to “flower” any waistcoats, no. And though this is obviously indicative of Fielding’s satirical effort to undermine middle-class female power of economic sensibility/self-sufficiency and tout their mercenary greed, this caricaturization nonetheless renders Shamela a more realistic, sympathetic, and worldlier woman than Pamela. If satire comedically exaggerates things beyond realism to prove a point, it backfires here. One random observation worth noting is that the word “clothing” does not appear at all in both novels, although “cloth,” “clothed,” and “clothes” do. I thought the use of asterisks to denote the total count of root words *and* their derivations was a useful function: in the chart, the numbers for words denoting fabric material come from asterisk-ed categories since it made sense to include all derivations (i.e. silk, silken), but I refrained from doing the same thing with articles of clothing (i.e. suit, suitable, suitably). One criticism of Voyant would be that it was easier to process these results about Pamela and Shamela separately rather than together. This wasn’t so much about reducing data crowding in the small graph than it was about minimizing error with total values. Even when I toggled frequencies, it gave me the total instances of the word across both texts, not separately.

#Exercise3 #Voyant #TextAnalysis #Pamela #Shamela #sewing #clothing #fashion