In the movie Team America, World Police (yes, I know, weird reference, but I am going somewhere with this, I promise, so stick with me here!) there is a scene in which the main character gets drunk in a bar after alienating his team. He ends up alone in a back alley, and with emotional music playing in the background, he vomites. Perhaps it was meant to symbolize his disgust with himself, or his purging himself of negativity or perhaps it was meant for the viewer to see just how far the man sunk. Whatever the case, he falls down, spent after omitting. But then he vomits again (with the music playing again, of course). He lays down again. Then he vomits AGAIN and the music plays AGAIN. I forget how many times it happens, but suffice it to say, it happens enough times for the viewer to wonder if THEY might vomit.
That's how I feel Pamela was trying to drive home the point of virginity. It just happened again and again, with Pamela vomitting out these words of virtue and virginity and upholding her family's honour. The scene where she runs through the house praying in every single room is just so unneccesary. It's the vomitting scene all over again. It's an overdone message that loses its significance in its redundancy. I think this is why Fielding felt he needed to write Jones. He needed to create a character that doesn't just regurgitate the morals they were taught in Sunday school.
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I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first time these two were put together. But this odd-ball pairing has helped me get a handle on some elements: Team America is a parody; the vomit scene is funny (like the peeing scene in Austen Powers) because it takes a pretty common movie element and just carries it on too long. Fielding, for whom parody was something of a natural mode, easily does the same thing in Shamela, for example, when Booby yells at Shamela: saucebox, pert, pert, saucebox, on and on for too long. What made Richardson such an irresistible target for Fielding is that he did not seem aware that some of his scenes are ridiculous; he is unintentionally funny; to take his scenes seriously requires an earnest, sincere, sentimental attitude that was about as natural or desirable to Fielding as it would be to Jerry Seinfeld. Arguably, Fielding has a bigger problem with naive reading (or writing) than with any of Pamela's messages about virginity or interclass marriage (remember that Fielding married his own maid--presumably for different reasons than Mr. B--something that oddly, Richardson would probably have disapproved of).
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