And in the end, Flint concludes that Pamela's reward is "a kind of self-annihilation, a willed penetration into the system that victimized her in the first place" (510). Richardson is able in the novel to both destroy and support the patriarchal order of the novel. .
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Folkenflik, Robert. "Pamela: Domestic Servitude, Marriage, and the Novel." Eighteenth Century Fiction. Apr 1993, 5:3, 253-68.
Folkenflik approaches Pamela as a view of "'social and relative duties,' centering on the relation of self to others and the tensions between social and religious roles" (253). While tracing Pamela's identity as a servant first and foremost, Folkenflik considers arguments from Ian Watt, Nancy Miller, and Nancy Armstrong. Mr. B's concern with Pamela's letters and his constant inquiry into them is "devoted to depriving Pamela of her privacy and denying her right to selfhood" (261). Folkenflik concludes his article with this relevant statement; "Rather than representing the rise of female authority, Pamela begins with the loss of female authority in the person of Mr. B's mother, Pamela's employer and teacher, and it ends with Pamela empowered as a mouthpiece for a reinscribed male authority, precisely the relation she bears to her author as well. Mr. B remains her 'Master.' If Richarson portrays the growth to selfhood sympathetically and celebrates the individuality of Pamela, he nevertheless suggests powerfully that the good wife is in many ways the good servant" (268).
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Golden, Morris. "Public Context and Imagining Self in Pamela and Shamela." ELH. Summer 1996, 53:2, 311-329. .
In this essay, Morris Golden gives an interesting account of the relationship of Samuel Richardson to the narrative of Pamela and Shamela. He traces key historical events and figures that bear a relationship and influence on the text. Golden states that "at a time when retrospection on his own life might help Richardson shape Pamela's story, and when the national situation encouraged such a shape, .
