Letters…
Ok so here is the Pamela post and all Pamela related stories ie: Shamela and Anti-Pamela. Maybe this entry is too late to be marked I don’t know but I am gonna go ahead and get it out there anyway. One of the reasons why I never wrote anything in the first place is I really did not know what to say about Pamela. It along with the other stories comprise over 600 pages of letter writting. Granted with the parodies they are making fun of the style, it was in a sense, more of the same.
Oh before I go any further I did get to go see 2012 and it indeed turned out very similar to what I was expecting, but worth the money to see it in the theatre. So back to the task at hand. I really didn’t want to come and write this blog entry and make it some big whine & cheese festival. Looking back on past entries it looks like I am some negative person with how I look at the books. That’s not true though I found faults with the other books, I did enjoy them. Take for example Robinson Crusoe, it is a really good story, and I enjoyed his character. With Pamela though, I couldn’t find a connection from myself to Pamela, Mr B or what have you. The structure didn’t help me either, I didn’t like reading letters over and over. To me a letter in a book seems like it should be seperate in a sense, maybe something that is referred to, but by having it as the constant means of narration was just too much. I know that Prof. Jones really likes this book (as far as I can tell) but it was too big and too much of the same to make me keep my interest.
The rags to riches love stories from this era have always been a turn off for me. I’ve never read Pride and Predjudice or Sense and Sensibility, but the plot loosely seems similar in that a poor girl ends up having some rich dude fall for her. I CAN’T STAND these types of narrative, I can’t even watch them and that only lasts a couple hours. By the way, those caps were’t me shouting so much as being used for emphasis, gotta reserve the italics when referring to actual works. As far as the parodies go, You kind of have to appreciate the source piece to enjoy it being parodied, at least thats how I feel. Like Star Wars and Spaceballs, if you don’t like Star Wars, you probably won’t appreciate Spaceballs as much.
Apparently back when this book came out it was all the rage, so maybe I have just been spoiled by my generation of action movies and complex stories. Reading it now though it plays like a 5 hour You’ve Got Mail and honestly who wants that, it’s just too much. Stories about romance don’t need to be epic in length, at least for my demographic. I couldn’t imagine hanging out with a group of my friends discussing this book,nor can I imagine someone my age discussing this book with friends when it was a new novel, but I guess they did.
I’m trying to figure out a closing bit for this entry but what can I say? Maybe I should give props to it if it spawned all those other similar stories, just to recognize where that style of story came from but I can’t verify that assumption. It was too much letter writting about a relationship that seemed unoriginal to me. I think I have one more blog post in me before Friday, hopefully I can get it to count towards my grade and not just write it for my health. Till then.
