Abstract
Clarissa, as she tells her own story, was once woven of whole cloth: her public and private selves were one before the cloth was rent. After fleeing the scene of her rape, however, Clarissa speaks poignantly of a new self-perception, one she recognizes by naming it only after its loss. ‘Once more have I escaped — but, alas! I, my best self, have not escaped!’ she cries.1 This ‘best self’ is her Virgin self, the enclosed and empty space of moral virtue, penetrated in the course of the novel by sexuality defined as male. Consequently, the character of Clarissa came to personify for many readers the vulnerable, the passive, the penetrable, the physically and socially powerless female figure.2 She is characterized most frequently as a creature out of balance with her physical body, place and time, whose textual life consists in marking and reproaching that imbalance: an exemplar.
When a woman’s sex is in itself dynamic and alive, then it is a power in itself, beyond her reason. And of itself it emits its peculiar spell, drawing men in the first delight of desire. And the woman has to protect herself, hide herself as much as possible. She veils herself in timidity and modesty, because her sex is a power in itself, exposing her to the desire of men …
D.H. Lawrence, ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterly’s Lover’, 1930
From this elementary iconography may be derived the whole metaphysic of sexual differences — man aspires; woman has no other function but to exist, waiting…. Between her legs lies nothing but a zero, the sign for nothing, that only becomes something when the male principle fills it with meaning.
Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, 1978
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Notes
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (London: Everyman, 1962) III, p. 321. All further references to this edition will be found in the text.
Two studies of Clarissa disagree on exactly this point: whose story is the ‘correct’ version? William Warner’s Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) sees Lovelace as a modern man playing parts, and tends to ‘side’ with him as actor and interpreter;
Terry Castle’s Clarissa’s Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson’s Clarissa (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982) vehemently disagrees with Warner’s point of view and offers an alternative femininist reading of Clarissa as a heroine/victim not permitted to speak her own interpretation of events in the novel.
Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Doubleday, 1950), p. 250.
John Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700–1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 124;
for Richardson’s debt to eighteenth-century novelists, see Jerry Beasley, ‘Rousseau and the “New” Novels of Richardson, Fielding and Smollett’, SEL 16 (1976): 437–50, which identifies the qualities these authors shared with popular romances,
and Margaret Doody’s chapter on ‘Clarissa and Earlier Novels of Love and Seduction’, in A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
For female novelists before Richardson, see Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1661–1800 (London: Virago Press, 1989);
Susan Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992);
and Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1749 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds., Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988);
and G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
See Jerry Beasley, Novels of the 1840’s (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia, 1979);
and Laura Brown, ‘The Defenseless Woman and the Development of English Tragedy’, SEL 22 (1982): 429–43 for the tradition of joining chastity to helplessness in the eighteenth century.
For Richardson’s place in the Enlightenment, see Rita Goldberg’s fine study, Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), especially pp. 18–23 on Clarissa as sexual myth and model. An earlier work is Robert Moynihan, ‘Clarissa and the Enlightened Woman as Literary Heroine’, Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975). Ellen Pollak offers an interesting analogical paradox in the work of Pope, in which the heroine is portrayed as the ‘centre of its fictional romance’, yet strives at the same time towards reifying the proposition that ‘women are virginal beings’, ‘Rereading “The Rape of the Lock”: Pope and the Paradox of Female Power’, in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 10 (1981): 429.
Denis Diderot, ‘Eloge de Richardson’, Oeuvres Complètes V (Paris, 1885), p. 215. The original is: ‘Il porte le flambeau au fond de la caverne…’. For an analysis of the ‘cult of Richardsonism’ in eighteenth-century France, see Chapter 4 of Goldberg’s Sex and Enlightenment.
Terry Eagleton discusses Clarissa as a ‘transcendental subject’ in The Rape of Clarissa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); for an analysis of fiction as a drama of self-realization, see Arnold Weinstein’s Fictions of the Self, 1550–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), which locates Richardson at the border of a phase of fiction marked by the turning inward of selfhood. For Richardson’s ‘narrative transvestism’, see Susan Lanser, Fictions of Authority;
and Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth Century English Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
In her study of popular romance in the present day, Janice Radway finds that the first function in a structural analysis of the romance plot is the heroine’s ‘removal from a familiar comfortable realm usually associated with her childhood and family’ (p. 134), whereupon she is ‘thrust out into the public world’ (p. 138) in Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). For female Bildungsroman in the British novel tradition, see Elizabeth Abel et al., The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983);
and Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Judith Laurence-Anderson’s ‘Changing Affective Life in Eighteenth Century England: Richardson’s Pamela’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 10 (1981): 445–56, traces the way in which Richardson’s work reflects contemporary attitudes towards master-servant relations.
A.O.J. Cockshut considers the role of double standards of sexual morality in Richardson in Man and Woman: A Study of Love and the Novel(London: Collins, 1977).
Letter of 6 August 1750, A. Barbauld, ed., Correspondence, III (New York: Arno Press, 1966), pp. 278 and 280.
The classic work on this point are Ian Watt, Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California, 1957), p. 148;
and Christopher Hill, ‘Clarissa Harlowe and her Times’, Puritanism and Revolution (New York: Schocken, 1958).
Tassie Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), sees Pamela as a ‘split’ novel, in which Richardson ‘reproduce[s] contradictory aspects of the ideology of femininity’, p. 15.
For Lovelace as a conventional eighteenth-century rake, see Penelope Bigges, ‘Hunt, Conquest, Trial: Lovelace and the Metaphors of the Rake’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 11 (1982): 51–64; Carol Flynn’s chapter on ‘A Lovelace in Every Corner: The Rake Figure in Richardson’s Novels’, in her Samuel Richardson: Man of Letters (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 1982);
particularly fine is John Traugott’s ‘Clarissa’s Richardson: An Essay to Find the Reader’, in English Literature in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. M.E. Novak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 157–208, which discusses the transmutation of Lovelace from stock figure of Restoration comedy to one of ‘sentimental realism’.
Christopher Hill sees Clarissa as the supreme criticism of property marriage; John Allen Stevenson, ‘Courtship of the Family: Clarissa and the Harlowes Once More’, ELH 48 (1981): 757–77, discusses the relations of family, courtship and endogamy; Leo Braudy studies the breakdown of institutional and familial authority and its effect on identity in ‘Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa’, in P. Harth, ed., New Approaches to Eighteenth Century Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); see also Tony Tanner on the importance of the father’s authority in Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979), pp. 103–4;
and Florian Stuber, ‘On Fathers and Authority in Clarissa’, SEL 25 (1985): 557–74.
Louise Kibbie’s ‘Sentimental Properties: Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’, ELH 58 (1991): 561–77, traces the relations between the Virgin, the ‘slut’ and the wife as emblems of male prerogative.
Hester Thrale Piozzi, Thralania, ed. Katharine Balderston (Oxford: Clarendon, 1951), p. 570.
Quoted in T.C.D. Eaves and B. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 52.
Patricia Spacks, in ‘The Dangerous Age’, Eighteenth Century Studies 11 (1978): 417–38, points out that the decision to be a child or woman was often resolved by death; see Eagleton’s comment on Clarissa’s death on p. 76, which he believes signifies ‘an absolute refusal of political society’, while being ‘submissive to patriarchal order’; see also Castle, p. 31, who sees her death as a rejection of language.
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© 1997 Susan Ostrov Weisser
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Weisser, S.O. (1997). The Light in the Cavern: Samuel Richardson and Sexual Love. In: Women and Sexual Love in the British Novel, 1740–1880. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377349_3
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