But, you may point out, a lying protagonist is hardly news for a fictional narrative. How is Lovelace different, say, from Milton's Satan, who manipulates his fellow fallen angels, assumes different identities to deceive the guardian angels of Paradise, and, finally, lies to Eve?
The difference between Milton's and Richardson's antiheroes is Satan's ability to keep track of himself as the source of his representations of the world. That is, when he lies, he (mostly) knows that he lies. Moreover, Milton's poem features an omnipresent narrator who provides a running commentary on Satan's misrepresentation of reality. For example, when Satan approaches Eve in the garden in the guise of a snake, he is said to begin "his fraudulent temptation" (IX; 531); when he ends that fateful speech, the narrator observes that "his words replete with guile / Into [Eve's] heart too easy entrance won" (IX; 11. 733—34). This commentary helps us to see the difference between the world "as it is," or at least as perceived by that omnipresent narrator, and the world as represented by Satan. Our cognitive predisposition to monitor sources of information thus enables us to make sense of the poem; when Satan, "enclosed in serpent" (IX; 11. 494-95) tells Eve that he was miraculously "endued .. . with human voice" (1. 561) after eating the forbidden fruit, we know that he, and only he, is the source of that false representation, and we know that he knows it, too.
The same cognitive predisposition, however, could be used to disorient the reader, as in Clarissa. To begin with, Lovelace seems to have a selective problem with monitoring sources of his representations, regularly failing to keep track of himself as the source of his fantasies about the world. In other words, unlike Milton's Satan, when Lovelace lies, he at times appears not to know that he lies. Moreover, because Clarissa is an epistolary novel (unlike, for example, Don Quixote, which also features a self-deceiving protagonist), we do not have here an omnipresent narrator who would alert us to the glaring discrepancy between Lovelace's version of what is going on and an alternative, perhaps truer, version. Instead, Clarissa is, in effect, a first-person narrative split between the two main protagonists. Consequently, it takes us some time—about five hundred pages or even much longer—to realize that one of the narrators of the story is misleading not just Clarissa but also himself and, consequently, us.
What it all adds up to is that in Lovelace we have an early instance of an unreliable narrator (a literary device typically associated with modernist and postmodernist fiction). As discussed in previous sections, the presence of such a narrator forces us to begin to question at some point during our reading numerous pieces of information that we would have otherwise processed as true within the fictional world of the story. Worse yet, since the narrator himself seems to believe in what he is saying and marshals evidence that supports his version of events, we may never find out what has "really" happened. We thus close the book with a strange feeling that the state of cognitive uncertainty that it induced in us will never be fully resolved. We will never know which representations within the story deserve to be treated as "true" and which have to remain metarepresentations with a source tag pointing to the first-person narrator.
Let us see now how Clarissa draws us into this state of metarepresentational uncertainty. Writers wishing to spring an unreliable narrator onto their readers frequently begin with a sly maneuver of establishing him/her as not only quite reliable but also more reliable than other characters in the story. As Ronald Blythe puts it, "[Qharmers must charm before the charmed begin to smell a rat."3 That's exactly what Richardson does in Clarissa. He opens the novel with a description of a familial turmoil that spins out of control, and he then introduces Lovelace as somebody who sees clearly into the messy passions of everybody else and can tell us what is really going on.
Here is what happens. Clarissa's parents, siblings, and uncles are angry at her because she refuses to marry an obnoxious wealthy suitor of their providing. Her rejection of that man, they are convinced, stems from her secret preference for Lovelace. The argument escalates quickly, with both parties afraid and mistrustful of each other. Clarissa is grounded, denied the right to correspond with her best friend, all but disowned by her mother and father, threatened with forced marriage, and physically assaulted by her brother. It matters little that she proclaims her indiffer
10: Richardon's Clarissa
ence to Lovelace and her willingness to abide by the wishes of her elders if only they don't make her marry the man that she abhors. For reasons that she cannot fathom—for she has been an obedient and truthful child all her life—they don't believe her.
After about one hundred pages of this family drama, we (but not Clarissa) finally learn why they don't. We are made privy to a letter (the first of many) from Lovelace to his friend Belford, in which he explains what fuels the fear and anger of the elder Harlowes. It turns out that he has been inflaming the passions of Clarissa's parents and siblings by bribing one of their own servants and using him to feed them information about Clarissa's supposed intention to elope with Lovelace. Lovelace has it all figured out. Persecuted by her own family—who would not believe her protestations of innocence since they listen to the servant who presumably knows her real intentions—Clarissa would soon be forced to run away from them. And whom would she run to, if not Lovelace, who has all the while been assuring her of his love and respect and begging her to take refuge from her unfeeling relatives with his own family? To get Clarissa out of her father's house and into his sole power is the goal toward which Lovelace is working with patience and prescience. He is the mastermind behind the commotion at the Harlowes—after hearing from him, we finally understand their motives fully.
Having thus established Lovelace as our privileged source of information about the tangled situation, Richardson proceeds to deepen that impression by demonstrating Lovelace's unusual perceptiveness when it comes to figuring out other people's states of mind. Roughly one-third into the novel comes a "Miss Partington" episode, which confirms Lovelace as not only an inveterate plotter but also an insightful mind-reader. Here is how Richardson builds up to it:
Lovelace has finally tricked Clarissa into leaving her family and eloping with him. He then manipulates her into staying together in rented apartments in London, at a house that, as he told Clarissa, is owned by a respectable widow of an Army officer, who lets rooms and takes care of her two nieces. In reality, the house is a brothel; the owner, "Mrs. Sinclair," is a madam; and her nieces are prostitutes, turned into such by Lovelace who had earlier seduced and abandoned them. Clarissa is introduced to the inhabitants of the house as Lovelace's wife, when, in fact, both Mrs. Sinclair and her nieces are convinced that Lovelace does not want to marry Clarissa and instead intends to make her his kept mistress. Lovelace explains to Clarissa that since they spend so much time together, they have to pose as a married couple (even though they keep separate bedrooms) in order not to scandalize the (presumably) respectable inhabitants of the house. However, the real reason that he wants Clarissa to address him as a husband in front of Mrs. Sinclair and her "nieces" is that if he then happens to rape Clarissa, he would have the witnesses who could testify in the court of law that Clarissa considered herself married to him and thus cannot possibly complain of any sexual liberties he has taken with his "lawfully wedded" wife.
One evening Lovelace throws a party to which he invites four of his equally debauched male friends and another former mistress of his, one Miss Partington (now, too, a prostitute), who is presented to Clarissa as a young lady of good family, wealth, and virtue. Miserable as she is about perpetuating the lie about her marriage, Clarissa is prevailed to continue posing as "Mrs. Lovelace" in front of his friends, not knowing that they are all apprised of the true state of affairs and of Lovelace's motives for making Clarissa believe that they all think that she is married to him. Later that night, Clarissa is asked if Miss Partington can stay in her room for the night, for Mrs. Sinclair has presumably run out of beds to accommodate her illustrious guests. Although, on the surface of it, there is nothing st
range about such an application, particularly as Miss Partington is supposed to be a woman of birth and virtue, the "over-cautious" Clarissa, not even knowing exactly what she is afraid of, but mindful of the house full of the intoxicated "gentlemen of free manners" (546), turns the request down. As readers soon find out (Lovelace explains it all in his letter to Belford), Clarissa was correct in her fears. Lovelace planned to use Miss Partington to open Clarissa's door at night and let him into her bedroom, after which, had he raped her, she would have had even fewer chances to sue him later since now not only Mrs. Sinclair and her "nieces" but also four of Lovelace's friends could testify that she went by the name of his wife.
On the morning after the failed Miss Partington scheme, Lovelace asks Clarissa what it was that Miss Partington and Mrs. Sinclair wanted from her last night. He then reports in his letter to Belford that Clarissa "artfully made lighter of her denial of Miss for a bedfellow than she thought of it, I could see that; for it was plain she supposed there was room for me to think she had been either over -nice, or over-cautious' (552; emphasis in the original).
Note, first of all, the multiple levels of intentionality embedded in this sentence. We can map them as follows:
Lovelace intends Belford (and with him, the readers) to be believe that
10: Richardon's Clarissa
Clarissa did not want him to think that she did, in fact, suspect that he had some ulterior motives in having Miss Partington spend a night in her room.
Depending on how we count, this sentence embeds from four to six levels of intentionality. This, as I have argued in Part I, makes it somewhat more challenging for the reader and, subsequently, subtly heightens our admiration of the ease with which the clever and observant Lovelace can figure out what other people, including Clarissa, are thinking.
It is the tragedy of both Lovelace and Clarissa, however, that their occasionally accurate readings of each other's states of mind never translate into the actual meeting of the minds. Paradoxically, the better Lovelace "reads" Clarissa, the more persistently he misinterprets her and the more assuredly he embarks upon the course of action destined to destroy any chances for their happiness together. In this particular case, Lovelace uses his insight into Clarissa's fear and her reluctance to let him see her fear to justify his intensified plotting against her. As he reasons now in his imaginary conversation with her, "[S]ince thou reliest more on thy own precaution than upon my honour; be it unto thee as thou apprehendest, fair one!" (553).4
Needless to say, the more Lovelace plots, the less Clarissa wants to marry the heartless liar. This effectively renders impotent the main lever that Lovelace could hope to use to control her (and any other woman): his alleged intention to be "reformed" and to make the heroic woman who succeeds in reforming him his wife. Feeling how the source of power is slipping away from him, Lovelace grows both more desperate and cruel in his treatment of Clarissa, which, of course, makes her even more adamant in her decision to escape him.
Richardson's novel thus articulates, with a hitherto-unprecedented intensity and detail, the theme of the correlation between arduous mind-reading and tragic misunderstanding. Remaining prominent in the later-day novels adhering to what I call the Quixotic tradition, such as Lolita, this theme is inextricably bound with our metarepresentational ability. Mind-reading is a crucial aspect of our everyday existence, but a character too occupied with figuring out other people's states of mind, and, worse, flaunting his ability to "see though" other people, runs a grave metarepresentational danger: he can easily lose track of himself as the source of his representations of the other person's mental world. He may take what really is a ^^representation with himself as a source tag—for example, "/ think that Clarissa is blushing in response to my half-hearted marriage proposal because she badly wants to marry me, poor dear, but is ashamed to acknowledge it" (to paraphrase one of Lovelace's typical sentiments) as a representation without any source tag, for example, "Clarissa is blushing in response to my half-hearted marriage proposal because she badly wants to marry me, poor dear, but is ashamed to acknowledge it."
Of course, this is by definition an impoverished and frequently quite wrong ascription of Clarissa's state of mind. In this particular case, Clarissa is blushing in response to Lovelace's lukewarm proposal not because she desperately wants to marry him—as a matter of fact, she doubts more and more that he would ever be able to make a suitable husband for her—but also because she is thinking of her friend Anna's most recent letter, in which Anna pragmatically advises her to take Lovelace up on his first word and marry him out of hand in order to avoid being censured by the world for eloping with a rake. Clarissa's blushing is indicative of a complex amalgam of feelings, for she is aware of the truth of Anna's advice, angry with herself for putting herself in such an ambiguous situation, and half-ashamed at realizing that, in spite of everything, she is still attracted to Lovelace.
It is only natural that Lovelace would have no access to these complex feelings—he is not, after all, telepathic—but what is more important is that by losing track of himself as the source of his representations of Clarissa's mind, he is foreclosing any potential for thinking that Clarissa may have complex feelings not accessible to him and thus subsequently revising his past misconceptions. By keeping track (that is, as much as we can, for sometimes it is not that simple) of ourselves as sources of our representations of other people's minds, we remain humbly aware of the possibility of making a mistake in our interpretation of their thoughts. So in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy can change for the best and deserve happiness with Elizabeth Bennet because he is aware of himself as the source of his misinterpretation of Jane Bennet's mind (i.e., his former belief that she did not really love his friend Mr. Bingley). By contrast, Lovelace does not correct, until it is too late, his readings of other people's states of mind—he would rather try to correct reality to fit his delusions.
Any manifestly successful instance of mind-reading then becomes a trap for the person whose ability to keep track of himself as a source of his representations of other people's mental stances is somewhat compromised. Although I am not interested in diagnosing Lovelace as mildly schizophrenic, I do want to apply here, albeit tentatively and perhaps more metaphorically than literally, Friths suggestion that the reason schizophrenic patients go on reading minds even though they do it all wrong is
10: Richardon's Clarissa
that, unlike patients with autism, who have never had a chance to attribute mental states to people around them, schizophrenics "know well from past experiences that it is useful and easy to infer the mental states of others [and] will go on doing this even when the mechanism no longer works properly."5 Lovelace's dangerous propensity to ignore himself as the source of his representations of Clarissa's mind and instead perceive these representations as accurate reflections of her mental stances is so persistent because it gets positive reinforcement on the occasions when he does read her mind quite correctly, as so happens, for example, in the above-discussed episode of Miss Partington as Clarissa's intended bedfellow. Like schizophrenic patients—and, again, I am using this comparison guardedly—Lovelace knows from his "past experiences" that he can be very perceptive in inferring mental states of others and has clearly benefited from doing so in his endeavor to seduce one virgin after another. With these memories of past and present successes alive in his mind, he will continue to treat his interpretations of other people's mental states as objectively true, even if this strategy backfires again and again in his relationship with Clarissa and finally makes any amicable communication between them impossible.
(b) Enter the Reader
At this point, we have to start considering the effect that Lovelace's peculiar brand of unreflective mind-reading has on the reader of the novel. Strictly speaking, I have already implicitly introduced the reader into the discussion above when I said that Lovelace happens to infer correctly Clarissa's mind in the Miss Partington episode. We know that Lovelace's inference is correct bec
ause we have access to Clarissa's letter to Anna Howe—in which Clarissa explains why she did not let Miss Partington share her bed—whereas Lovelace merely thinks that he is right simply because he is convinced that he is never wrong in his assessment of other people's mental states. In other words, we, the readers, are tacitly coerced by the novel into accepting Lovelace's assessment of Clarissa's thoughts as rather accurate, in fact, more accurate on many occasions than the assessment offered by Clarissa herself in her letters to Anna. Clarissa, after all, has to sound invariably proper and virtuous, whereas Lovelace is under no such obligation and can be as cynical and straightforward as he wishes.
Lovelace's fraught tendency to ignore himself as the source of his representations of the world thus becomes our tendency, too, especially in the early parts of the story, when we turn to his letters to find out what has really transpired.
Establishing Lovelace as a relatively trustworthy source of our representations—that is, drawing us into temporarily forgetting that his account of the events should be processed with a source tag, such as, "Lovelace claims that . . ."—is a crucial part of the metarepresentational game that the novel plays with the reader. The more we trust Lovelace as a privileged source of information, the greater is our shock and disorientation when in the second third of the novel we start coming across sentiments that imply that Lovelace may be losing it and, in fact, may have never had it together in the first place.
Here is one such moment. Clarissa's loyal servant Hannah had been earlier taken away from her. Lovelace has just heard that Hannah might be available once more to serve her lady. Lovelace cannot let her come near Clarissa because, to advance his scheme of seduction, he has to keep her friendless and surrounded by his agents. Lovelace muses in a letter to Belford:
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