by Steven Moore
I will take [Clarissa’s] papers. And as no one can do her memory justice equal to myself, and I will not spare myself, who can better show the world what she was, and what a villain he that could use her ill? And the word shall also see what implacable and unworthy parents she had.
All shall be set forth in words at length. No mincing of the matter. Names undisguised as well as facts. (497)
Be sure to be very minute: for every trifling occurrence relating to those we value becomes interesting when we are at a distance from them. (530)
Doubt not . . . that I shall give a good account of this affair. (535)
I’ve quoted so many of these statements because they highlight the text’s intently self-conscious, metafictional nature—Clarissa makes almost as many statements about her writing—and because they conveniently summarize what Richardson intended: via Lovelace, he identifies the plot and purpose of Clarissa, justifies the slowness and length of the work, differentiates his techniques from those of other novelists, praises its novelty and rarity, expresses his “joy in stratagem, and plot, and invention,” anticipates and answers criticism, and boasts he has given “a good account of this affair.” But of course Lovelace is not the only author-surrogate in the novel; Richardson lets him do his talking for him, but he positions Clarissa as the superior writer, and narrative control is as important and dramatic a conflict as sexual control in the novel. Lovelace has to struggle to dominate both Clarissa and Clarissa, and eventually loses control over both.
Clarissa controls the narrative for the first 30 letters—that is, for the first two months (and 100 pages) of the novel—but even after Lovelace’s first letter (#31) she continues to dominate the narrative until he abducts her, when she has to cede partial control both of the narrative and her person to him, at which point his language flexes its muscles. (She’s heard he is “a great plotter and a great writer” [4].) But beginning with letter 191 (May 19th), Loveless takes almost complete control of both the narrative and of Clarissa, writing the majority of the letters for the next five weeks (some 365 pages) until Clarissa escapes his clutches and finds her voice again (letter 295, June 28th). They return to sharing narrative control for the next two months, weighed in Clarissa’s favor as Belford takes her side. Team Clarissa dominates the narrative thereafter; not only is her “narrative” (her view of events) supported by others like Belford and her cousin Morden, but even after her death her voice persists via several letters she prepared to be delivered posthumously, along with a lengthy narrative will. Near the end, Lovelace complains, “I know not what I write, nor what I would write” (463), and ceding defeat to Clarissa’s superior narrative power, he exclaims, “What an army of texts has she drawn up in array against me . . . !” (530). This battle of the sexes is a battle of texts.197
Nowhere is this battle more effectively dramatized than in the letter Lovelace writes to Belford two days before he rapes his cowriter: he recounts a dream in which he murders Clarissa, because
she was a thief, an impostor, as well as a tormentor. She had stolen my pen. While I was sullenly meditating, doubting as to my future measures, she stole it; and thus she wrote with it, in a hand exactly like my own, and would have faced me down that it was really my own handwriting. . . .
Thus far had my conscience written with my pen, and see what a recreant she had made me!—I seized her by the throat—There!—There, I said, thou vile impertinent!—Take that, and that! (246)
It’s deliberately, brilliantly vague whether he is assaulting her with his pen or his penis, which are symbolically equivalent: equally proud of his writing and sexual skills, Lovelace subconsciously reveals he’s aware Clarissa threatens to deprive him of both due to her literary and moral superiority. He consciously downplays this fear for a while, couching it in literary terms of tales and plots: “the haughty beauty will not refuse me when her pride of being corporally inviolate is brought down, when she can tell no tales, . . . I’ll teach the dear charming creature to emulate me in contrivance!—I’ll teach her to weave webs and plots against her conqueror!” (256). During the height of their writing competition, they harshly critique each other’s writing style: hers, Lovelace claims, shows “how pretty tinkling words run away with ears inclined to be musical!” (323), while she dismisses his as “libertine froth” (339). Lovelace calls her a poor plotter, “for plotting is not her talent” (321), but he gradually realizes that modern moral analysis is a superior literary mode to old-fashioned plots and stratagems—both his name and his plot devices are so 17th century. Lovelace also admits to Belford that, far from being the dashing hero of his libertine romance, he is the dastardly villain in her Christian homily, which all the other characters come to prefer over his narrative.
Richardson positions Clarissa as the better writer, but she pays a price: during one histrionic scene in the brothel, she threatens to kill herself with her penknife (281), and her frantic letter-writing during the last month of her life contributes to her death. She is a confident, poised stylist during most of the novel, with two fascinating exceptions: the first occurs when Clarissa learns she may have a rival for Lovelace’s affections in the luscious person of Rosebud, a 17-year-old maid at the alehouse Lovelace frequents while watching for an opportunity to abduct Clarissa. Even though she regards him as little better than a stalker at this early point, Clarissa loses her cool in response to Anna’s letter about Rosebud. Italicizing Anna’s descriptions, snapping out short phrases punctuated by dashes in place of her usual flowing, magniloquent style, hissing with catty sarcasm, this is one of the few places in the novel where Clarissa resembles a normal teenage girl:
I long to hear the result of your intelligence. You shall see the simple creature, you tell me—Let me know what sort of a girl it is—a sweet pretty girl, you say—a sweet pretty girl, my dear!—They are sweet, pretty words from your pen. But are they yours, or his, of her?—If she be so simple, if she have ease and nature in her manner, in her speech, and warbles prettily her wild notes (how affectingly you mention this simple thing, my dear!), why, such a girl as that must engage such a profligate wretch, as now, indeed, I doubt this man is; accustomed, perhaps, to town-women, and their confident ways!—must deeply, and for a long season, engage him! Since, perhaps, when her innocence is departed, she will endeavour by art to supply the natural charms that engaged him. (71)
Meow! When she later learns Lovelace treats Rosebud right and even helps her marry her boyfriend, Clarissa resumes her usual barrister style (the one, you’ll recall, Sir George Mackenzie recommended in his Aretina). The second and more eye-popping instance is after Clarissa is raped. Recovering from her drug overdose and realizing what Lovelace did to her while unconscious, Clarissa gets “to her pen and ink,” but (as Lovelace tells Belford) “what she writes she tears, and throws the paper in fragments under the table, either as not knowing what she does, or disliking it” (261). He sends some of the scraps and fragments to Belford “for the novelty of thing,” including the textual collage reproduced on the following page. Richardson typeset this himself as a visual representation of Clarissa’s blown mind, and as Bruce Kawin notes, it “is as extraordinary as any of Sterne’s black or blank pages” (239). Her narrative style, like her hymen and her self-esteem, is shattered, and she has a difficult time picking up the pieces. Temporarily deprived of her own voice, Clarissa assembles fragments from her favorite writers to speak for her: Otway (his play Venice Preserved is often mentioned in the novel), Dryden, Shakespeare, Cowley, and, um, didactic poet Samuel Garth. (Clarissa has fusty literary tastes, naturally, and if she ever read a novel, it’s not noted.) In Greek mythology, after Philomela is raped and her tongue torn out, she communicates her story by weaving it into a robe; Clarissa, whom Lovelace later compares to Philomela (325), communicates her woe by weaving texts together until she can regain her own voice. It’s a startling, innovative use of printing technology on Richardson’s part, as is the fold-out music score he included in the original edition to accompany
a song Clarissa composes (letter 54, but reduced to one page and relegated to the back of the Penguin edition), as is Richardson’s dramatic use of typography on the night of Clarissa’s rape. Using two heavy lines, he cordons off the incident like a crime scene and slaps a temporary gag order on the text:
The whole of this black transaction is given by the injured lady to Miss Howe, in her subsequent letters, dated Thursday July 6. To which the reader is referred.
It is Richardson’s narrative strategies, ideological tensions, metafictional remarks, typographical innovations, and unexpected choices that make Clarissa interesting to some of us—not its Christian “sampler-doctrine” (294) or its insufferable, inimitable heroine. How daring of Richardson, for example, to follow Belford’s brief note to Lovelace announcing Clarissa’s death with a rambling letter by Lovelace’s coarsest libertine buddy, Richard Mowbray; Lovelace “cannot bear to set pen to paper,” which makes Mowbray wonder what the big deal is: “And what is there in one woman more than another, for matter of that?” (480). Knowing that most of his readers would be as heartsick as Lovelace at that point, Richardson took a gutsy chance by stomping that muddy footprint just there. How clever of him to have a semiliterate woman spell the rake’s name “Luveless” (305). How sly of him to have a maid accidentally start a fire while reading a novel (Greene’s Pandoso) and, 557 pages later, pun on the danger of reading “inflaming novels and idle romances” (442).198 How curious that Richardson would rail (via Lovelace) against an example of Christian kitsch in one letter (449) and then, 60 pages later, provide an even kitschier one when describing Clarissa’s death. How prescient of Richardson to have protofeminist Anna use pronouns in the nonsexist if stylistically awkward way that wouldn’t become standard until the 1970s, as in “When a person gets a cold, he or she puzzles and studies how it began; how he—or she got it: and when that is accounted for, down he-she sits contented and lets it have its course . . .” (37). How LOL ironic to have hyperperfectionist Clarissa, of all people, say with a straight face, “I [am] not difficult to please” (155). How delightfully surprising, in a serious novel that is ultimately about the grim, sometimes lethal fact “we have all of us our inordinate passions to gratify” (275)—uncompromising virtue for Clarissa, a compromised Clarissa for Lovelace—that the latter’s uncle nearly dies because of his inordinate passion for . . . lemonade.
But for every nice touch, there’s a clumsy stumble. Clarissa’s family forbids her to communicate with the outside world but turn a blind eye to her solitary visits to a chicken coup on the edge of their estate (where Clarissa drops off and picks up letters from Anna and Lovelace); are we expected to believe they can’t figure out how she continues to send and receive letters? Too often Richardson gives lame excuses to keep his characters apart so they can continue to write, ludicrously so in Anna’s case; given everything the author tells us about this spirited, independent woman, are we to believe she wouldn’t have found some way to visit her beloved friend during Clarissa’s captivity and lingering death? (The excuses Richardson gives—sick mother, trip to the Isle of Wight—are utterly unconvincing: Anna would have stolen a horse and rode it hard and wet to London to rescue her girl.) It’s equally unconvincing and contrary to Lovelace’s obsessive character to believe he neglected Clarissa during her final months because he had to tend to his sick uncle (who survives past the end of the novel). During that period, Lovelace contemplates visiting her disguised as a pastor, around the same time the Harlowe family sends a pastor to Clarissa, with her cooperation. What wonderful possibilities for mistaken identities and cross-purposes that holds! But Richardson didn’t pursue that promising plot twist, or simply forgot about it.199 Many of the literary quotations are awkwardly introduced and feel phoned in: I’m not surprised to read in Ross’s introduction that they stem not from Richardson’s own reading (which was limited) but were “assembled from several handy anthologies such as Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry . . . or The Beauties of the English Stage” (18).
And are we really expected to believe that 18-year-old Clarissa has already written a critical monographs on plays (200)?200 Are we to believe these characters have time to write thousands of words a day, in addition to making rough drafts, copies, and memoranda of their lengthy letters? Too often Richardson’s characters explain things their correspondents would already know, admittedly so when they uses phrases like “I suppose I need not tell you . . .” (499), which is Richardson’s clumsy way of supplying necessary information he can’t otherwise figure out how to convey. The epistolary form is a test of an author’s ingenuity, and too often Richardson cheats in this manner, or by resorting to explanatory footnotes and editorial interventions, as he did in Pamela. He has his characters urge each other to be “very circumstantial and minute” (per his postscript), which certainly adds to the novel’s realistic density, but this unrealistically entails giving them photographic/phonographic memories that defy belief. Even Richardson’s technique of “writing to the moment,” the “present-tense manner” of which he was so proud—and which does indeed give a fly-on-the-wall quality to the proceedings—is kind of silly: characters sometime act, then record their actions, then do something else, and then write about that, as though they were on Twitter. Waiting before dawn outside Clarissa’s chicken coop, Lovelace chastises her for standing him up: “On one knee, kneeling with the other, I write!—My feet benumbed with midnight wanderings through the heaviest dews that ever fell, my wig and my linen dripping with the hoarfrost dissolving on them!—Day but just breaking—” (64.1), and later, in letter 231, Lovelace writes down his own conversation as he’s speaking. Sometimes Richardson cheats by saying some characters take notes as they go along so that they can write up their accounts later, yet another roundabout way of dodging a technical challenge. Many of the letters are continuations of preceding ones, numbered as new letters (but mailed together) simply to disguise what are actually long chapters, another avoidance of the rigors of epistolary form. Richardson’s characters repeat themselves too often, which even they acknowledge: “what can I write that I haven’t already written?” writes Anna (37); “How often, my dearest aunt, must I repeat the same thing!” (45) says an exasperated Clarissa, no more exasperated than the reader who has to listen to characters ring “changes upon the same bells,” as Clarissa puts it, “and neither receding nor advancing one tittle” (42). “More to the same purpose he said,” Clarissa mercifully summarizes at one point (185), but too often we get that “more to the same purpose” in stupefying detail, endless reiterations of points already made, positions already stated, conflicts already at work, and sentiments already expressed. Among the latter, the gaggingly effusive, exponentially cloying praise heaped upon Clarissa is particularly tiresome, and totally unnecessary: Clarissa’s good qualities speak for themselves, but here, as elsewhere in the novel, Richardson can’t resist prompting the reader to respond as he wishes—leading the witness, as lawyers call it. This tendency betrays Richardson’s lack of confidence in both his material and in his readers: like an uncertain TV producer who feels compelled to add a canned laugh track to prompt the audience, Richardson repeatedly tells us how we should respond to Clarissa/Clarissa, supplies trainer-wheel footnotes to remind us where certain things were said before, and explains things the intelligent reader can surmise on her own. Clarissa explains it all, instead of allowing us to explain it to ourselves.
And then, of course, there’s the excessive length—which, again, even the characters complain about: “our story is too long,” says Lovelace (233), seconded by Clarissa, who admits her story “is too long” (235), perhaps the only point on which he, she, and we can agree. The fictional editor (Belford, it’s implied) omits some letters because “this collection is run to an undesirable length” (note preceding letter 470)201 but he includes a lengthy one by Morden who assumes his “doleful prolixity will not be disagreeable” (500). Think again, Colonel. It’s not as though Richardson is dealing with a wide variety of inciden
ts occurring over decades (as in In Search of Lost Time or Infinite Jest) or with profound, philosophical issues that require extensive elaboration (as in The Man without Qualities or The Recognitions). Clarissa moves at the same glacial pace as A Dream of Red Mansions, coincidentally written at the same time halfway around the world, but without the Chinese novel’s larger cast and longer timespan. Nor do any of the authors of these meganovels apologize for their length, as Richardson does repeatedly, self-defensively, another indication of a lack of confidence in his material. Unlike the confident Fielding, the obsequious Richardson is too concerned with imposing on his predominantly female audience, or with offending them—which is one reason why he unrealistically insists that none of his libertines are atheists or even joke about religion, or ever use obscene language.
I’m going on at Richardsonian length about this white elephant of a novel only because some critics overpraise Clarissa as “the eighteenth-century’s supreme fictional masterpiece.”202 Despite many interesting features, it doesn’t deserve that distinction. It has too many technical flaws, too many clumsy narrative contortions, too much repetition, too much filler, too much conventional thinking—for every subversive suggestion there are a dozen brainless bromides—too much womanish fuss over delicacy and punctiliousness, and offers too few returns on the enormous investment of time and attention this massive novel demands. Some readers begin Clarissa without finishing it, and I suspect many who do finish it, like Voltaire, “would not want to be condemned to reread that English novel” (Selected Letters, 206).
One couldn’t ask for a better palate cleanser than The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), the first novel by the third major English (Scots, actually) novelist to emerge in the 1740s, Tobias Smollett (1721–71). It is rough and wild where Clarissa is refined and cerebral, plays out in the wide world rather than inside rooms, and is convincingly realistic rather than artificially so. (Chamberpots, for example, are never mentioned in Richardson, but they are used and often upended on people in Smollett.) As Fielding did in Joseph Andrews, Smollett opens with a preface denouncing unrealistic romances and championing the more realistic (and funnier) novels of Cervantes and especially Lesage, whose Gil Blas he was translating, and which supplied the basic plan for his first novel. And as Richardson did in his prefaces, Smollett states his intentions: to generate indignation “against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world” and “to represent modest merit struggling with every difficulty to which a friendless orphan is exposed, from his own want of experience as well as from the selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind.”203 The friendless orphan is a redheaded Scot born into a family torn apart by a cold-hearted grandfather, whose anger at the clandestine marriage of Roderick’s father drives the boy’s mother into an early grave and his father into exile, leaving the lad to fend for himself. He manages to scrape together a good education (he quotes Horace in Latin throughout the novel) and some knowledge of medicine, but when he leaves Scotland for London to make a living, he is stymied at every step by what he variously calls “the artifice and wickedness of mankind” and “the knavery and selfishness of mankind” (15, 54). Within 48 hours of arriving in London, he and his traveling companion are “jeered, reproached, buffetted, pissed upon, and at last stript of our money” (15), and that’s just for starters: over the next few years (roughly 1739 to 1743) he endures a relentless number of disasters and disappointments, is victimized by scoundrels high and low, is press-ganged into a ship and sent to the West Indies to fight the Spaniards, thrown in jail, and almost beaten to death on several occasions, all usually through no fault of his own. Roderick admits his hair-trigger temper and thirst for revenge cause problems, but he is more sinned against than sinning. About halfway through the novel, Roderick encounters a textbook heroine with the unlikely name Narcissa (Smollett’s tip of the hat to the romance genre), and parts of the second half of the novel concern his frustrated courtship of this amiable beauty. Unlike the protagonists of many picaresque novels (with which Roderick Random has only a distant relation), Roderick never becomes one of the selfish, envious, malicious members of mankind, and for that reason, he is rewarded at the end with financial and amorous success.