In the novel “Pamela Or Virtue Rewarded” by Samuel Richardson, Pamela plays the part of the poor martyr and uses her clothing to incite pity from those of a higher class than her. As this essay on “Pamela Or Virtue Rewarded”  seeks to make clear, she constantly makes reference to her poverty as a point of pride yet after she marries into a higher class some of this humility disappears. This is not to say that she is not represented as having the same pious and humble principles but she does appear rather lost when she is no longer able to draw sympathy and compassion because of her class and style of dress. Encouraged constantly by her parents, whom she has deluded as well into thinking that she does not wish for the finer things in life, Pamela is far more sinister than this novel meant to instruct would reveal, in fact, this might give devious young ladies the impression that being coy and feigning humility is attractive and will gain them a rich husband. By acting as the martyr, the uncorrupted beauty with the heart of gold, the paragon of virtue, she is able to climb the social and can quell any criticism of her rise to power with one of her cleverly-timed bits about how she was poor and does not like the fine things in life.

The martyr disappears suddenly in a rare moment when the reader seems to have caught “poor little Pamela” off guard. Instead of detailing how special her poverty is to her or writing to her mother about how much she loves to dress in cheap dirty flannel, the reader is assaulted as she states in one of the important quotes from “Pamela” or “Virtue Rewarded” by Samuel Richardson, she “put on fine linen, silk Shoes, and fine white Cotton Stockens, a fine quilted Coat, a delicate green mentua silk Gown and Coat, a French Necklace, and a lac’d head, and Handkerchief, and clean Gloves, and taking my fan in hand, I, like a little proud Hussy, looked in the Glass and thought myself a Gentlewoman once more” (303). Two things immediately spring to mind; first of all, what ever happened to her proud assertion that her poverty and its outer appearances were her jewel and secondly, there was never a point which she claimed to be “gentlewoman” and always referred to herself in the base terms she spends so long trying to convince the reader should apply to her because of her poverty and low station.

It is clear that Pamela admires the image she sees in the glass and her language is proof of this. As a character that is constantly concerned, particularly at the beginning of the text, with the way her impoverished clothing makes those around see how angelic she is (since she never stops talking about how she is poor and dresses badly because of her virtue) one cannot discount such a scene as the one in front of the looking-glass. This is perhaps the only time the reader is given a true glimpse into the psychology of this manipulative martyr. If “Pamela Or Virtue Rewarded” truly is an epistolary novel aimed at teaching young girls about how to live a virtuous life, one must wonder how such a Cinderella story could not have been skewed in the minds of these teenaged girls. For them, the story has everything; a pretty girl, a dominant man, and of course, gorgeous clothes. The only matter left for these girls to consider is how they can begin acting more like Pamela to reap her material reward. It is certainly nothing new that young girls should idolize someone with “princess status” and one can fairly assume, especially given the large commercial success of this tale, that plenty of girls could see the manipulation built into the text. Perhaps instead of creating a new England—full of submissive, flannel-wearing, puritanical, hush-mouthed little girls the exact opposite was unconsciously created. When viewed in this sense, one can see Pamela’s donning of the fine clothing as the climax of the novel—the reward for playing it cool (to impose such a modern phrase).

Compared to her whiny and martyr – like assertion early in the novel that “The Clothes are fine Silks, and too rich and too good for me to be sure” (18) her description of her attire at the wedding is astounding in scope and confirms the cynical reader’s view that Pamela, to use Henry Fielding’s mock-title, should in fact be called “Shamela” and has been leading the reader, along with B., around by the nose for the whole of her story.  The novel is thick with long details about Pamela’s thoughts and feelings and one is likely to get so swept up in the minutia of this novel that it becomes possible to forget her statements revealing humility as it relates to her clothing. At the beginning of the novel, the reader is instantly aware how much importance Pamela invests in how her clothing represents her.

When her master dresses her up in grand clothing, she is faltered by his compliments but “confesses” to her parents “O! How I wish’d for my gray Russet again, and my poor honest Dress” (25) and later bemoans her state in one of the important quotes from Pamela by Samuel Richardson, “O! that I had never left my Rags nor my Poverty, to be thus expos’s to Temptations” (33). The fact that she opens her self-pitying laments with the dreadful, “O!” and is clever enough to come up with adjectives for her clothing that personify the articles themselves; her dress is “honest.” When she finds herself in need of new attire, she relates to her mother that she ““I bought of Farmer Nicholas’ Wife and Daughters a good sad-colour’d Stuff, of their own Spinning, enough to make me a Gown and two petticoats” (45). Instead of describing the color (as she does in her post-poverty days) again, she projects human emotion and all of its associations onto her very garb by calling it “sad.” This is quote a different hen she has all of her finery on, her clothing loses its personal characteristics and is merely described as “fine” repeatedly as well as described in detail. This reveals her innate knowledge that clothing expresses more than her long-winded testaments to her own perfect nature, grace, piety, and of course, virtue ever could.

Pamela’s parents are partially to blame for their daughter’s sickeningly sweet, over-the-top display of martyrdom. Their relationship to their daughter is almost parasitic—they live off of her stories and can pat themselves on the back when they hear of her perfect virtue in the face of a moral adversary. Always a glutton for praise, Pamela, who signs her letters, “your Poor and dutiful daughter” is rewarded with their humble advice and implicit showering of praise on her “Jewel”—her virtue. Her mother, a Puritan cheerleader, persuades her, “Yes my dear Child, we fear—you should be too grateful—and reward him with that Jewel, your Virtue, which no Riches, nor Favor, nor any thing in this life can make up to you” (14). In return for their written caresses, she makes them feel more self-righteous about being poor and declares at the end of one her long, self-absorbed, and completely self-denying letters to them, ““my dear parents; my dear poor parents, I will say, because your Poverty is my Pride” (54). This back and forth relationship of martyrdom continues throughout the novel. One can only assume that her parents are not particularly thrilled that they are poor and their daughter, who has always got a little self-righteousness to spare, allows her supposed ideas about the glories of poverty spill over and thus they can forget about how miserable and dank their puny insignificant lives are for just one moment as they live, both of them, vicariously through their daughter.

Perhaps too much time has passed and even the most imaginative of this current generation of secular, postmodern babies cannot even accept the idea that true virtue could exist to such an extent uncorrupted. Perhaps an even more poignant statement is that it may be more likely that this new century’s young generation has been trained to see past the appearance of true good—that due to television and advertising there is no possibility to see a person as being as perfect as seem, especially when they engage in such shameless self-flattery, self-pity, self-aggrandizing, and acting out of the martyr’s role as is seen in Pamela’s letters. To bring the point full circle, this is also a generation that, very much like Pamela, is keenly, almost painfully aware of the importance of clothing in “telling the world who we are” and thus her attention to her dress at all times is seen as a natural part of being young. If Richardson’s novel teaches the puritan reader anything, one would, by proxy, have to assume it is that being pious and reserved is great for a woman and can turn an unfaithful, emotionally abusive man with frightening tendencies toward rape and bondage into a drooling puppy. If it were to fulfill its function as an educational tool for the modern reader, however, it would be a lesson many learned as children—look out for the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

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