The Effective and Ineffective Uses of the Epistolary Form: Assessing 'Pamela' and 'The Coquette' Leah Katz College

Literature is often used as a medium to explain some facet of human emotion. It exists as a way for people to gain an understanding of others. Certain narrative forms achieve this goal with greater ease than others, but it is truly the implementation of the form that determines the degree of success. Pamela utilizes epistolary form in a way that poorly represents the human condition and makes it nearly impossible to properly empathize with the central characters, but The Coquette gives the audience a superior form of narration by tapping into the omniscience that occurs when reading from the perspective of varying characters.

In Pamela, particularly, the epistolary form makes it very difficult to trust the narrator. When nearly every letter begins with “Dear Father and Mother,” everything Pamela writes must be seen through more skeptical eyes (Richardson 11). Because Pamela’s parents are the recipients of her letters, she becomes an incredibly unreliable narrator. Her parents are obviously very concerned about her virtue, especially when they say “But we would sooner live upon the water and clay of the ditches I am forc’d to dig, than to live better at the price of our dear child’s ruin,” (Richardson 13). It seems as though...