Influence or “Influenza”? Pamela, Anti-Pamela, and the Tradition of Women’s Amatory Fiction

The publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in November 1740 was an immediate success, and the frenzy over the immensely popular novel quickly developed into an unprecedented sensational event commonly called “the Pamela controversy.” Among the very first literary responses to the Pamela vogue are Henry Fielding’s Shamela (April 1741) and Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (June 1741), published within less than two months from each other. A closer look at the three novels, however, reveals that Haywood’s Anti-Pamela is curiously closer in style to Richardson’s Pamela than to Fielding’s Shamela, despite the fact that both Fielding and Haywood aim at attacking Richardson with their parodic novels. As one of the first attempts to deal with the intertextual influences between Richardson’s Pamela and Haywood’s much neglected work Anti-Pamela, in this essay I argue that the similarity in style between the two texts comes not from Haywood’s imitating Richardson, but rather from Richardson’s incorporating elements from the tradition of women’s amatory fiction, of which Haywood’s works in the 1720s constitute a significant part. In other words, despite his consistent disparagement of such writings by women as “influenza,” Richardson’s text betrays his indebtedness to Haywood, and in composing Anti-Pamela, Haywood does not depart much from her earlier novelistic style, thus leading to the false impression that Haywood is following Richardson in style. The analysis in the essay shows that the textual exchanges between Richardson and Haywood are never one-directional but intricately multi-directional, reflecting the complicated situation one encounters when trying to reconstruct the “true” history of the rise and development of the English novel.