Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  This reading coheres closely with a view of Lovelace as a rake, a model of a male stance towards women that was soon to become unfashionable, in no small part due to the endeavours of Richardson. The model of the rake would be eclipsed by the model of the feminised man of feeling.

  This reading of Lovelace – which happens not to be mine – finds a great deal of support in the text. In his letters to his rakish male friends Lovelace is much concerned to present himself as a great seducer and abandoner of maidens, particularly of middle-class maidens whose fathers and brothers don’t have the training with weapons, or, when matters really get serious, the political connections which would enable them to take their revenge. In this reading Clarissa represents the greatest challenge that Lovelace has yet faced: a girl of irreproachable virtue and great self-possession, a member of a family that, without having any lineage, is nevertheless powerful. Bringing down the girl would bring down the family, teach it a lesson. It would also prove a point about the will to virtue in women in general: that it is not proof against the traitorous sexual desire which a skilful seducer can arouse in them. The soul or spirit in a woman is an undeveloped entity: the seducer drives home the lesson that woman is body.

  This is effectively what Lovelace says in his letters to his friends. His courtship of Clarissa is part of a plot against the Harlowes and what they represent, as well as of a general plot against women. Lovelace, in this reading, is an entirely self-aware person. He knows what he is up to.

  Knowing what he is up to entails, to his mind, knowing what he is up against. This is, of course, his biggest mistake. In Clarissa he is up against a rock-like virtue. Unable to move it, he is eventually driven to force it. Of course he knows that the resort to force is an admission of failure. But at the beginning he does have a way of justifying the rape, of integrating it into his ideological project. In the folklore of the rake, even unwilling contact with the magic of the phallus will sexualise a girl.

  Lovelace is a hunter, a man who speaks of women as his ‘sportive prey’. I need hardly remark that Richardson is less than fair to hunting as a sport, as he is less than fair to Lovelace and his code throughout. Whether or not Lovelace is a good exemplar of his class, he invokes the code of that class, which is a code of nobility, archaic, masculine, pre-individualist, based on warfare and the hunt. The demands of the code can be evaded only at the cost of forfeiting one’s manhood and becoming a slave or a woman. Richardson dislikes the code and attacks its prized values, denigrating them and asserting counter-values that turn weakness into a strength.

  In contrast to Lovelace is Clarissa herself. Clarissa, at least in one influential reading, does not fully know herself. The mistakes she makes in relation to Lovelace – principally the mistake of running away with him – result from an attraction to him that she spends a lot of her time denying, and a hope, against her better judgement, that eventually he can be made to turn into the kind of man she wants him to be, that is to say, a gentle and attentive lover and husband.

  Whether it is possible to domesticate a rake and woman-hunter like Lovelace without destroying most of what makes him interesting and even attractive – his wit, his energy, his continual self-invention – is a question that Clarissa does not ask herself and that Richardson, by implication, answers in the negative. (There is a tamed and reformed version of Lovelace in the book – Lovelace’s friend Belford – and marriage between Clarissa and Belford is one of the directions that the plot could in theory take. Belford is a nice enough man. But merely to be in Clarissa’s proximity he has to desexualise himself and treat her not as a woman but as an angel, that is to say, as a creature marked as of a higher order by its asexuality.)

  Without going into textual particulars, let me offer an alternative understanding of Lovelace: as a man who is smitten by the beauty of a woman, who presents to his circle of fellow rakes a face or mask that hides his feelings, and who is animated, with respect to the woman herself, by feelings that he does not understand but which certainly include baffled rage – rage at her impenetrability.

  Through Lovelace, impenetrability becomes a key concept to the understanding of Clarissa, or perhaps just to the understanding of the conception Lovelace has of her. What is there to do with beauty, impenetrable and self-enclosed as it is, except to stand outside it and contemplate it? I quote the Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino: ‘The urgings of a lover are not quenched by beholding or touching any particular body, for it is not this or that body that he desires but the splendour of the celestial majesty shining through bodies, a splendour that fills him with wonder. That is the reason why lovers do not know what they desire, what they seek: because they do not know God.’2

  II Virginity

  If we are going to talk about penetrability, we must talk about virginity and about the cultural and religious meanings of virginity, in particular in and around the novel Clarissa.

  In the strand of Christianity represented by Paul, the virginal state – what was sometimes called the vita angelica – is higher than the married state. The Pauline strand is perpetuated in the ascetic tradition of the first two centuries of the Christian era, which offered women freedom from the inferior status determined by their biology in return for a life of celibacy. I quote St Jerome: when a woman becomes a servant of Christ ‘then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called man’.3 Rape is not the only means that Richardson’s Lovelace hopes to use to recall Clarissa from the vita angelica. He also has fantasies of fathering children upon her: the sheer physicality of gestation and motherhood will be an ingenious humiliation, a way of reducing her to her body again.

  The Harlowe family argue that Clarissa’s refusal to marry the candidate of their choice is selfish. Given the lack of appeal of the candidate of their choice, Solmes, this is not a convincing argument. Nevertheless, the accusation of selfishness is one that Clarissa has to wrestle with in private. Her earnest, Puritan way of justifying herself to herself is to respond that there is an inner voice she cannot disobey which tells her she may not prostitute herself, even for her family’s sake. But her case is not wholly convincing, or perhaps convincing only to a Protestant Christian. How does she know she is not self-deceived, that her aversion to Solmes is not mere fastidiousness? Why does she think she knows better than her father?

  Clarissa obeys her inner voice. But there is or ought to be a competing inner voice speaking a competing imperative, one that we may today think of as Darwinian but which goes back at least to Roman times, namely that the finest representatives of the species owe a higher duty to their kind to mate.

  From fairest creatures we desire increase,

  That thereby beauty’s rose might never die.

  In Shakespeare’s Sonnet I, this argument is addressed to a young man, but we should remember that Shakespeare took it over from Sidney’s Arcadia, where it is addressed to a girl who has sworn to lead a virgin’s life.

  Richardson is a Christian but not a religious writer in the way that Bunyan, for example, is. Although Clarissa herself conceives of her destiny more and more in religious terms, her turn to religion occurs only after the rape and within the shadow of death. Up to this point, religion has no more and no less of a presence in the book than it had in the society in which the story is set. Clarissa’s religious preoccupations remove her increasingly from everyone else in the novel, and from the reader too. This is clearly Richardson’s intention. Clarissa is moving into an exalted area where ordinary folk cannot follow.

  Clarissa is not a religious novel but it invokes religious forces. What religious forces? Pervasively, Puritan Protestantism, with its emphasis on personal salvation and on individual self-scrutiny, its stern mistrust of the passions, of display, of social role-playing, all role-playing being, by definition, insincere. But Clarissa also yearns for elements of Catholicism which Protestantism has put behind it, specifically the destiny of martyrdom and the vocation of sainthood. In other words, some of the energies Richardson calls upon come direct
ly from Catholic hagiography; it is they (together with the incompletely digested example of Shakespeare) that lend a somewhat theatrical and Italianate colouring to this otherwise Puritan and puritanical novel.

  Virginity, martyrdom and sainthood have no particular religious meaning within Protestantism. Why are they important to Richardson?

  Virgin is a word used often in Clarissa, but almost always as an adjective (‘virgin cheek’, ‘virgin fame’) and thus in a metonymic sense. (A telling exception: Hickman is jeered at as a ‘male virgin’.) Clarissa is a virgin, and we all know it, but Richardson does not say so explicitly. Why not? First, because ‘Virgin’ as a name, a status, has been captured by Catholicism. Second, because the conception of virginity that Richardson and his audience hold is a narrowly physicalist and therefore mildly indecent one.

  Why, once she has escaped the toils of Lovelace, can Clarissa not put the rape behind her and make a new life for herself – if not in the role advocated by her friend Anna and by Lovelace’s family, as Mrs Lovelace, then as a woman of independent means, if necessary an old maid, in retirement on the estate left to her by her grandfather? Why must she die? This is the question Richardson asks and answers, even though – to his eternal credit – his answer alienates him from his readers and perhaps from himself too, as he knew himself.

  His answer is that Clarissa turns towards death because she cannot put the rape behind her. She cannot put the rape behind her because she adheres to a certain conception of virginity with which her self-conception is closely bound. She cannot recover the old self-conception because she cannot recover her virginity.

  There are certain mythic dualisms within which Clarissa is trapped and beyond which she (perhaps Richardson too) cannot think her way, dualisms that are irreversible in the sense that you can move from state A to state B but not from state B to state A: child-adult, presexual—sexual, virgin—woman, unfallen—fallen, perhaps also wife—whore (although Daniel Defoe had no trouble imagining that one could return to being a wife after having been a whore). Faced with Lovelace’s desire, Clarissa’s intuitive need (this is hardly in Richardson’s book, but might have to emerge in performance) is not to have to commit herself, not to have to elect between the alternatives. This need is denied not only by Lovelace but by the Harlowe family too. After the rape, what she needs but cannot conceive of – because here the Christian understanding of virginity fails her – is a way of returning to virginity.

  Her crisis is a real one. Nevertheless, it is specific to a Christian understanding of virginity. In Greek mythic thought – to name only one instance – a loss of virginity is not final or irreversible. As Marina Warner points out, goddesses like Aphrodite, Ishtar, Astarte and Anat were titled virgin (parthenos) despite taking lovers. Though a parthenos in ancient Greece was forbidden to have sex, sexual intercourse did not lose her her parthenia as long as it remained concealed; and it could be concealed because the definition of parthenia did not turn on the physical state of her genitalia. As Giulia Sissa puts it, genital penetration was not an ‘irreparable’ act.4

  The rape of Clarissa, writes Nancy Miller, ‘[does] violence . . . to her sense of self’. It forces upon her ‘a sexual personality’ and thereby paralyses her, robs her of flexibility of movement. What has been inflicted on her is a ‘hypertrophic reduction of human identity to sexual definition’.5

  I take it that when Miller refers here to Clarissa’s ‘personality’ and ‘identity’ she intends her deepest being: Clarissa would not be a worthy heroine if she could be defeated by the mere ascription of a social fate or the mere infliction of a psychological trauma. Through being raped, I take Miller to say, Clarissa has suffered ontological damage. Clarissa herself seems to agree: ‘I am no longer what I was in any one thing,’ she says a few days after the rape. (p. 890) Yet the damage has to be ontological only in a particular religious tradition and a particular religious ontology, within which Clarissa, her author and many of her commentators seem to find themselves.

  This is not to say that the only perspective on rape in the book is the one they adopt. Lovelace, in a baffled comment which must find an echo in some readers, asks why Clarissa cannot put the rape behind her, since what occurred was ‘a mere notional violation’ in which her innermost being was not touched. Clarissa’s best friend, Anna Howe, though condemning Lovelace, in effect agrees: what damage there is has been done to Clarissa’s name alone, she says, not to her self; the situation is recoverable; rehabilitation of her name is possible, and indeed, once the circumstances are known, will be readily forthcoming. (That Anna’s recipe is for Clarissa to marry Lovelace is neither here nor there.)

  Clarissa’s response to Anna is threefold: that she can never reward Lovelace by marrying him; that what Anna proposes is merely a resolution of the crisis at a social level; and (cannily) that the forgiveness of society will never be wholehearted.

  In all, there is no realistically convincing argument for suicide or at least for the turning towards death that Clarissa undergoes and chooses to undergo, particularly when, after two months of reflection, she reverses her earlier judgement and announces that Lovelace has indeed not touched her deepest self, that in this sense she is unviolated.6 Although the death of the heroine is a goal towards which Richardson has clearly been working from the moment he conceived the novel, he is from this point onward unable to present it plausibly, at least at the level of psychology.

  Why must Clarissa die? What has happened that is so final, so ineradicable, that even the stern sense of absolute rightness, absolute cleanness of conscience, that Clarissa begins to exhibit after her period of post-traumatic mourning is overridden by the will to die? I return to the matter of virginity. In the narrowest, most physical, but also most Christian sense of the term, she has lost her virginity, and nothing will bring it back. The measure of the distance between the Richardson who penned the last books of Clarissa and his modern-age, Protestant audience – even his 1748 audience, who clamoured, as the last instalments of the story approached, for the heroine to be allowed to live – is that, like Lovelace, his audience cannot regard the loss of virginity as enough of a tragedy to justify suicide. To them, what Clarissa has suffered has been an affront to her dignity, in her own eyes and in the eyes of the world. Her dignity can be restored, the damage can be repaired.

  In wondering with Lovelace whether there is not something ‘merely notional’ in the violation, in being reluctant to see Clarissa as indelibly marked by it, I as reader and potential re-representer of Clarissa concede to participating in a certain violence of interpretation, a violence against which Clarissa in effect protests on those numerous occasions when she resists the right assumed by others to interpret her (to interpret such involuntary motions of her body as blushing, for instance). The rape is in the first place Clarissa’s, not Lovelace’s or anyone else’s, to interpret, and the second half of the book is given over to her own very powerful interpretation of the event, an interpretation of whose rightness she is convinced to the point of dying for it.

  Because of Clarissa’s protests, and because of the conviction carried by her self-interpretation, my attempt to frame that self-interpretation, together with the interpretation of rape that Richardson offers by creating a fable in which the raped woman dies, by placing both within a specific historically bounded religious and cultural tradition, must itself carry overtones of violation. But such a countercharge must have its limits. If it is further claimed that for a man – any man – to interpret rape or to interpret a woman’s interpretation of rape in itself carries overtones of violation, then we are still under the sway of the sentimental notion of womanhood that Richardson did so much to establish – the notion of the woman’s body as special, compounded of the animal and the angelic in ways beyond a man’s comprehending.

  III Lovelace

  There is a crisis going on in Lovelace too, to which Richardson does less than justice. What is the proper response of a human being, and specifically a man, to beauty
? That is the question which exercises, or ought to exercise, Lovelace. Rape is only one of the answers he gives to the question, and the least satisfying, even to him. The rape is his attempt to break the grip of soul-harrowing beauty upon him by familiarising himself (overfamiliarising himself) with its earthly embodiment; in a sense, it is an attempt to kill whatever is other-worldly in beauty. At times the novel Clarissa, in its overheated language, trembles on the edge of the Gothic: if rape is the last resort of a man in a state of possession, then there are moments after the rape when Clarissa seems capable of rising up against Lovelace as an indestructible, murderous demon-bride.

  The rape brings down to earth the woman, and specifically the virgin, who enthrals Lovelace. I quote Simone de Beauvoir: ‘The virgin would seem to represent the most consummate form of the feminine mystery; she is therefore its most disturbing and at the same time most fascinating aspect.’7

  De Beauvoir here echoes a specifically male conception of woman as embodiment of a mystery or secret that can be unlocked only via the phallus. In this conception the virgin is the most closed, the most secret, and therefore the most fascinating avatar of the feminine.

  It is because of the conjunction of Lovelace’s desire to know with the fantasy of Clarissa as the closed female body that the rape of Clarissa has become such a locus classicus in contemporary critical thought, in its project of uncovering the genealogy of the Western will to know. ‘She is absolutely impenetrable, least of all by rape,’ writes Terry Eagleton. The ‘reality of the woman’s body’, evinced by Clarissa even after the rape, is that it ‘resists all representation and remains stubbornly recalcitrant to [the man’s] fictions’.8

  Lovelace, of course, comes around to Clarissa’s way of thinking, though only when it is too late; indeed, he follows her in his own version of contemptus mundi and then in death. Through the couple Clarissa—Lovelace Richardson evokes, sometimes consciously, a gallery of types in which the angel-woman redeems or tries to redeem the man from his merely animal state. To Lovelace the Roman persecutor, Clarissa plays the Christian martyr who converts him by her steadfast adherence to her faith, even under torture; or she plays Beatrice to Lovelace’s Dante (one of the stories she tells herself is that she is Lovelace’s better self, bringing him closer to the light); or Lady Philosophy to Boethius; or the Virgin Mary, bridge and intercessor between matter and spirit, earth and heaven.