Pamela: Situational Irony 2 key examples

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.

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.