Shamela, Henry Fielding | Earla A. Wilputte (essay date 1994)
Earla A. Wilputte (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: Wilputte, Earla A. “Ambiguous Language and Ambiguous Gender: The ‘Bisexual’ Text of Shamela.” The Modern Language Review 89, no. 3 (July 1994): 561-71.
[In the following essay, Wilputte contends that in his novel Fielding uses sexually ambiguous creatures and bisexuality to represent perversions of language.]
An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741) is too easily dismissed by scholars as not warranting real critical attention. Fielding's parody of Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded is a genuinely comic piece and, as so often happens with comedy, the critics take it apart with reluctance. Fielding's satire exposes Pamela as a prostitute who plays the role of virtuous serving-girl to entrap her booby master into marriage. But the problem in this surface reading of Shamela is that it belies Fielding's more serious purpose.
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