SOURCE: Wilputte, Earla A. “Ambiguous Language and Ambiguous Gender: The ‘Bisexual’ Text of Shamela.” The Modern Language Review 89, no. 3 (July 1994): 561-71.

In the following essay, Wilputte contends that in his novel Fielding uses sexually ambiguous creatures and bisexuality to represent perversions of language.

An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741) is too easily dismissed by scholars as not warranting real critical attention. Fielding's parody of Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded is a genuinely comic piece and, as so often happens with comedy, the critics take it apart with reluctance. Fielding's satire exposes Pamela as a prostitute who plays the role of virtuous serving-girl to entrap her booby master into marriage. But the problem in this surface reading of Shamela is that it belies Fielding's more serious purpose.

In Shamela, Fielding proclaims that something has gone wrong with the sociolinguistic use of the moral vocabulary. His focus...