by Steven Moore
His defense of Clarissa’s great girth hinges on those conditional ifs: yes, the spirit of real life “is duly diffused throughout,” and yes, “the characters are various”—from aristocrats and physicians to footmen and whores— though most are uninteresting, beginning with the title character, a priggish, humorless personification of Christian doctrine with whom no “person of taste” would want to spend more than 15 minutes in “real life.” Her family is even worse: a tyrannical father, a weak mother, a pig-headed older brother, a mean-spirited older sister, and two tedious bachelor uncles. After struggling through the entire novel, Voltaire said of its cast: “if all those people were my relatives and friends, I could not become interested in them” (Selected Letters, 205). Nor is there “a variety of incidents sufficient to excite attention, and those conducted as to keep the reader always awake.” There are only a few key incidents, with the bulk of the novel devoted to endless analysis of those plot points, too often conducted in a soporific style that challenges the reader to stay awake. Clarissa is an “extravagant performance” all right, but one that could have achieved its goals in half the space.
This Christian fairy tale dramatizes in epistolary form the last year in the lives of two strong-willed individuals: angelic Clarissa Harlowe (18 going on 19) and diabolic Robert Lovelace (around 25), “two parallel lines which, though they run side by side, can never meet” (236). The clichéd adjectives are Richardson’s, and repeated ad nauseam as Clarissa is compared to an angel throughout the novel, and literally becomes one at the end (per the novel’s Christian mythos); similarly, the smooth-talking rake Lovelace is associated with Beelzebub, Satan, Moloch, and other demonic denizens of the Christian hell. (Fielding no doubt had these two in mind when he advised writers against “inserting characters of such angelic perfection or such diabolical depravity in any work of invention” [Tom Jones, 10.1].) On a visit to Harlowe Place in south England, Lovelace spots Clarissa and determines to seduce her and keep her as a mistress for a while until it’s time to move on to his next conquest: a revenge-fueled pattern he’s been pursuing ever since a woman jilted him as a teenager. He regards the seduction of this icy beauty as the ultimate challenge: “was ever hero in romance (opposing giants and dragons excepted) called upon to harder trials!” (31). Clarissa meanwhile is enduring trials of her own, for her family is pressuring her to marry a repulsive dolt named Roger Solmes, primarily because he’s rich and his estate adjoins theirs. (She has already turned down a few previous suitors, preferring to live alone as an adult, if not in a nunnery.) Both principals have confidants who live far enough away to justify frequent letters: Clarissa communicates with her cool, flippant friend Anna Howe—about the only appealing character in the novel—and Lovelace writes to a fellow rake named John Belford, an ugly but good-hearted man who switches sides to Team Clarissa halfway through the novel and becomes the implied editor of this bulky collection of letters.
The novel falls roughly into thirds: the first 91 letters track in excruciating detail the bickering between Clarissa and her family for three months, along with Lovelace’s contrivances to spirit her away from Harlowe Place. Alert Anna has a premonition of how this will end and thus encourages her friend to write in “so full a manner as may gratify those who know not so much of your affairs as I do. If anything unhappy should fall out from the violence of such spirits as you have to deal with, your account of all things previous to it will be your justification” (1). This is the first of many instances where Richardson makes his characters request that their correspondents write in “minute” detail (his favorite word), a rather clumsy way of justifying the novel’s circumstantial detail. It invariably makes Clarissa somewhat self-conscious about her writing, realizing (like Pamela before her) that others may read these private letters someday, which in fact happens even before she’s dead as various characters begin copying and sharing her letters among themselves: there’s a palpable sense of a novel in the making as everyone obsesses over Clarissa’s “story.”
Fearing she is days away from a forced marriage, Clarissa is tricked into running away with Lovelace on April 10th, and spends the middle third of the novel as his prisoner (letters 92–292), first in a safe house in St. Albans (20 miles NNW of London), then in a London brothel disguised as a boardinghouse. While there, she escapes temporarily but is brought back, where the brothel’s madam and her girls drug Clarissa with opiates and encourage Lovelace to rape her while unconscious, done more in punishment for running away than from lust. (Indeed, he dismisses the actual sexual experience by implying she was merely like any other woman: “to use the expression of the philosopher on a much graver occasion, There is no difference to be found between the skull of King Philip and that of another man” [259].) The rape occurs on the night of June 12th; it takes Clarissa a week or so to recover from the drugs—“My head is gone,” she tells Lovelace. “I have wept away all my brain” (261.1)—and then she manages to escape again on June 28th and hides herself in the house of a local merchant named Smith. There she gradually stops eating and allows herself to die “of grief,” and the last, longest third of the novel (letters 293–537) records in numbing detail her physical decline to an ethereal skeleton, her death on September 7th (reaching toward the ceiling for Jesus), and the reaction of the rest of the novel’s characters to the martyrdom of Saint Clarissa. Her older cousin, Colonel William Morden, who has been living in Europe during the first two-thirds of the novel, tracks down Lovelace and kills him in a duel; it is implied that Lovelace, an excellent swordsman, allows himself to be killed in expiation for his treatment of Clarissa.
The dual moral of the story, Richardson pontificates in the preface, is “to caution parents against the undue exertion of their natural authority over their children in the great article of marriage, and children against preferring a man of pleasure to a man of probity upon that dangerous but too commonly received notion that a reformed rake makes the best husband”—a notion expressed in Pamela. There’s nothing new here: we’ve seen plenty of novels where tyrannical parents try to force marriages on their offspring, and others (like Davys’s Accomplished Rake) that warn girls against bad boys. In the postscript, Richardson admits he also had a religious agenda: the novel “is designed to inculcate upon the human mind, under the guise of an amusement, the great lessons of Christianity. . . .” He even uses that to justify what may strike some as a lack of poetic justice: unlike Job—with whom Clarissa increasingly identifies during the second half of the novel, even writing some “meditations” adapted from the biblical novella—Clarissa is not rewarded at the end, but instead dies, separated from her best friend Anna and still alienated from her unforgiving family. But in Christian terms, Richardson unctuously tweaks us in his postscript, dying young means early admission to heaven, without having to suffer through decades of disappointing life on earth. “And who that are in earnest in their profession of Christianity but will rather envy than regret the triumphant death of CLARISSA, whose piety from her early childhood; whose diffusive charity; whose steady virtue; whose Christian humility; whose forgiving spirit; whose meekness, whose resignation, HEAVEN only could reward?” By this logic, only an atheist would prefer a traditional happy ending.
Unless we’re willing to classify and dismiss Clarissa as an extravagant example of 18th-century Christian devotional literature, we need to read it another way. On occasion I’ve quoted a few lines from Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature suggesting that many novels have “Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it” (2). To save Clarissa from Richardson the artist, if indeed he truly intended the novel to illustrate “the great lessons of Christianity,” we must first point out that its promises of heavenly rewards are as illusory as the promises of marriage used by rakes like Lovelace to lure naïve virgins into their clutches. Clarissa was home-schooled by two spiritual advisors, Dr.
Lewin and Mrs. Norton, who brainwashed the girl with unrealistic Christian ideals that made her unequipped to live in the real world. Nowhere is this more apparent than during the notorious fire scene narrated in letter 225, in which Lovelace takes advantage of a fire accidentally set by a maid—which Clarissa goes to her grave convinced he set deliberately—to cop some feels of the frightened Clarissa “with nothing on but an under-petticoat, her lovely bosom half-open, and her feet just slipped into her shoes” (or “almost naked,” as she later exaggerates to Anna). This sends her into a psychotic meltdown, far beyond how any normal woman would react, as Lovelace later complains: “Greater liberties have I taken with girls of character at a common romping bout, and all has been laughed off, and handkerchief and headcloths adjusted, and petticoats shaken to rights, in my presence” (244). Smollett was so struck by the ludicrousness of Clarissa’s freakout that he later parodied the scene in his Humphry Clinker. Like Nick Carraway after that unpleasantness at West Egg, Clarissa expects people to be “at a sort of moral attention forever,” and like that boy in David Foster Wallace’s Pale King who is so good that nobody can stand him (§5), Clarissa is so Christian that she is impossible to be around; even her BFF Anna chides her for her “grave airs” (10), and Lovelace sadly wonders, “Did she never romp? Did she never from girlhood to now hoyden?” (201).
It’s not until she leaves her provincial home and her shelf of theology books and is taken to London that she learns there’s a difference between Christian theory and practice. Like Sarah Fielding’s David Simple, she feels the two should be one, but Lovelace wryly notes “This dear lady is prodigious learned in theories, but as to practices, as to experimentals, must be, as you know from her tender years, a mere novice” (158.1). She admits this in a letter to Anna written about a month before her death: “Oh, my dear, ’tis a sad, a very sad world!—While under our parents’ protecting wings, we know nothing at all of it. Book-learned and a scribbler, and looking at people as I saw them as visitors or visiting, I thought I knew a great deal of it. Pitiable ignorance!—Alas! I knew nothing at all!” (405). This epiphany comes too late, for she’s too committed to Christian ideology to change, and in fact during her final months redoubles her Bible study and slips into a kind of religious dementia. What’s sad is that her unexamined conviction of the truth of Christian doctrine—which she foolishly believes was planted in her mind at birth by her god (185) and are “innate principles” (349), not social constructions—is simply wrong. There’s no god, no heaven; she’s been lied to. Before you decide to live or die by an ideology, you’d better be damned sure it’s a valid one; as Montaigne said (regarding the religious persecutions of his day), “After all, it is putting one’s conjectures at a rather high price to burn a man alive for them.” Clarissa’s Christian belief is a conjecture that she mistakes for a fact, and like a religious suicide-bomber, she destroys herself over that mistake. When Clarissa calls out for Jesus at her moment of death, the gullible girl has once again been tricked by a persuasive man into running away from home.
For Lovelace, his rape of Clarissa represents “the triumph of nature over principle” (371), an idea reinforced by his metaphoric association with various beasts of prey.192 Though he is nominally a Christian and believes in an afterlife, he is comfortably at home in the real world in a way Clarissa could never be, though he too labors under an equally illusory ideology, that of the gentleman. Despite a rap sheet of rapes and seductions stretching back seven years, all involving lying and subterfuge, he regards himself as a gentleman and resents anyone who doesn’t treat him as such. In The Accomplished Rake, Davys had called bullshit on these douchebags “with their fine speeches and filthy designs” (198), but while she let her rake off easy, Richardson sees to it that Lovelace dies for honoring “honor” in name only: as Morden lectures him, “the man who has shown so little of the thing honour to a defenceless, unprotected woman, ought not to stand so nicely upon the empty name of it . . .” (442). Lovelace feels honor-bound to accept Morden’s challenge for a duel; he admits he is responsible for Clarissa’s death, but he resents being treated as anything other than an honorable gentleman—yet another example of someone dying for an idiotic ideology.
The tale points to a different set of morals: That private property is “narrow selfishness,” for “the world is but one great family” (8). That perceived duties to parents and siblings are merely “cradle-prejudices” (31), for “How much more binding and tender are the ties of pure friendship, and the union of like minds, than the ties of nature!” (359). That “none but very generous and noble-minded people ought to be implicitly obeyed” (136), not simply anyone in a position of authority.193 That 18th-century manners are a thin, ineffective veneer over a violent creation, and that, contrary to Anna’s Christian assurance, “Heaven will seal [assent] to the black passions of its depraved creatures” (148). That matrimony “is the grave of love, because it allows the end of love” (326), and “that there is hardly one in ten of even tolerably happy marriages in which the wife keeps the hold in the husband’s affections which she has in the lover’s” (458). That polygamy makes more sense than monogamy (a point Richardson raised earlier in Pamela, in the sequel to Pamela, in Sir Charles Grandison, and in letters). “That every woman is a rake in her heart” (116, taken from Pope’s “Of the Characters of Women”), and prefers bad boys to good guys; that “all women are cowards at bottom, only violent when they may” (289); that women are incapable of enduring friendship, and that “even women of sense are not to be trusted with power” (520); that women are bad spellers (529); that Englishmen raise women (as Anna fumes) as “fools and idiots in order to make us bear the yoke you lay upon our shoulders” (523). That it is more fun to read the letters of a rake than those of a prude—after a while, the reader responds to a new letter from Clarissa as to a bill in the mail—and that a rake shows more insight into behavior than a self-appointed teen moralist. That Clarissa and Anna are probably lesbians, though they don’t go farther than despising men, expressing how much they love each other “as never woman loved another” (502), and alluding to the homoerotic biblical story of David and Jonathan (359). The artist’s stated morals of Clarissa—parental flexibility with regard to marriage, and the avoidance of rakes—seem to be tubs tossed out to distract whales while the tale points elsewhere. The artist favors Clarissa, the tale prefers Lovelace.
The tale also tells us that rakes and novelists have much in common.194 Each one of the following statements by Lovelace the seducer applies to Richardson the novelist:
am I not bringing virtue to the touchstone with a view to exalt it, if it come out to be virtue? . . . And I will bring this charming creature to the strictest test that all the sex, who may be shown any passage in my letters . . . may see what they ought to be, what is expected from them; (110)
and I, loving narrative letter-writing above every other species of writing . . . (175)
Sally, a little devil [who works in the brothel], often reproaches me with the slowness of my proceedings. But in a play, does not the principal entertainment lie in the first four acts? Is not all in a manner over when you come to the fifth? And what a vulture of a man must be he who souses upon his prey, and in the same moment trusses and devours?
But to own the truth, I have overplotted myself. (175)
Since I must move slow in order to be sure, I have a charming contrivance or two in my head—even supposing she should get away—to bring her back again. (201)
(Within parenthesis let me tell thee that I have often thought that the little words in the republic of letters, like the little folks in a nation, are the most significant. The trisyllables, and the rumblers of syllables more than three, are but the good for little magnates). (211)
But in thy opinion [Belford/Richardson’s critics], I suffer for that simplicity in my contrivances which is their principal excellence. No machinery195 make I necessary. No unnatural flights aim I at. All pure nature, taking advantage of nature as nature ten
ds; and so simple my devices that when they are known, thou, even thou, imaginest that thou couldst have thought of the same. (223)196
I love to write to the moment— (224)
I have abundance of matters preparative to my future proceedings to recount, in order to connect and render all intelligible. (232)
Now, Belford, for the narrative of narratives. I will continue it as I have opportunity, and that so dextrously that if I break off twenty times, thou shalt not discern where I piece my thread. (233)
I would give Mrs Moore and her a brief history of an affair which, as she said, bore the face of novelty, mystery, and surprise; (233)
And what would there have been in it [Clarissa’s seduction] of uncommon or rare had I not been so long about it? (246)
Thou’lt observe, Belford, that though this was written afterwards, yet (as in other places) I write it as it was spoken and happened, as if I had retired to put down every sentence as spoken. I know thou likest this lively present-tense manner, as it is one of my peculiars. (256)
If I give up my contrivances, my joy in stratagem, and plot, and invention, I shall be but a common man, such another dull heavy creature as thyself. (264)
What, as I have often contemplated, is the enjoyment of the finest woman in the world to the contrivance, the bustle, the surprise, and at last the happy conclusion of a well-laid plot? (271)
I have always told you the consequence of attending to the minute where art (or imposture, as the ill-mannered would call it) is designed. . . . (289)
This, though written in character [code], is a very long letter, considering it is not a narrative one or a journal of proceedings, like some of my former, for such will unavoidably and naturally, as I may say, run into length. But I have so used myself to write a great deal of late that I know not how to help it. (294)
