and changing role of women in society. One of the ways in which feminism is shown in the text is through allowing readers to see the depths of women (i.e. their emotions, feelings, thoughts) rather than seeing women at surface level. However, the poor treatment of Pamela herself, and her intense consideration to her virtue- a societal construct founded in moral religion- might also suggest the opposite. Richardson himself was not a feminist, and Pamela consisted of the traditional lily-white heroine trope embellished with a sense of naivety (with Pamela being only fifteen years old.) With respect to authorial intent, Pamela was only driven by here intense fear of having her virtue compromised, and her motivation to keep her virtue intact provided a very narrow scope of womanhood and the sex as a whole. The controversy over the novel is present and ongoing. The epistolary form in which Pamela is written enables readers of the novel to see inside Pamela's mind and, in doing so, readers are able to better understand her identity and the ways her identity as a woman of lower socioeconomic status intersect and are bound up in that identity. Kacy Tillman compares the written "letter" to the body of the scribe (or "paper body" of which writers and readers of letters struggle to control. Tillman's writes, "...in early American novels, the letter served as a kind of paper body, a contested space where women writers and their readers vied for control over the female body, symbolizing the broader cultural struggle in which women were enmeshed during and shortly after the Revolution" (124), and in Tillman's article she posits that a relationship exists between “epistolarity and gender construction in early American novels: that women were expected to follow an epistolary code of ethics, which men could violate or manipulate as they saw fit: the control of a paper body was connected to the control of a physical one; and that women who failed (even despite trying to abide by the rules of epistolarity) risked ruin" (125). Within the first few chapters of Pamela, Virtue Rewarded, Pamela is concerned because one of her letters has been lost. Also, in an instance when Mr. B notices Pamela writing a letter, he asks to read it and, because he's her master, she allows him to do so. Of course, Mr. B doesn't find anything written in the letter that he