A Film Canon

This delightful parody identifies the reader with Lady Davers, Mrs Jewkes and all the other characters in Richardson's original who express scepticism or incredulity at Pamela's motives. By continuing the fiction of Pamela as a real character - and his own work as a mere collation of letters omitted from her first incarnation - Fielding satirises the credulity of her original readership, while simultaneously undermining it with his comic exaggeration - and separation - of both her and Richardson's authorial voices. On the one hand, Pamela's hyperbolic modesty is translated into a transparent modesty topos, and justified by a series of memorable misspellings and misunderstandings. On the other, Richardson's taste for hysterical moral pronouncements is raised to a hallucinatory pitch, his awkward fusion of epistolary and diarised novel satirised and, above all, his canny ability to cloak voyeurism in moralism undermined, as Fielding paints the central rape scene in a lavish, pornographic register, albeit without quite registering the eloquence with which this cloaking represents the deeper contradictions of the rape-fantasy, rather than the disingenuity of its personification. The result is a profound scepticism about the novel's syncretic tendencies, anticipating the charmingly regressive picaresque of Joseph Andrews.