Summary
Letter 1: Shamela Andrews to Mrs. Henrietta Maria Honora Andrews
Shamela asks her mother to help get her a post somewhere near her, as Parson Williams is coming to town and she wants to see him. She adds that Mrs. Jervis is probably going to come with her.
Letter 2: Shamela to Henrietta
Shamela tells her mother she has news—the young Squire has come home to her place of employment and has taken an interest in her. He held her hand and complimented her and kissed her, and she pretended to be mad. Mrs. Jervis came in and spoiled it.
Letter 3: Henrietta to Shamela
Henrietta tells her daughter she must act well, and not be guilty of such a slip with the Squire as she had with Parson Williams. She ends by saying she will try to procure Mrs. Jervis a good house when she and Shamela return.
Letter 4: Shamela to Henrietta
Shamela is annoyed at her mother for being the pot who called the kettle black, alluding to her mother’s past indiscretions. As for herself, Parson Williams says she can make amends if she says her prayers and reads books.
Letter 5: Henrietta to Shamela
Henrietta responds by saying she was not criticizing Shamela for being her mother’s daughter, but simply warning her to make sure she did not let the Squire have his way with her without getting money. He is clearly a “rich Fool” (16), which is different from Parson Williams, a poor man with no money but certainly one of the “best Sort of Men” (16).
Letter 6: Shamela to Henrietta
Shamela says she has much to tell her mother. She writes of how the Squire flirted with her and kissed her madly, and how she pretended to be offended, but it backfired on her and he left after saying he was not going to do anything to her. She states angrily that it is “a prodigious Vexation…to a Woman to be made a Fool of'' (17).
Mrs. Jervis came in and laughed at her, but explained that she had a plan for Shamela. The Squire had come by the room last night but the door was locked, and now she would keep it open. Shamela would be in bed naked and the Squire could come in and do as he pleased. Shamela told Mrs. Jervis that she did not want to be made a fool again, but Mrs. Jervis said it would be different—this time she would marry him, and would have all his money and lots of fine things. Shamela wondered if he would just leave her in the morning after he had his way with her as many men did, and decided she could not go through with the plan.
Later that night, though, the Squire came in and climbed into bed between them and started to touch Shamela. She screamed and swooned and the frightened Squire jumped out of bed and tried to revive her. He was speechless and terrified and begged her to forgive him. He lamented ever meeting her, and left the room. Shamela found this funny, and laughed with Mrs. Jervis after he left.
The next morning the Squire called Mrs. Jervis to him and let her go. She cried to Shamela that they were being pushed away, but Shamela reassured her that she had a plan and they would not have to go.
Analysis
Parson Oliver’s collection of documents begins the story of Shamela, but it soon becomes very clear that it is not going to be a long tale. As critic W.R. Irwin notes, “Shamela is very short; it contains but thirteen letters plus miscellaneous introductory matter. Aware that a full-length parody could be as tedious as Pamela itself, Fielding skillfully suggests prolixity by the minute narration of just a few events, most of them leading to the nuptials. This brief space, however, suffices. By ‘word-rendering, form-rendering, and sense-rendering’ Fielding demonstrates to his own satisfaction and that of a like-minded reader that Pamela is ill-founded, ill-written, and—worst of all—pretentious.”
Like Irwin, Eric Rothstein interrogates Fielding’s goals with his novella. He notes the “lack of narrative consistency” and that “the reader who thinks of Fielding as chiefly burlesquing Pamela may be nonplussed by it.” But he explains “There is much less problem if one thinks of Pamela as a means of localizing and focussing a wide-ranging satire. I do not mean, of course, that Pamela is a mere literary bystander struck down in someone else's fracas—Fielding obviously disliked it. But Shamela is rather an exploitation than an expose of its older soberer sister. Paradoxically, the exploitation may be more devastating…”
In these first few letters, we learn of Pamela/Shamela’s true character—she is not an innocent, not a guileless young woman beset upon by her concupiscent master. Rather, she has already slept with Parson Williams, which whom it seems she has had an illegitimate child, and is deliberately trying to seduce the Squire, albeit in order to marry him, not just sleep with him—”No, Mrs. Jervis, nothing under a regular taking into Keeping, a settled Settlement, for me, and all my Heirs, all my whole Life-time, shall do the Business—or else cross-legged, is the Word, faith, with Sham” (18).
Shamela comes across as flippant, hot-tempered, and naive; she chastises her mother for reminding her about her slip with the parson, and says “Let me do what I will, I say my Prayers as often as another, and I read good Books, as often as I have Leisure; and Parson William says, that will make amends” (15). She whines and complains when she does not get her way, proclaiming, “Oh what a prodigious Vexation it is to a Woman to be made a Fool of” (17). Fielding often suggests her immorality and propensity to fraud and fakery: words like “counterfeit,” “pretended,” and “feigns” are commonly used, and at one point Shamela says it is difficult “to keep one’s Countenance, when a violent Laugh desires to burst forth” (18). And of course, “Sham” is a word that means trickery or hoax, so there is the constant reminder of who this woman really is.
Beyond the humor, though, Fielding calls attention to some real contemporary concerns about female chastity. Scholars have written extensively about this, and about how “chastity” was not an objective truth but was, as Soile Ylivuori writes, a “performative identity,” and an “intricate system of dissimulation and dishonesty.” What this means, Ylivuori explains, is that “Since all the signs of chastity were openly discussed, the fact that debauched women could imitate these signs to hide their loss of virtue was a constant concern for contemporary critics.” Pamela and its spinoffs were “perhaps the best demonstration of the tremendous anxiety caused by the possibility of faked modesty, Shamela and other parodies highlighting the supposed danger posed by artful women to men and the whole society.” Parson Oliver’s warnings about the dangers the text holds for everyone who reads it—especially young men and women—are thus rooted in contemporary worries and fixations.
