[In the following excerpt, Potter argues that Shamela displays the coherent ideology of libertinism that Fielding embraced, with its rejection of contemporary standards of virtue, religious dogma, and vision of human behavior.]

Shamela and Joseph Andrews form a transition between Fielding's dramatic career and his career as a novelist, and both works are informed by the developing Georgian libertinism. Shamela (1741) is a brief but brutally effective satirical revision of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). It exposes what Fielding regarded as the moral complacency of the novel, particularly Pamela's conscious virtue, which is held up as a commodity that treacherous servant girls might exchange for marriage and high life. Joseph Andrews (1742) moves past the clever parody that informs Shamela and into the novel proper; it is a panorama of eighteenth-century life that reveals more effective examples of individual morality and libertinism than are tendered in either Shamela or Pamela.

Like The Modern Husband, the deliberately titillating main action of Shamela is tinted with a representation of a more established morality. This, of course, is exactly what Fielding perceived Richardson to have done, except that Richardson successfully marketed his version as a moralist tract without regard for its obviously self-contradictory nature: the title page of the equally titillating Pamela states that it is “[p]ublished in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes.” Fielding appropriates the events of Pamela, actively subverts the novel's voice, and rejects its construction of morality. He replaces Richardson's “virtue” with a new implied morality in which honesty and individualism are more important to goodness than thoughtlessly prized traits of technical virginity and consciously enacted modesty and humility.

Shamela and Parson Williams are contemptible not for their sexual relationship (especially before Shamela's marriage), but for their hypocrisy and dishonesty in denying their relationship, and for the ridiculous ways in which Williams guides Shamela to rationalize her sexuality as a part of healthy religious worship. Fielding's derision of these characters' manipulations and rationalizations clearly manifests his libertine frustration with such pseudo-moralism. The two characters challenge socially imposed limitations on individual sexuality, yet allow themselves to be so burdened by social mores that they must attempt to reconcile their actions to social constructs of religious morality. Thus do they fail at both good nature (which would preclude the mercenary goal of the deceit) and libertinism (which would celebrate their independence of social stricture). Here is the first clear fictional embodiment of the failed libertine, begun in dramatic characters like the priest-ridden Old Jourdain of The Old Debauchees: a character attains all or most of the qualities that enable libertine autonomy of thought, action, religion, and sexuality, but eventually lacks the social privilege, personal empowerment, or will necessary to emerge as a self-determining individual. That these men and women fall repeatedly back into their socially constructed roles suggests that Fielding recognized the difficulty of achieving the powerful and individuated position of fully integrated good-natured Georgian libertine.

By writing a book as explicitly bawdy as Shamela, and mocking a work as widely admired as Pamela, Fielding again exhibited the libertine independence of thought and position which allowed him to defy so ably entrenched public morality with plays like The Covent Garden Tragedy. He positions himself as intellectually and morally superior to the gullible masses who, like Mr B., are susceptible to the mercantile virtue of Richardson and Pamela. As Claude Rawson suggests, “Fielding's limited but hearty freedoms with ‘low’ matter and language doubtless sprang from natural gusto combined with a pointed superiority to the straight-laced middle class form” (Order 287). Such critical observations about Fielding and his narrators are not uncommon, but none of the critics who make them observe the obvious connection to the discourse of libertinism in which elements such as naturalism, the energy and individualism implied in “gusto,” and the “pointed superiority” of position form a coherent and consistent platform from which Fielding and other libertine writers declaim.

As a part of the ongoing reclamation and redefinition of the ideology of libertinism for the Georgian period, Fielding first denies the validity of the popularly constructed understanding of virtue, which, particularly for women in eighteenth-century England, had become almost fully equated with sexual virginity. The absence of definition thus created by Shamela is remedied most fully in Joseph Andrews (and augmented by the subsequent novels), but Fielding also addresses the constitution of virtue in sources like the Champion. His essay of 24 January 1739/40 offers an extended definition of virtue that, in accordance with his more permissive and individualist understanding, aligns virtue with the new moralist Georgian libertinism developing in parallel to the traditional conceptions of virtue and libertinism. Standard definitions of both virtue and libertinism are rooted in their Restoration discourses, but they eventually collapse into the false and extreme positions that Fielding rebuts with his new virtue and the Georgian libertine moralism to which it contributes:

Virtue is not that coy, nor that cruel mistress she is represented. Nor is she of that morose and rigid nature, which some mistake her to be … Nor hath the virtuous man less advantage in the ways of pleasure. Virtue forbids not the satisfying our appetites, virtue forbids us only to glut and destroy them. The temperate man tastes and relishes pleasure in a degree infinitely superior to that of the voluptuous. The body of the voluptuous man soon becomes impaired, his palate soon loses its taste, his nerves become soon unbraced and unfit to perform their office: whereas, the temperate body is still preserved in health, its nerves retain their full tone and vigour, and convey to the mind the most exquisite sensations. The sot soon ceases to enjoy his wine, the glutton his dainties, and the libertine his women. The temperate man enjoys all in the highest degree, and indeed with the greatest variety: for human nature will not suffice for an excess in every passion, and wherever one runs away with a man, we may generally observe him sacrificing all the rest to the enjoyment of that alone. The virtuous and temperate man only hath inclination, hath strength; and (if I may be indulged in the expression), hath opportunity to enjoy all his passions.

Poverty is so far from being enjoined us by virtue, that parsimony, which she expressly prescribes, is a certain way to wealth. Indeeds [sic] she suffers us not by any base or mean arts, by imposing or preying on others, to rush, as it were, into immense fortunes … It is needless to run through any other instance, we shall find in all, that virtue indulges us in the use, and preserves us from the abuse of our passions.

In Fielding's definition virtue is an active process of consideration of each set of specific circumstances, rather than a set of prescriptive social limitations of thought and action. His virtue allows the individual to participate in the world intellectually, economically, socially, and sexually as long as no other individual is intentionally injured in the process: one cannot gain power “by all means whatever,” but one should be able to indulge natural appetites without censure. This is the virtue that informs Fielding's vision of the libertinism of his day. …

Shamela similarly challenges blind acceptance of religious dogma without consideration of a given situation or the needs of the individual. But even more, Fielding demonstrates through the character of Parson Williams the naiveté inherent in any generalized assumption that religious association infallibly manifests good nature or true virtue. He uses Williams to attack not the clergy as a whole, but the specific behaviour of specific members of the clergy, who would injure others spiritually, socially, and economically to satisfy their own appetites. Fielding later implies in the events of Joseph Andrews what he states explicitly in another Champion essay: if “a few unworthy members creep in [to the clergy], it is certainly doing a serviceable office to the body to detect and expose them; nay, it is what the sound and uncorrupt part should not only be pleased with, but themselves endeavour to execute, especially if they are suspicious of, of offended at contempt or ridicule” (29 March 1740). Fielding serves equal blame and ridicule, however, to those who would indulge blind faith over good faith, much as he did in the more vitriolic attacks on Catholic priests in The Old Debauchees. As Parson Oliver states in the penultimate frame letter of Shamela, “what Scandal doth it throw on the Order to have one bad member, unless they endeavour to screen and protect him?” (304). Institutionalized Christianity deserves censure when it too loses the qualities of good nature that are supposed to serve congregations. If, by failing to censure, the Church ceases to bring comfort and happiness and prevent misery and misfortune, it is as deserving of scandal as the hypocritical parson or the thoughtlessly victimized parishioner. Fielding's libertine requires not atheistic rejection of religion, but conscientious moral evaluation at each of these levels, even as he recognizes that just by hinting that a member of the holy orders had behaved ill, one might be “arraigned for spreading such invectives, with a malicious design of bringing the whole body of the clergy into contempt” (Champion 29 March 1740).

Williams might be termed a libertine by those who misunderstand libertinism to represent only sexual licentiousness, but it is clear that his damaging and aggressive self-serving character does not belong among Fielding's other actively libertine characters such as Old Laroon, Julian the Apostate, and Tom Jones. He is instead one of the failed Restoration-style libertines against whom Fielding's heroes are held, from Squire Western and the youthful Mr Wilson, to Mr Modern and Amelia's Noble Peer, for he uses his knowledge and position to coerce sexual acquiescence from young women. While Shamela is at the time of the fictional exchanges of letters a jaded and conniving woman of the world, she was once, we must suspect, a younger and more innocent servant girl who entered into an illicit, but natural and pleasurable sexual relationship with Williams, which resulted in the birth of a bastard child. Other than carelessness and the unreasonable social barrier against women (virtuous or not) who are not virgins, such a scenario—assuming that it was entered into willingly by both parties—is not particularly damaging.

The relationship reveals its anti-libertine elements, however, when one considers that Shamela, while clever at deceiving her dull master, is herself passive and trusting when it comes to the spiritual guidance of her parson. Instead of offering well-considered, if non-traditional, exegesis of Biblical texts or even the hegemonic Church stance, Williams intentionally misreads texts in order to get what he can from Shamela and his other parishioners. Since Fielding apparently believes in an afterlife (he repeats that Heaven is where one should anticipate rewards for earthly virtue), Williams does Shamela a great spiritual wrong as he persuades her to plan for “Pleasures, which tho' not strictly innocent, are however to be purged away by frequent and sincere Repentance” (287), a plan that smacks of purchasing pardons against future sins. He preaches “Be not righteous overmuch” in a way that twists the generally understood anti-sanctimonial meaning of the text into an encouragement of unconsidered sin. Shamela records that she has also learned from Williams's sermon that “those People who talk of Vartue and morality, are the wickedest of all Persons. That 'tis not what we do, but what we believe that must save us” (288). While these suggestions obviously echo the teachings of Whitefield and the Methodists (consistently a subject of derision in Fielding's works), they are also, in Fielding's mind, dangerous to the soul. Using such enticements to manipulate others violates the doctrine of good nature and its admonitions against damage to others (as well as the necessary rejection of “the Allurements or Terrors of Religion” [Miscellanies I 158]).

Finally, Williams acts against Fielding's libertinism when he counsels the Willing Shamela to commit adultery. Consensual and non-manipulative sexual contact between two unmarried adults is quite acceptable in Fielding's Georgian libertine code, but, as we have seen in The Modern Husband, adultery is not tolerated, as it no longer involves only the two sexual partners. Williams explains to Shamela that “the Flesh and the Spirit were two distinct Matters, which had not the least relation to each other … Therefore, says he, my Dear, you have two Husbands, one the Object of your Love, and to satisfy your Desire; the other the Object of your Necessity, and to furnish you with those other Conveniencies … as then the Spirit is preferable to the Flesh, so am I preferable to your other Husband, to whom I am antecedent in Time likewise. I say these things, my Dear, (said he) to satisfie your Conscience” (301). Shamela's complicitous conscience may be satisfied, but Fielding is not, and neither is the standard of Georgian libertinism.

It is unusual to view Shamela as something of a victim; she is traditionally read as the “monster of selfish ambition” (Smallwood 51), the scheming victimizer of the ludicrously gullible Mr Booby. This standard reading is also appropriate, and I will discuss it shortly, but I think it is necessary to look at both sides of Shamela's character. She is considerably less knowing, for example, than is generally assumed. She does manipulate and pursue Booby (with help from Williams and her mother, who encourages her to “make a good Market” of her person), but she is uneducated and unsophisticated, and so is herself easily manipulated by Parson Williams. Further, for all of her affected innocence of flirtatious discourse and the revelations of sexual knowledge which invariably follow, Shamela consistently misses puns and jests of which she is the object: her position outside of the hegemonic masculinist grouping of wit, power, and wordly knowledge remains unchanged. In one scene, Shamela pretends not to know what Booby means when he tells her “you can give me Pleasure if you will” and then immediately confirms her knowledge of Booby's sexual arousal as she reports being pulled into his lap: “O Mamma, I could tell you something if I would.” In the same paragraph, however, Mrs Jewkes “took a Glass and drank the dear Monysyllable” (291), a standard bawdy toast which Shamela admits to her mother she does not understand. More significant is the echo of this incident near the end of the letters and after Shamela's marriage to Booby. Both Williams and Booby make toasts to “et caetera,” another pun on the female genitalia. Shamela again is ignorant of the joke of which she is the object, and the joke only gets extended when she asks “if it was not a Health to Mr Booby's Borough, and Mr Williams with a hearty Laugh answered, Yes, Yes, it is his Borough we mean” (301-2). At the same time that Shamela triumphantly uses her “vartue” and sexuality to connive her way into marriage with Booby, she surrenders much of her autonomy and becomes the objectified sexual possession of her husband: his “burrow.”

She continues her affair with Williams, of course, but since Fielding's goal is to reveal the mercenary qualities of Pamela, since we are intended to sympathize at least somewhat with the obviously victimized Booby, and since adulterous sexuality is beyond the protection of libertine self-determination, she is caught and punished for her adultery, and loses all that she has gained through her cleverness and empowered agency.

Shamela is something of a victim of both the anti-libertine drives and thoughtless manipulation of power by Parson Williams and the longstanding tradition of a masculinist social organization (with both a husband and a lover who do not subscribe to any form of belief in an expanded gender equality). This is not to say, however, that she does not herself attempt to use, in the grasping and self-serving way of the Restoration, the tools of libertinism to dissemble her way into the master bedroom. Though Fielding's belief in and support of the class system, which enabled him to write with his tone of confidence and superiority, aligns him ideologically with Mr Booby and against the upward mobility of Shamela, he also clearly finds both Richardson's Mr B. and his own Mr Booby foolish and credulous. The result is a work that satirizes both central characters, Booby for being gullible and driven by uncontrolled and unconsidered appetite (despite his social power) into the untenable position of either an unequal marriage or rape, and Shamela because she uses the tools of libertinism not to enable love or even desire, but out of avarice and lust for an adulterous lover.

Shamela enacts the role of old-style libertine effectively, demonstrating exactly the type of interpretation of independence and social subversion that Fielding rejects in his more positively represented Georgian libertinism. Most significantly, she manipulates social constructions of virtue and generalized moral beliefs by playing the very role she violates by knowingly playing it. She appropriates the behaviour and simulates the beliefs of the virginal and beautiful but subservient and powerless servant girl Booby assumes her to be even as he accuses her of manipulation. She tells Mrs Jewkes, “I would not be Mistress to the greatest King, no nor Lord in the Universe. I value my Vartue more than I do any thing my Master can give me” (289). She announces this, however, only after realizing that her initial goal of “a regular taking into Keeping, a settled Settlement, for me, and all my Heirs, all my whole Lifetime” (283) has become too easy to attain from her lustful master, and she decides to “make a great [fortune] by my Vartue” (293). As she flirts verbally, pulls down her stays to expose her breasts, and enacts numberless ruses to arouse Booby and then deny him, Shamela exemplifies exactly James Turner's assertion that for libertines of the old style, “Libertine sexuality cannot be understood simply as a surrender to spontaneous physicality; it is inseparable from the cerebral triumph over the opposite sex, from mastery exercised through tactical reason” (“Paradoxes” 71). After her marriage, Shamela writes to her mother that “Times are finely altered, I have entirely got the better of him, and am resolved never to give him his Humour. O how foolish it is in a Woman, who hath once got the Reins into her own Hand, ever to quit them again” (301). She has won power through her tactical superiority over her ostensible master, and holds the reins over his uncontrolled animal appetite. To Shamela, the social form of virtue becomes “vartue,” and is only “a charming Word.” Though she blesses the “Soul who first invented it” (290), she reinvents it as she reinvents herself, both marketable commodities in the distorted values of popular England.

This reinvention of virtue as a tool to entrap the very class that would banish a woman for lacking the traditional version is echoed in the multiple reinventions of Shamela in her various autodiegetic endeavours. She both gains and demonstrates individual power and a sense of superiority as she reports her clever deceits and manipulations to her mother by letter. She controls not only the representation of her own character (as not traditionally virtuous, but witty, ingenious, and, of course, stunningly beautiful), but also that of Mr Booby. While Booby holds the publicly recognized power in the fictional reality of the relationship, Shamela has the power in her reporting to make him more ridiculous than he may be, thus tempting the reader to believe he deserves his fate, married (however briefly) to a treacherous and adulterous wife.

Rawson addresses this issue briefly, but instead of recognizing the libertine empowerment of Shamela via her independent thought and fictional control in dictating her own story, he grants those qualities directly to Fielding. It is true that, as I have noted above, the ultimate power of narrative and all of the privilege that comes with it are Fielding's, but Shamela's role in her own fictional and metafictional world must also be considered. Rawson, for example, suggests that the placement and frequency of markers like “says she” and “says I” emphasize the satiric issues of self-absorption by the speaker and, significantly, “become part of Fielding's managerial self-display” (Order 270). Again, this is accurate, but Rawson does not examine the impact of those same elements on the fictional narrator of Shamela's tale: Shamela enacts the same “managerial self-display,” and that is where she most effectively gains not only a libertine authority and power of self-representation, but also the feminine independence valued in the Georgian libertine model. Shamela's autodiegetic exercise grants her the power of author and authority that Fielding's later narrators teach his readers to value. The majority of the actions and schemes she records align her with self-ish and often cruel Restoration libertinism, but the act of recording itself shows the shifting nature of the search for individualism and autonomy in the early eighteenth century. Shamela's self-narrative is only the first in a series of feminine autodiegetic exercises to appear in Fielding's fiction. This device enables his female characters to demonstrate their powers of self-determination, originality, and creation in accordance with Fielding's own libertine belief in the necessity of increased equality between the sexes.

Ironically it is not Shamela's own exercise of narrative authority that causes Parson Oliver's outrage, but that of a third hand hired by Booby to tell their story, presumably in the form of Pamela. Parson Williams assures Shamela that the final version will contain nothing of the truth: “So far on the contrary, if you had not been acquainted with the Name, you would not have known it to be your own History” (303-4). Shamela's final comment is that “all these Matters are strange to me, yet I can't help laughing to think I shall see my self in a printed Book” (304). She does not see herself, however, nor even her own reported version of herself, but Booby's perception of her, mediated by the dramatic sense of the hired hack writer. She has lost control over her story, and in losing that control she is left open to the accusation of deceiving the public, including credulous but influential clergymen like Parson Tickletext, who apparently not only expects blind faith, but exercises it too: when her deception moves from the private sphere to the public domain, her one unintended (and thus uncontrolled) deception results in public humiliation and punishment. It is for her adultery with Williams that she is ultimately turned away by her husband, but it is the deceit for which the public has fallen that makes Tickletext, Oliver, and the implied reader cheer her downfall. Shamela becomes vulnerable to the effects of social limitations on feminine sexuality and autonomy only after she loses her power of autonomous self-representation.

The libertine challenges that Fielding throws down in Shamela reveal his frustration with the reductive and thoughtlessly accepted vision of human behaviour dominating social organization and individual action in his society. As Ian A. Bell suggests, “Fielding sees a society driven by money and outward show, hopelessly gullible and lacking in substance. By engaging in dialogue with that culture's most celebrated literary document, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Fielding is able to begin to build a platform from which he may announce his own oppositional concerns and attitudes” (76). Shamela only begins, though, to tear down traditional standards; the positive engagement, offering an alternate model incorporating many of the central tenets of challenge and independence in Georgian libertinism was still to come in Joseph Andrews and the novels that followed. …

Works Cited

Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews and Shamela (1742, 1741) ed. Homer Goldberg (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1987).

———. Miscellanies: Volume I (1743), ed. Henry Knight Miller (1972).

Rawson, Claude. Order from Confusion Sprung: studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985).