After having read Pamela, I was intrigued about how other writers of the time reacted to the story, and how the story that I as a modern reader saw as revolting due to the actions of Mr. B. was seen by a contemporary reader to Richardson. The first of these parodies is An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, or Shamela for short, by Henry Fielding.
The most obvious change between these two texts is the characterization. While Pamela was depicted as a meek, gentle girl who only seeks to remain virtuous, Shamela is manipulative, driven, and sexual.
Fielding does a similar character flip with Mr. B. In the original text, he was driven by his desires seemingly unprovoked by Pamela, was outmanoeuvring Pamela, and, in modern terms, was effectively a sexual predator. In Fielding's text, however, Mr. Booby is depicted as a fool who is tricked by Shamela to marry her, and playing into her desires by sending her to Lincolnshire rather than having tricked her in doing so.
A further difference that was interesting was the addressee of Shamela's letters. In Pamela, the letters are addressed to her parents and her father. In Shamela, the letters are explicitly addressed to her mother. Where this is seemingly a minute detail, it brings sense to the content discussed in the letters. The issues that Pamela had written about to her parents seemed odd to discuss with her father at times. In having Shamela writing exclusively to her mother, the content feels less odd, and allows for more response by her mother in terms of advice.
This allowance for more responses by the mother makes the conversation feel more realistic, as it feels that the letters are being read. In Pamela, the lack of response and the content of the responses made it seem as if her parents were not truly reading the letters, not to mention the fact that her father blatantly states that they have not read them all. In Shamela, her mother directly references elements of the previous letters, and provides relevant advice to Shamela on how to achieve her goals.
The letters themselves are more realistic in Shamela, not only in their addressee and their content, but also in their length. In Pamela, the letters were long, and very detailed about every encounter between Pamela and Mr. B., which made them seem impossible to have been written by Pamela in the timeline presented. Their length also made them hard to get through reading them all (it is easy to see why her parents didn't, that's for sure). Shamela's letters are shorter, and only discuss highlights and important details concerning what is happening to her. By keeping the letters shorter, they are more realistic and are easier to retain the information from, since they were not muddled with other information, like Pamela's continuous update concerning her paper (maybe she would have had more paper if she wasn't using it all to talk about how little she has left).
Although Shamela was written as a critiquing parody to Pamela as it was seen as giving maids ideas of marrying their masters, the break from the patriarchal structure that the original had is interesting. Although the text is still very misogynistic, as Shamela is presented as a negative character, the representation of Shamela as outsmarting Mr. Booby is far more interesting to read, and a far more pleasant one too.