The Art of Satire

1. The Art of Satire as Examined in Anti-Pamela and Shamela Presentation by Annie Clifford Darel Henderson and Marie Cailliau

2. Defining the Topic Satire (as we all know by now): Definition: 1. use of wit to criticize behavior: the use of wit, especially irony, sarcasm, and ridicule, to criticize faults 2. literary work using satire: a literary work that uses satire, or the branch of literature made up of such works[Early 16th century. Directly or via French< Latin satira "poetic medley, satire"] Source: MSN Encarta (online) http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/satire.html

3. Back to Pamela • The novel Pamela by Samuel Richardson was published in 1740. Many works modelled after it were published swiftly thereafter, some mimicking and some satirizing the original (7). Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela and Henry Fielding’s Shamela (both 1741) were two of the latter type.

4. Controversy • Some readers hailed Pamela as the supreme conduct instruction book, while others pointed out that Pamela was less than virtuous, and that the book gave its readers much temptation.

5. “That Pamela was the subject of a sermon preached from the pulpit, and that villagers rang out peals of bells on hearing of the heroine’s marriage, are twice-told tales about the novel.” (Hammond 2) [Twice-told = really popular]

6. What’s There to Make Fun of? According to Pamela’s critics: • Richardson’s “didacticism was cloaked by a sexualized almost prurient tone” (8). • Prurient: marked by unwholesome sexual interest: having or intending to arouse an unwholesome interest in sexual matters Source: MSN Encarta Online

7. What’s There to Make Fun of? According to our class weblogs: • Its tediousness. • That she falls in love with her persecutor. • That she is “a servant again, although a rich one.” (Helena) • Overuse of the terms “ruin” and “virtue.” • How laboriously drawn out it is. (Rickie) • How she says she needs to get away, but never leaves. (Amber)

8. Shamela -is a more direct satire. -mimics the form. -purports to correct the falsities of Pamela. -exposes the prurience by making it overtly bawdy.

9. Cited Examples “It would be hard indeed that a Woman who marries a Man only for his Money should be debarred from spending it.” An example of anti-prurience from Shamela, pg 267.

10. Shamela and the Church • Fielding is extremely effective in criticising the Church’s moral weakness. • Other comments have been edited out. Ask Darel about these.

11. Praise for Shamela • How about this: Let’s make a rather easy copy of Richardson’s story and give both Shamela and Mr. Booby what they deserve: wretchedness. • Although Shamela is still rather pathetic, so is everyone else. Fielding doesn’t actually allow anyone in the novel a sense of reality, which is therefore a great way of keeping it satirising and parodying. Haywood might forget she’s writing a parody now and again, but Fielding doesn’t – the extravagant tone throughout his story isn’t as welcomed as it is in the other two.

12. Anti-Pamela • attacks some of the master narratives of Pamela • draws a sexually freer paradigm for women • points out the use of sexuality to further one’s prospects

13. Cited Examples The Ideal of the Most and Absolute Innocent Woman (Pamela) is Destroyed: • Syrena sent her mother some fine things that the old gentleman had given her, and “they drank together with a good deal of Mirth and Ridicule on the Donor” (187) who in this case was being kind-hearted and trying to help Syrena’s “ailing” mother.

14. Cited Examples Attacking Richardson’s Didacticism: • This isn’t a direct quote, but the first incident in which Syrena takes on that lieutenant – Haywood basically spells out how a woman can have raunchy affairs without being caught. Just go to a tavern!

15. Cited Examples Attacking the idea of character and emotions taking time to be proven: • “Bring this likeing up to Love, and then it will be in your power to do with him as you please” (66).

16. Pamela, Anti-Pamela, and Class • It is an excellent portrayal of the options that were open to women. Haywood satirises the way that women tried to rise through the class structure effectively when she focuses on the cutters of cloth. She also moves wonderfully through the smutty life of London, giving a much more accurate picture of life than Richardson does.

17. Class cont’d • Still, the fortune-hunters usually turned into prostitutes. Haywood is giving a similar unreal character in the form of Syrena. This is always going to be problematic since she wants to satirise Richardson. Had she wanted to do it effectively, she could have continued along her rather realist vein and given the story of a servant who got pregnant by her master’s abuse, and was then kicked out by him because she was pregnant. This would be a novel worth writing and reading, but one hard to do successfully during this time.

18. Class cont’d • The reason such a novel would be hard to do is because it subverts the social class. The higher up you go, the better you’re supposed to be, culminating with the King as the Head of Church. • The fact of the matter is that the lower classes tried to emulate the upper classes and court – the result was a miller sleeping with his blacksmith-friend’s wife, his old master’s daughter, and two or three prostitutes along the way.

19. Class cont’d • Haywood, again, does do a rather good job at displaying the upper class as raunchy as the lower class, breaking down barriers between them. On the other hand, she fails to come out and state anything directly. It is clear that miseducated women, or uneducated women, are at risk in society, but she doesn’t even give Syrena the privilege of declaring this fact because Haywood makes her a complete idiot, despite her education. An interesting commentary on commerce and sex, perhaps, but not as powerful as Darel could hope.

20. Aspects All Three Have Missed C.S. Lewis writes: “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.” He continues: “Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny.” Source: Athanasius: On the Incarnation (found online)

21. Aspects All Three Have Missed • The explicit and obvious double-standard for sexuality for men and women • The acceptance of class structure and restrictions therein • The d*mned letter writing. Will she never learn?!

22. Aspects All Three Have Missed • Both Haywood and Fielding seem to take Richardson at face-value when he writes that Pamela is “Published in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the YOUTH OF BOTH SEXES”

23. Aspects All Three Have Missed • Reward for all three is getting a man and getting the money. Whether this goal is achieved or thwarted, the standard for success is the same. • Even the subtitle of Richardson’s title “Virtue Rewarded” makes it explicit that, rather than its own reward and matter of self-fulfillment and private Christian fidelity, Pamela’s stubborn adherence to her belief is the key not to salvation but financial security through marriage to Mr. B. • In Anti-Pamela, Syrena “had always been sooth’d with the hopes of living grand, wither by Marriage, or a Settlement from some Man of Condition” 56, as a simple opposition to Pamela, her punishment is rejection by those she attempts to snare • In Fielding’s Shamela also, the title character’s punishment at its conclusion is to lose her husband through divorce.

24. Back to the Letter Writing: Writing itself: As physical and as a Means of Exposure • In Pamela, scenes of her physical violation are always linked to her writing, whether it be the absurdity of her writing during these very attempts on her virtue, or Mr. B’s frisky attempts to get her pages from her underclothes, she would not be so attractive to Mr B, or have so many struggles with him, if she did not write.

25. Letter Writing cont’d • In Haywood’s satirical contribution, Syrena also fails to stop writing, and is sabotaged by it. Her attempt to call rape on one of her victims is spoiled by a mis-delivery of one of her blatantly honest letters to her mother. Although Haywood paints her heroine as a master of deception, her letters are fatally frank. • In Fielding’s work also it is a written record of Shamela’s correspondence that dooms her; Parson Oliver’s possession of them is the catalyst for this exposition of the young girl’s deceptive life.

26. Letter Writing cont’d • However, to give Pamelaits due, writing is more of a source of power than the weakness in Haywood and Fielding. As Doody points out “She captures Mr. B in words, even more thoroughly than he captures her in his Lincolnshire house” (Doody, 15).

27. Also Missed: Why did neither satirist attack the idea that women are dangerous? Because we are? • The Danger of Femininity • Although Pamela proves Mr. B to be incorrect when he calls her a wanton hypocrite and claims she “‘has all the arts of her sex; they were born with her’” (Richardson, 67 ), 

28. Continued Danger of Femininity • Richardson still enforces this idea that women cannot be trusted through the obvious example of Mrs. Jewkes and even Mrs. Jervis, whose loyalty is first to Mr. B; Pamela, in her honesty, is an anomaly.Her only trusted confidants are Parson Williams, eventually Mr. B, and her father, who quickly outshines her mother in the correspondence and is the only parent we ever meet.

29. Continued Danger of Feminity • Instead of undermining this, Haywood supports it by having the conniving Syrena be guided by her former orange-selling mother. There are no male influences in Miss Tricksy’s world, enforcing her dishonesty as a kind of inherited, gender-linked trait. Syrena is even caught by a woman, Mrs. C, and yet she is only distinguishable and given power by her fierce feminine jealousy. • Fielding yields to this idea too. Even though both Shamela’s mother and father have unsavoury pasts, placing the onus on more than just her mother, it is the latter parent who guides her through her deception and, even more tellingly, Shamela feels that, in order to maintain the position she achieves, it is necessary to cut her mother out of her life (272).

30. A Quick Reading Makes Us Likely to Miss: • Just as this novel evolved from a merely utilitarian, didactic guide to letter writing into a story in its own right, it is short-sighted to assume that it has nothing further to offer than this black and white view of virtue.

31. A Quick Reading Makes Us Likely to Miss: • Also, the same historical and political context that prevented Haywood and Fielding from rewarding their heroines for their deceit is no less at work in casting Richardson’s work in this solely moral light.

32. A Quick Reading Makes Us Likely to Miss: • In her introduction to the 1987 Penguin edition of Pamela, Margaret Ann Doody calls this novel “the story of two countrified young people, bumptious, ignorant, egotistical” and goes so far as to argue that Richardson’s novel “suggests that all of us, even in our most serious trials and decisions, have an element of absurdity” (Doody, 18) • She cites Pamela’s diction, which brings in terms and phrases from cooking and cleaning to describe her person and emotional situation and points to the amusing egotism of Pamela comparing her own situation to a martyred bishop or Lucretia.

33. Margaret Ann Doody, cont’d • She finds in Richardson that “sacredness and absurdity are consubstantial as they are in Pamela’s letters, those sacred imperfections.” (Doody, 20) • (This idea also goes a long way toward a greater forgiveness for, if not appreciation of, the character of Parson Williams.)

34. Who Would You Cast?

35. Who would you cast? llll

36. Who would you cast? Source: Google Image

37. Who would Annie cast?