Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Je suis Voltaire,” or, Appropriating the Philosophe in the Social Media Age
- 2 “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”: The Uses of Hamilton in Special Collections Pedagogy and Public Engagement
- 3 Performing Frankenstein in the South: Sex, Race, and Science across the Disciplines
- 4 French Fairy Tales and Adaptations in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom
- 5 Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bailey (1742) and Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001)
- 6 Teaching with The Pilgrim’s Progress Video Game
- 7 Eliza Haywood’s “Bad Habits”: Teaching Adaptations of Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze and The Distress’d Orphan; or, Love in a Madhouse
- 8 Teaching Eighteenth-Century Literature through Eighteenth- Century Adaptations: Adaptive Structures
- 9 “A Private Had Been Flogged”: Adaptation and the “Invisible World” of Jane Austen
- 10 Fifty Shades of Pamela in the Undergraduate Classroom
- 11 Teaching the Austen-Monster-Mashup: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
- 12 Learning to Adapt: Teaching Pride and Prejudice and Its Adaptations in General Education Courses
- 13 Race and Romance: Adapting Free Women of Color in the Long Eighteenth Century
- 14 The Crusoeiana: Material Crusoe
- 15 Adaptation in Strange Places: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder and the Narrative Effect and Form of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
- 16 Adapting the Tombeaux des Princes: A Study in Media Variations
- 17 Experiential Pedagogy to Join the Thread of Conversation with Paul et Virginie
- 18 “Lookin’ for a Mind at Work”: Hamilton, Adaptation, and Enlightenment Ideals for the Core Curriculum
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
10 - Fifty Shades of Pamela in the Undergraduate Classroom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Je suis Voltaire,” or, Appropriating the Philosophe in the Social Media Age
- 2 “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”: The Uses of Hamilton in Special Collections Pedagogy and Public Engagement
- 3 Performing Frankenstein in the South: Sex, Race, and Science across the Disciplines
- 4 French Fairy Tales and Adaptations in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom
- 5 Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bailey (1742) and Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001)
- 6 Teaching with The Pilgrim’s Progress Video Game
- 7 Eliza Haywood’s “Bad Habits”: Teaching Adaptations of Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze and The Distress’d Orphan; or, Love in a Madhouse
- 8 Teaching Eighteenth-Century Literature through Eighteenth- Century Adaptations: Adaptive Structures
- 9 “A Private Had Been Flogged”: Adaptation and the “Invisible World” of Jane Austen
- 10 Fifty Shades of Pamela in the Undergraduate Classroom
- 11 Teaching the Austen-Monster-Mashup: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
- 12 Learning to Adapt: Teaching Pride and Prejudice and Its Adaptations in General Education Courses
- 13 Race and Romance: Adapting Free Women of Color in the Long Eighteenth Century
- 14 The Crusoeiana: Material Crusoe
- 15 Adaptation in Strange Places: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder and the Narrative Effect and Form of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
- 16 Adapting the Tombeaux des Princes: A Study in Media Variations
- 17 Experiential Pedagogy to Join the Thread of Conversation with Paul et Virginie
- 18 “Lookin’ for a Mind at Work”: Hamilton, Adaptation, and Enlightenment Ideals for the Core Curriculum
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
In the spring of 2015, in an undergraduate course entitled Desire and Transgression in the Eighteenth Century, my students and I read Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). It just so happened that around the same time, Fifty Shades of Grey was hitting the movie the- atres after the enormous publishing success of the novels of the same title. Having read the novels, I was struck by the similarities between the Twilight fan-fic of E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey and Richardson's game-changing novel. I was pleasantly surprised when several students proposed enthusiastically that Pamela seemed to them to be “the eigh- teenth-century version of Fifty Shades of Grey.” Many of these students professed that Fifty Shades of Grey was currently their “favorite book,” and yet these were the same students who found Mr. B's behavior toward Pamela reprehensible and disturbing. They also found Pamela herself to be annoying, unrealistic, and flat-out unbelievable, for many of the same reasons that Henry Fielding does in his adaptive spoof/critique of Richardson's novel, Shamela (1741). The more we thought about Pamela as a precursor of Fifty Shades of Grey and discussed how both works draw on fairy tales and cultural archetypes, the more students were able to understand the novel and, if not relate to it, understand its appeal. In this chapter, I explore how my students positioned Pamela as a precursor to Fifty Shades of Grey, how our juxtaposition of these texts in discus- sions brought out new and potent types of cultural commentary from the students, and how such a conversation could be further deepened with the inclusion of concepts from adaptation studies.
Student Reactions: Fifty Shades of Grey as Context for Pamela
In literary studies, Pamela has often been discussed as an important develop- ment in the rise of the English-language novel in the eighteenth century, with a focus on its representation of interiority as well as its reification of domestic femininity. For undergraduate students, however, Pamela reads strangely; Pamela herself is difficult to sympathize with, and undergraduate reactions to Mr. B ranged from “creepy” to “gross.”
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- Information
- Adapting the Eighteenth CenturyA Handbook of Pedagogies and Practices, pp. 158 - 168Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020