Clarissa--Or the History of a Young Lady

by Samuel Richardson

  Characters, like real people, are preoccupied with time. Each of us has a personal relationship with time, and each of us experiences the trajectory of a life determined by time, though that understanding may flicker within us uncertainly and only on occasion. Reading a novel permits us to carefully observe this compelling phenomenon through a distancing lens. Novels throw illuminating light on temporal dimensions because time works both as subject matter and as form.

  This is particularly true of Clarissa, which though it records the events of a single year, does so with such density, such attention to detail, that we feel we have lived a whole year of real time in reading it. And in fact, because the novel was published over the space of a year, none of Richardson’s contemporaries could possibly read Clarissa’s experience faster than she could live it.

  Richardson once characterized his technique as “this way of writing, to the moment.”2 The effect is an almost cinematic focus on the present, yet with a curious preoccupation with the perpetually reconstructed past and an anxiety about the unknowable future. Something could happen at any minute. Anything. Teetering on the present, reaching backward for support, eyes on the future, the characters reel from moment to moment. This reeling is the emotional atmosphere of Clarissa, but it is also its intellectual content.

  The language of the letters is tentative, speculative, and wondering. The characters formulate and revise their wishes, but they may be blocked by the wishes and particularly by the strategies of others. Everyone wants his or her own way.

  The struggle for power rages over a reality that is disputed territory. The world of Clarissa is presented subjectively, with subjectivity itself becoming part of our wondering inquiry—for in epistolary novels the reader can never directly experience what actually happened. Instead, what happened must be reconstructed for us, after the fact, by witnesses at various removes from the action itself, witnesses with convoluted motives and varying degrees of credibility. Consequently, our attention is not on what happened but instead on what the different characters believe happened, or even what they believe from one moment to the next. Evidence, after all, is perpetually trickling in, filtered through mood and different perceptual biases. Characters may misrepresent their own feelings or actions; Lovelace frequently lies. It is important to notice, though, that each of the two main characters, Clarissa and Lovelace, promise to their correspondents, Anna Howe and John Belford, that they will tell them the truth as far as they know it.

  Both Lovelace and Clarissa return obsessively to reconstructions of a past that can never be laid to rest because it can never be objectively known or described. The letters function—for each—as a kind of history, a possible basis for interpreting the course of events leading up to the fictional present. They inhabit a world where reality resides only in text, in letters, and in the various ways they can be read and reread. When Clarissa turns over to Belford the collection of letters that constitutes her part of the novel, it is for the purpose of establishing the truth for her community and by implication for all readers, now and forever. Her correspondence functions as evidence. For Clarissa, “the pen is a witness on record” (L183).

  Much of what Richardson himself considered to be the excessive length of his novel arises thematically out of this uncertainty over what actually happened and why. Notice that the novel begins with Anna Howe asking what passed between Lovelace and her brother that caused the domestic crisis that propels the novel. The opening duel is visited and revisited by all the characters until the concluding duel puts an end to all speculation. The time bracketed by the two duels represents a temporal nexus where future and past cross and recross.

  Length arises too out of Clarissa and Lovelace’s shared belief in the efficacy of delay. Once one commits to a particular course, then the number of available options necessarily diminishes. But delay offers opportunity to investigate alternative courses, to gather advice, to reexamine evidence, and most important, to change one’s mind.

  As in soap opera, the characters in this novel live suspended in thought and supposition, having no employment beyond accounting for the past and speculating on the future. They talk, they write, they feel, they plan, and above all, they manipulate one another and the facts of their shared existences.

  For Clarissa and Lovelace the prime manipulations involve time and love or, if not love, then attraction. Clarissa admits to Anna Howe that she feels for Lovelace a “conditional kind of liking” (L28). The condition in question involves Lovelace’s reformation. His values, those of the rake, conflict violently with her own, those of the pure maiden. If he is to have her, he must reform. Re-form. Rather than loving the man he is, she loves the man he must become in the future in order to justify that love.

  Meanwhile, Lovelace sets up his own conditions for Clarissa. Her virtue must be tested, not once but twice. If “ruined,” he predicts, she will behave like all the other women whose virtue he has tried: She will accommodate herself to her situation and will grow to love him. Like Clarissa’s, his “love” is based on a mistaken concept of the person the beloved might become rather than who that beloved is at the present moment.

  Their conflicting values necessarily pull them in opposing directions, an oppositional dynamic that is underscored by their radically different conceptions of time. For Lovelace, time is an open-ended stream and can therefore be carefully navigated to his own advantage. His repeated phrase “a wife at any time” (L99) illustrates that for him marriage is always an option, though one that he hopes he will not be forced into. Whatever happens, with this one stroke he will always be able to “mend” his transgression against Clarissa. In this essentially comic view of existence, bad actions in the present are not necessarily visited by bad consequences in the future.

  For Clarissa time is a closed-ended narration, even a tragedy. She underscores the irrevocability of time’s linear trajectory when she asks Lovelace, “Canst thou call back time?” (L266). The question is rhetorical; she knows he cannot call time back, although he never agrees this is so.

  This fundamental disagreement concerning the nature of time, taking place over time, deepens the widening abyss between them and fuels the dramatic tension that ultimately consumes them both. The ferocity of Clarissa and Lovelace’s conditional love leaves behind an afterglow that no reader can ever quite forget.

  II

  “And I have run into such a length!—And am such a sorry pruner, though greatly luxuriant, that I am apt to add three pages for one I take away!”

  —Samuel Richardson3

  An abridgment necessarily reduces or all but eliminates the important fact of the characters’ mental and psychological restlessness concerning the nature of reality. Their iteration and reiteration of the past, after all, is their life’s blood.

  Certainly too what the abridger removes from the text depends on her/his sensibilities, preconceptions, and assumptions. In effect the text in the reader’s hands represents the abridger’s interpretation of the text, much as the orchestral performance heard by a music lover represents not so much what the composer wrote as how the orchestra leader interprets that work.

  My own abridgment was inspired by that of Philip Stevick, now out of print;4 both his edition and mine use Richardson’s first edition as source and approach the text not just as an historical artifact but as a work of art. Our view is that the second and third editions are not only longer than the first, but suffer aesthetically from the incessant advice of Richardson’s friends and readers, not all of which he was able to ignore. My method was to approach the full version of the first edition, using Angus Ross’s excellent 1985 Penguin edition, and to do so with a mind as open as possible, gradually pruning away what I found extraneous and preserving what seemed essential.

  To some extent the essential had to do with practical matters, the most obvious of these being continuity. I wanted the abridgment to read smoothly, as if nothing had been excised. But
I also worked to include the passages most often discussed in the critical discourse that surrounds Clarissa.

  I removed sentences, paragraphs, and entire letters while preserving the language, as well as the sequence of paragraphs, the placement of paragraph breaks, and the order of significant events. In rare cases I deleted words within a sentence; these omissions are indicated with ellipses. I pruned whatever seemed repetitious without effect or moralistic without thought. I likewise removed many minor characters, though probably the sense of a fictional community suffers by such trimming. The Tomlinson plotline I removed entirely.

  All this clearing away of shrubbery, of course, risks subverting Richardson’s intention and accomplishment. The well-intentioned gardener, therefore, approaches her task with both humility and hubris: humility at laying violent hands on a classic, and hubris at the possibility that all this clearing away of overgrowth and undergrowth may actually reveal more clearly the design and shape of the original garden.

  III

  My own most memorable realization was the important role Anna Howe plays in the novel. Previous abridgments without exception reduced the significance of Anna Howe, instead casting a bright light on the struggles of the two principals, Lovelace and Clarissa.5 This binary reading, I believe, fails to recognize that the central power struggle is actually a three-way conflict, an unstable dynamic providing more psychological complexity and dramatic tension. Richardson himself once confessed, “I love Miss Howe next to Clarissa.”6

  Anna Howe plays an active role in the fiction by observing the action, listening to Clarissa, and offering advice. Repeatedly she urges Clarissa to assume the estate her grandfather left her and so cut her ties of dependence with both her family and Lovelace. Anna is really urging revolution, though she and the other characters recognize independence is an inappropriate goal for a young lady of family and fortune. At the beginning of the novel and repeatedly throughout it, Clarissa expresses a deep longing for independence and the single life. Yet she understands that setting up housekeeping would be a bold and potentially dangerous step. Her conventional side cannot resolve on angering or even litigating with her father over assumption of her estate.

  Anna, who, as she confesses, risks nothing, can easily imagine herself in Clarissa’s place, embracing independence:

  I’d be in my own mansion, pursuing my charming schemes and making all around me happy. I’d set up my own chariot. I’d visit them when they deserved it. But when my brother and sister gave themselves airs, I’d let them know that I was their sister, and not their servant; and if that did not do, I would shut my gates against them; and bid them be company for each other. (L27)

  Lovelace recognizes that Clarissa’s moods and decisions are shaped by the stream of correspondence from Anna Howe, and he acknowledges to Belford Miss Howe’s importance and power. Having intercepted several letters from her to Clarissa, he complains that they are “of a treasonable nature” (L175). In his view, they justify violence. A recurring fantasy is that he will rape both women, suggesting perhaps that he cannot subdue one without subduing both. Possibly he sees them as two aspects of the same person, or as the two together composing the single “double-armed beauty” (L199) known as Miss Clarissa Harlowe.

  Other times Lovelace imagines similarities between himself and Anna Howe, who has “too much fire and spirit in her eye indeed, for a girl” (L252). He notes how she loves to tease and bedevil her suitor, Hickman. He even imagines “that that vixen of a girl, who certainly likes not Hickman, was in love with me“ (L201). And in fact, Anna does acknowledge to Clarissa more than once that Lovelace’s spirit is more attractive than Hickman’s torpor and timidity.

  When Lovelace examines the relationship between Clarissa and Anna, he is provoked into denying women are capable of friendship. He explains to Belford, “truly, a single woman who thinks she has a soul, and knows that she wants something, would be thought to have found a fellow-soul for it in her own sex...; when a man comes in between the pretended inseparables, [friendship] is given up like their music and other maidenly amusements” (L252).

  In this complex, unstable triangle, we have both Clarissa and Lovelace equated with Anna, and each of the three principals expressing passion for the other two. This glimpse into the transgressive potential of relationship delays but cannot quite subvert the conventional direction of domestic fiction. Anna Howe, former spokesperson for women’s independence, must eventually marry the sweet-tempered Mr. Hickman, thus restoring social coherence to the disrupted neighborhood.

  And yet neither Clarissa nor Lovelace will so compromise. In Lovelace’s words, “I must soon blow up the lady, or be blown up myself” (L255).

  —Sheila Ortiz-Taylor

  Letter 1: MISS ANNA HOWE TO MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE

  Jan. 10

  I am extremely concerned, my dearest friend, for the disturbances that have happened in your family. I know how it must hurt you to become the subject of the public talk; and yet upon an occasion so generally known it is impossible but that whatever relates to a young lady, whose distinguished merits have made her the public care, should engage everybody’s attention. I long to have the particulars from yourself, and of the usage I am told you receive upon an accident you could not help and in which, as far as I can learn, the sufferer was the aggressor.

  Mr Diggs, whom I sent for at the first hearing of the rencounter to inquire for your sake how your brother was, told me that there was no danger from the wound, if there were none from the fever, which it seems has been increased by the perturbation of his spirits.

  Mr Wyerley drank tea with us yesterday; and though he is far from being partial to Mr Lovelace, as it may be well supposed, yet both he and Mr Symmes blame your family for the treatment they gave him when he went in person to inquire after your brother’s health, and to express his concern for what had happened.

  They say that Mr Lovelace could not avoid drawing his sword: and that either your brother’s unskilfulness or violence left him from the very first pass entirely in his power. This, I am told, was what Mr Lovelace said upon it, retreating as he spoke: ‘Have a care, Mr Harlowe. Your violence puts you out of your defence. You give me too much advantage! For your sister’s sake I will pass by everything if—’

  But this the more provoked his rashness to lay himself open to the advantage of his adversary, who, after a slight wound in the arm, took away his sword.

  There are people who love not your brother, because of his natural imperiousness and fierce and uncontrollable temper: these say that the young gentleman’s passion was abated on seeing his blood gush plentifully down his arm; and that he received the generous offices of his adversary (who helped him off with his coat and waistcoat and bound up his arm, till the surgeon could come) with such patience as was far from making a visit afterwards from that adversary to inquire after his health appear either insulting or improper.

  Be this as it may, everybody pities you. So steady, so uniform in your conduct; so desirous, as you always said, of sliding through life to the end of it unnoted; and, as I may add, not wishing to be observed even for your silent benevolence; sufficiently happy in the noble consciousness which rewards it: Rather useful than glaring, your deserved motto; though now pushed into blaze, as we see, to your regret; and yet blamed at home for the faults of others. How must such a virtue suffer on every hand! Yet it must be allowed that your present trial is but proportioned to your prudence! As all your friends without doors are apprehensive that some other unhappy event may result from so violent a contention, in which it seems the families on both sides are now engaged, I must desire you to enable me, on the authority of your own information, to do you occasional justice.

  My mamma, and all of us, like the rest of the world, talk of nobody but you on this occasion, and of the consequences which may follow from the resentments of a man of Mr Lovelace’s spirit; who, as he gives out, has been treated with high indignit
y by your uncles. My mamma will have it that you cannot now, with any decency, either see him or correspond with him. She is a good deal prepossessed by your uncle Antony, who occasionally calls upon us, as you know; and, on this rencounter, has represented to her the crime which it would be in a sister to encourage a man, who is to wade into her favour (this was his expression) through the blood of her brother.

  Write to me therefore, my dear, the whole of your story from the time that Mr Lovelace was first introduced into your family; and particularly an account of all that passed between him and your sister, about which there are different reports; some people supposing that the younger sister (at least by her uncommon merit) has stolen a lover from the elder. And pray 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.

  You see what you draw upon yourself by excelling all your sex. Every individual of it who knows you, or has heard of you, seems to think you answerable to her for your conduct in points so very delicate and concerning.

  Every eye, in short, is upon you with the expectation of an example. I wish to heaven you were at liberty to pursue your own methods; all would then, I dare say, be easy and honourably ended. But I dread your directors and directresses; for your mamma, admirably well qualified as she is to lead, must submit to be led. Your sister and brother will certainly put you out of your course.