Novella: Shamela

Overview
Henry Fielding's "Shamela" is a short, pungent parody first circulated in 1741 that ridicules Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel "Pamela." Purporting to reveal the "true" letters of its heroine, Fielding recasts Richardson's celebrated servant-girl as a calculating social climber who uses feigned virtue as a tool for upward mobility. The piece is sharp, comic, and deliberately scandalous, designed to puncture the moral seriousness and sentimental rhetoric that made "Pamela" both popular and controversial.

Plot
The narrative presents a set of private letters and journals that supposedly belong to "Shamela," an ambitious maid whose apparent modesty and piety are an act intended to entrap her employer. Rather than resisting advances out of moral scruple, Shamela engineers situations to secure marriage and social advancement, coaching herself in the arts of contrition, fainting, and celestial language. Scenes that one would read in Richardson as trials of virtue are reframed as calculated maneuvers, culminating in the achievement of marriage and financial security, not through innocence, but through manipulation.

Narrative and Structure
Fielding mimics the epistolary form to satirical effect, adopting Richardson's letter-writing conventions while subverting their intent. The mock-editorial frame claims access to the "real" documents behind the popular tale, and the text is peppered with sarcastic asides, ironies, and intentional stylistic exaggerations that expose what Fielding saw as Richardson's artifice. This meta-fictional posture allows Fielding to comment directly on the mechanics of novel-writing, on the reader's appetite for sentimental narratives, and on how rhetorical devices can be used to manufacture virtue.

Characters
The central figure is Shamela, whose piety is a practiced performance rather than sincere conviction. Opposite her sits the gentleman whose advances are recast from predatory designs to opportunities for mutual transaction; his susceptibility underscores Fielding's claim that social ambitions and sexual economics drive behavior more than moral feeling. Supporting figures appear as foils or as instruments of exposure, with the mock-editor's voice serving to guide readers' judgments and to highlight the gap between appearance and motive.

Themes
Shamela interrogates themes of hypocrisy, social mobility, and the commodification of virtue. It argues that professed religious feeling and modesty can be instrumentalized to secure marriage and status, turning sentimental rhetoric into social currency. The satire also targets the sentimental novel's ability to conflate literary affect with moral worth, suggesting that readers and writers alike are complicit in elevating performance over integrity. Questions of class and gender are central: the novella exposes how a young woman's limited options make manipulation both plausible and, in Fielding's view, morally ambiguous.

Style and Legacy
Fielding's language is brisk, often coarse, and keenly comic; his parody relies less on subtlety than on exposing perceived absurdities in Richardson's tone and technique. "Shamela" was scandalous to some contemporaries and influential in shaping early novelistic debate about realism, satire, and the moral purpose of fiction. Its bite helped establish Fielding as a literary rival to Richardson and set the stage for later works, notably "Joseph Andrews," which continues the satirical engagement with sentiment and virtue.