Pamela: Irony 5 key examples

Pamela has no idea that Mr. B. is not sending her home, but rather to his Lincolnshire estate. There, she is to endure innumerable cruelties at the hand of Mrs. Jewkes and Mr. B. The editor cuts in to let the reader know that things are about to get worse for Pamela. But she seems to fully believe that her greatest challenges with Mr. B. are over. It is especially ironic that Pamela promises to fill her parents in when she sees them in person "if I have not time to write." The bulk of Pamela's writing is in the journal that follows the 32 letters, so it is clear that she will have plenty of time to write. However, Mr. B. will prevent her from sending most of her writing to her parents.

Pamela's belief that she is going home plays into her role as a heartbreakingly naive heroine. She has lived such a sheltered life until now, it seems, that she never suspects that things could get worse for her. Pamela is not always a clever character (at least on the surface), but Richardson takes pains to invite the reader's sympathy for her precisely because she is not clever in the ways of the world. She is so virtuous, he implies, that she believes the best in people when she ought to be far more suspicious.

On the other hand, Pamela does end up happily married to Mr. B. Whereas he spends the first half of the book insisting that he does not want to be married, he relents at last. By marrying him, Pamela climbs up the social ladder. This drastic change in her fortune suggests that Pamela could be more savvy than she first appears. It opens the possibility that Pamela knows more than she is letting on when Mr. B. sends her away.

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.

Mr. B. may treat Pamela terribly—in fact, she sometimes refers to him as the devil. However, she finds that she also cares about him. She thinks that it must be her loyalty to Lady B., whom Pamela served until her death, that has made her more forgiving toward Mr. B. than she maybe ought to be. She does not want him to die. What's more, because she has such fond feelings for his mother, Pamela is convinced that Mr. B. has the capacity to "cease his Attempts [to assault her] and reform." If only he were to do this, Pamela imagines that he could become an angel in her view.

Pamela's belief that Mr. B. just needs to reform in order for all to be forgiven is difficult to take in given modern understandings of domestic abuse. Survivors of abuse frequently have mixed feelings toward their abusers and might choose not to leave an abusive situation because of their belief that their abuser is, at heart, a good person. But as the book goes on, it becomes clear that Richardson himself really believes that Mr. B. has the capacity to reform, and that when he does so, his relationship with Pamela will be healthy. Richardson is typically considered a psychological novelist who is interested in the inner workings of his characters' minds. This is one way in which his characters seem less like real people and more like caricatures he invents to impart a lesson about morality and redemption.

The reader has already seen a version of this letter. In Letter 31, Pamela tells her parents about her plan to get away from Mr. B. and return home to them. Richardson then cuts in to reveal that Mr. B. is fooling Pamela: he is in fact sending her to another house he owns. Richardson includes a letter Pamela manages to send to Mrs. Jervis, assuring the woman and Pamela's parents that while she has been kidnapped and can't share many details, she is nonetheless safe. Now, encountering the same letter in Pamela's journal, the reader learns that Mr. B. "prescribed" it for her (wrote it ahead).
Even this letter to Mrs. Jervis, which previously stood out as a way Pamela was fighting back against her captor, was part of his master plan to manipulate everyone. The people most interested in protecting Pamela believe that she is safe because she has told them so—except that it was not her, after all, who wrote those words. Mr. B. thus buys himself some time to do what he wants to Pamela without the interference of worried parents or protectors. The reader now sits in suspense, wondering just how bad things will get for Pamela.

Pamela is not at fault for Mr. B.'s manipulation, but this revelation nonetheless demonstrates that just because Pamela writes something and signs her name to it does not mean that it is really true. Almost the entire novel consists of her letters and journals, documents typically associated with authenticity. But Mr. B. has the power to read and influence Pamela's writing. Likewise, Richardson, as the book's editor, can also decide what material to present and how to present it. Richardson is playing with the idea that the truth is always being mediated, even in someone's journal or letters.

Pamela compares families to well-established plants with complex root structures. Just because a poor family cannot point out how deep its roots run, she argues, does not mean that it isn't just as honorable or well-established as a rich family. Gentry, or upper-class families, generally have detailed records of their family histories for a variety of reasons. For one thing, they understand these records to secure their families' places forever in the gentry, where they enjoy riches and disproportionate influence over politics. Showing off one's lineage was well-established among rich people by the time Richardson was writing. On top of their motivation for keeping records, rich families have also had the means to do so for much longer than poorer families. They could read and write, they had access to paper and ink long before these resources were widely available, and they had family libraries where they could store records long before the internet made data storage more accessible. But, as Pamela argues, rich families' "elaborate" records often reveal a history of "good-for-nothingness." Instead of praising the mere existence of elaborate records, Pamela wonders why people don't look for a real, "rooted" history of honor, like there is in her family.

What Pamela does not quite note here is the irony that Lady Davers takes issue with Pamela's suitability to marry Mr. B., rather than the other way around. Mr. B. is the one who has behaved horribly toward Pamela. If one of them is lacking honor, it is certainly him. Pamela's suggestion that her family is just as well-rooted as Mr. B.'s is somewhat radical given 18th-century class politics. Richardson helps the reader digest it by packaging it in this situational irony. Pamela's parents in fact used to be rich, so she is not as far from Mr. B.'s social status as she could be. The fact that they are not so far apart socially coaxes more conservative readers to drop their own elitism and consider Pamela's metaphor in light of the fact that she is so much more morally upstanding than Mr. B.