Pamela: Foreshadowing 3 key examples

Unbeknownst to Pamela, she is not being taken home to her parents, but rather to Mr. B.'s other estate in Lincolnshire. The editor warns the reader to brace for the worst. This warning is especially ominous given the fact that Pamela has spent the entire book so far avoiding Mr. B.'s sexual violence. How much worse could it get for her?

As the reader comes to see, Mr. B. has only just gotten started in his campaign to control Pamela. Up until now, she has at least had the support of several servants, including Mrs. Jervis and, ostensibly, John the footman. At the Lincolnshire estate, Mr. B. cuts Pamela off from such supports. He has manipulated John to interfere with some of Pamela's letters before now, but from this point forward he drops almost all pretense of letting her communicate with her parents. She takes up journal writing, still addressing her entries to her parents, because she can no longer send them letters. He completely isolates her and installs Mrs. Jewkes, a loyal servant of his, to control her every move. Pamela endures the same abuse Mr. B. has been inflicting on her all along, but now she also endures the abuse of a servant who is openly on his side.

Richardson has been criticized, both by his contemporaries and by modern readers, for subjecting Pamela and other fictional heroines (most notably Clarissa Harlowe in Clarissa) to ever-escalating cruelty just to drive forward the plot of his novels. It is sometimes difficult to tell whether Richardson is more interested in condemning or gawking at the "tryals" Mr. B. puts Pamela through. This moment is one of the places where that tension is apparent: the "editor's" tone toward Pamela is sympathetic, but the interjection is also a reminder that the editor and the characters alike are Richardson's fictional inventions. He is not just assembling a set of letters and journal entries but furthermore making up all the "tryals" Pamela is experiencing.

Pamela emphasizes the "brown nodding Horrors of lofty Elms and Pines" all around the big, "lonely" mansion. The poetic image of the "brown horror" of trees was common at this time. For instance, the 17th-century writer and translator John Dryden did a famous translation of Virgil's Aeneid that used this image. It typically signaled danger and adversity to come. Pamela notes that some of the dark trees are elms, which in some traditions are associated with death and are planted near graves. Gothic literature did not really take off until a few decades after Richardson wrote this novel, but Pamela is unmistakably describing a haunted house of the kind that features prominently in gothic novels. She can tell instantly that terrible things are going to happen to her inside the house, just from the way it looks. She uses the imagery to capture her sense of foreboding, which stands in sharp contrast to the hope she felt when she thought she was on her way to her parents' cheery house.

Lady Davers is being quite harsh to Pamela, and Pamela finds her conduct "shocking." What Pamela does not know is that Lady Davers has some reason to disbelieve that Mr. B. and Pamela's relationship is legitimate. Mr. B. has not yet revealed to Pamela that he has a daughter, Miss Goodwin, from his previous relationship with Sally Godfrey. Neither Mr. B. nor Sally behaved especially well in their relationship. By getting Sally pregnant, Mr. B. demonstrated a disregard for women and their social imperative not to have sex before marriage. But Sally was also involved in a failed attempt by her family to trick Mr. B. into marrying her against his will. Sally ran off to Jamaica, and Lady Davers ended up being tasked with raising the baby on her brother's behalf. She changed the baby's last name to Goodwin to disguise her salacious origins.

Lady Davers is cruel, but she is understandably bitter about being forced to deal with the consequences of her brother's ill-advised relationships. The fact that her cruelty to Pamela in this moment goes so unexplained hints at the fact that there is more to know about Lady Davers and her relationship with her brother. But because neither Pamela nor the reader knows this backstory yet, the scene offers the reader the chance to become indignant on Pamela's behalf. Whereas until now her about-face with regard to Mr. B. has seemed ill-advised, the reader can confidently stand with Pamela against the accusations Lady Davers is making.