Clarissa: Is it even good?

Samuel Richardson does not seem to like women.

This cat is named smells. She spent much of the last 5 weeks reading over my shoulder.

CW: This is a review of book about complicated and disagreeable topics, including emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

I read Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady (1747-8) so you wouldn’t have to.

Unfortunately, I’ve come to the conclusion that you have to read Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Partly, this is because Clarissa is 1,500 pages long, so any attempt to do it justice in a 2,500 word blogpost must fail. But it is also because Clarissa is very good.

I should note that it is also very bad. This is not a contradiction. It is long enough to have many sharp elements and many dull ones. A brief summary is in order. But I’ll talk first about why I spent five weeks slugging through 40 pages a day instead of spending the holidays drinking like a normal person.

Leslie Fiedler, an American literary critic who blended Marxist honesty with anachronistic aestheticism (who could think of imitating such an original!) wrote that Richardson was “A melancholy and pious printer, who in 1740 became the first modern novelist almost by mistake.” (Love and Death in the American Novel, P. 62)

Richardson combined the sentimental love religion descended from courtly love poetry with the episodic prose narratives of early modern novels and picaresques into the first recognizably modern novel in the English language. The form emerges from the medieval morass of English thought in its entirety in Richardson’s work. Nearly every English language writer, and many from other tongues, have spent the last 277 years responding to Richardson or to people responding to Richardson.

Austen metabolized his work, T.S. Eliot played with it, and his characters hover ghostlike over every book with a hint of sex or romance in it. To read this book is to look back into the deep past and see it as its inhabitants thought of it. Clarissa calls to mind the feeling one gets in an anthropology museum, facing the skulls of the first anatomically modern humans. Take a writer, cut away his flesh and ligaments, pop out his eyes and peel back his scalp and you’ll find Samuel Richardson staring back at you.

It’s a book told in letters, a structure that conceals the editorial hand in a way understandable to audiences unused to the dictatorial whim of the novelist—letters lost, misdirected, altered are all a part of Clarissa Harlowe’s downfall.

In form and purpose it is a recognizable novel, but Richardson, through his plodding, repetitive, brilliant drip of letter upon letter (more than 530!) manages something greater than the invention of a form. He lays out the lives and the hearts of his characters. To quote Fiedler again, Richardson has managed “the creation of “character” in the full modern sense, that is, of fictional actors at once complexly motivated and consistent, highly individualized and typical—this is the essential achievement of Richardson’s art.” (Fiedler, 73)

So what do these modern characters do?

In the first 400 pages a young woman (Clarissa Harlowe) is gradually forced by her abusive family to flee her home rather than marry an ugly, uncharitable fellow. She runs away with Robert Lovelace, who spends the second 400 pages in a mostly-imagined chess match against Clarissa wherein he tries to subvert her ‘virtue.’ Lovelace eventually tires of this game after Clarissa leaves him following a particularly stupid scheme. So he tracks her down, kidnaps her, sexually assaults her and attempts to pressure her into living with or marrying him. Over the next 690 pages Clarissa wills herself to die, Lovelace suffers symbolic castration, and everyone learns whatever important lessons Richardson has decided they must learn.*

There are many possible readings of this book. The relationship between Clarissa and her best friend, Anna Howe, is close enough to warrant a lesbian reading, though the evidence for this derives partly from the drift of meaning since the 1740s. A great many words (saucy, condescension, lover, mean, nice) in this book meant something else when they were written. But there’s enough saucy stuff in the letters between Clarissa and Anna to support a sapphic reading. They refer to each other as Lovers and say each preferred the company of the other over that of any man.

Richardson did not write anything more explicit to satisfy a lesbian reading of the book, but this suffices for an argument that Clarissa is about noble and bourgeois families breaking up a pair of lovers and coercing them to marry men or be punished with sexual violence. This novel, whatever Richardson may have intended, is about the disciplinary use of sexual violence as it relates to the bourgeois marriage. Clarissa’s brother, James Harlowe Jr., indirectly threatens that Clarissa be subjected to sexual assault by the man he would have her marry to break her spirit. Other characters chide him, but only lightly, for suggesting his sister be raped by her husband as a means of control. That the husband is the patriarchal authority figure is questioned only by Anna Howe and Robert Lovelace, the latter because he has made many a husband into a cuckold, the former because she sees clearly what marriage in the 18th century must mean to the bourgeois woman.

Anna Howe’s essay on the nature of marriage, (Letter 523) is the strongest counterargument offered against the marriage plot in the book and stands as a moving proto-feminist critique of the patriarchal marriage state:

“Thus can I enumerate and swell perhaps only imaginary grievances: ‘I must go where he would have me to go: visit whom he would have me to visit: well as I love to write (though now, alas! my grand inducement to write is over), it must be to whom he pleases.’ And Mrs. Hickman (who as Miss Howe cannot do wrong) would hardly ever be able to do right. Thus, the tables turned upon me, I am reminded of my broken-vowed obedience.” (P. 1457)

Note the italicized “imaginary”—Anna is being ironic. But she is subtle enough that her reader, John Belford, the executor of Clarissa’s will and former friend of Lovelace, can read her objections as frivolous. Her best friend is dead. The man responsible is still at large. But her mother and her entire social world are united in asking Anna to accept the marriage proposal of a man (Mr. Hickman) whom she would rather have as a brother than a husband. Once Anna and Clarissa proposed to each other that they live a single life together. We feel Anna’s desperation and resignation that Clarissa’s death and will have stripped her of any option but Hickman. What a bleak, sad moment, played by Richardson as the happy reformation of a saucy vixen.

This, I think, is my preferred reading, of Clarissa as a total assault on the conventions of 18th C. bourgeois sexuality submerged in, yet still recoverable from, the cloying religious story and Romantic seduction tragedy. (See below for an appendix discussing why I hate the 18th century).

But there’s Richarson’s preferred religious reading, where Lovelace is demonic and Clarissa is a saint. Richardson intended the novel as moral instruction for young women. And, save for Clarissa’s belief in her father’s curse against her, the religious reading is the most annoying. Despite its tragic ending, it is a novel of religious optimism. Sinners reform and repent. Virtue survives its test and is rewarded for suffering outrage with eternal salvation. Richardson scandalized audiences by killing his protagonist. But that is not enough for me.

If only he had written a novel of theological pessimism and the triumph of earthly passions over pious virtue. Yet piety prevails: Clarissa dies a saint, capable of a Christian forgiveness, and she dispatches a stream of dying letters to remind her friends and relatives of their religious, sexual and familial duties. Even Lovelace’s passions are tamed and he awaits her death offstage, persuaded by Belford not to interpose at the last moment.

We are meant to see in Clarissa’s death a woman’s Crucifixion. Yet she is better, more faithful even, than Jesus. In the King James Bible (then in use), Mark, Ch. 15, V. 34, Jesus is recorded as saying: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

While Clarissa, with her dying breath, (Letter 481), says: “Bless—bless—bless—you all—and now—and now (holding up her almost lifeless hands for the last time)—come—Oh come—blessed Lord—JESUS!”

I will leave the explicit comparison between these two moments to the reader’s interpretation, and remark that the literary value of the Christian Bible (per Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis) was to see high tragedy in the lives of the lowly and the poor and to see doubt and humility in the lives of God and Kings.

Richardson denies Clarissa such a human moment. Her crucifixion is sanitized, no spear pierces her, no blood runs from a scalp tormented by the thorny crown, no nails are driven into flesh. A uniformly pious existence is a uniformly boring existence. She dies of virtue.

All virtues are made to serve the ends of their time be that the transmission of property through uninterrupted bloodlines, or the social reproduction of docile labor power. In Clarissa we see virtue set up as something of a parlor game, a dialectical opposition between the virgin and the rake. Each must have the other: The rake needs the virgin to pursue and the virgin needs the rake to give chastity a value. This dialectical opposition is what makes the seduction tragedy work, and it persists to this day in the stock characters of the bad boy, the apolitical rebel, the rich sexual predator and their victims.** Like with the crucifixion, Richardson sets up this tension, plays around with it and then closes without quite resolving it. He leaves the development of the dialectic to other writers.

Lovelace, however, declines to die of pious virtue and instead leaves England to recover from his symbolic castration so he can return to his favorite pastime (sexual violence). Clarissa’s cousin, Colonel Morden, ignores Clarissa’ dying wish that no blood be shed on her account. Lovelace and Morden goad each other into a formal challenge and fight a duel outside Trent. This is a neat inversion of the duel between Lovelace and James Harlowe Jr. which precedes the opening of the novel. There Lovelace wounded Harlowe Jr. but spared his life. Once more at Trent, he draws first blood, but is more seriously wounded by Morden, who offers that they stop the duel, blood having answered blood. Lovelace declines and Morden fatally wounds him in another clash of swords.

Because we are running long, I’ll limit myself to a few more remarks. One tendency that stuck out to me was Richardson’s refusal to describe physical things. We have some object names: a diamond solitaire, a chariot and four, a white dressing gown. We have some physical settings: a poor garrett, a suite of comfortable rooms, a green bower. And we have some personal descriptors: fair hair, heaving bosoms, penetrating eyes. But there’s a consummate refusal to give this world color. What is in these drawing rooms? How does a body move?

Take the description of Lovelace’s duel with Morden, supplied by Lovelace’s valet:

My chevalier swore by G—d he was not hurt: ‘twas a pin’s point: and so made another pass at his antagonist; which he, with a surprising dexterity, received under his arm, and run my dear chevalier into the body: who immediately fell; saying, The luck is yours sir—Oh my beloved Clarissa!—Now art thou—Inwardly he spoke three or four words more. His sword dropped from his hand. Mr Morden threw his down, and ran to him, saying in French—Ah monsieur, you are a dead man!—Call to God for mercy.

Leaving aside Richardson’s aversion to the quotation mark, we find a restrained hand. Is it snowing? What do the mountains round Trent look like? What does Lovelace’s blood look like on the snow? I have such a clear picture in my head of this duel in a December field: the black riding boots of the antagonists, the flush of their faces in the cold, their chests bared to show the first touch of steel, their hands chapped with wind and clutching pearl white and cherry red on the hilts of their rapiers. And above the lowering cloud and a few flakes. And not far off the horses harnessed to the post chaise starting a little at the clash of steel and the smell of blood and eyeing down the Adige valley to the Venetian plains, yet free of snow. But none of this is on the page. You create a book as you read it.

A million words and hardly any to give us sight of the world! What an accomplishment. You can’t write like this anymore. This fanatical insistence on the internal world and the abstract world, as opposed to the physical, is one of the keys to the working of a novel. Literature accords the closest touch of another’s heart of any art form. Where film can create the moment as it was, maybe even as it felt, the novel gives you another world, a depth beyond depth, life in its full feeling and all its stakes, and a time that is neither the present nor the hateful 18th Century.

Next week we’ll discuss how to make that world.

-30-

*This is the point in the review where, formally, one would expect me to hint at or reveal some personal trauma or interest to support my authority in writing on this subject. But I am above such cheap tricks of ethos and bathos and you will have to accept that everything I say is grounded in a reasonable reading of the text. If you want revelation of some personal wound in the Critic, I have this to say 1. Truth and disclosure are slippery things and you should beware the writer who makes unnecessary recourse to them. 2. Fuck you, pay me.

**For a nice inversion of these dynamics see the B-plot in American Graffiti involving John Milner and Carol

APPENDIX: I have always found the period from the end of the Spanish Habsburgs to the Tennis Court Oath to be loathsome and boring. You can extend it backwards, perhaps, to the Peace of Westphalia, or the English Restoration or the lynching and cannibalization of the De Witt brothers in The Hague in 1672. Call it the long 18th century, (1648-1789).

I hate the long 18th century, a bitter time of vacuous politics, princely religion and deep reaction. All the hallmarks of a fallen and stupid civilization are in evidence: the decay of formal politics after the Fronde, the end of all radical projects after the fall of Cromwell, the final triumph of the enclosures, the final settlement of Medieval sexual politics after the witch trials—this the ideological backdrop of Clarissa. In those years of Kabinettskriege and baroque punctilio, the cult of virginity and the bourgeois patriarch triumphed; England hanged her highwayman and played robber to the whole world while slaveowners penned paeans to liberty and butchers cried peace with the blood of innocents still wet on their bayonets. Nothing was possible. Even the great political upheavals were stupid: The death of a possessed homunculus in Spain unleashed a world war; von Kaunitz’s Diplomatic Revolution set the stage for another; in America, the descendants of Puritan revolutionaries and gadfly royalists so exhausted the English by losing battle after battle that King George eventually permitted them to set up their Empire of Liberty—the Republic of the Lash.

All of this descended from the mutual suicide of militant protestantism and the Spanish monarchy. The long generations between Muenster (1535) and the Peace of Muenster (1648), saw the defeat of Europe’s peasantry, its radical middle classes and its skilled artisans, and their enrollment in the project of anti-ideological world empire. The nobility and the mercantile elite, so set against each other when Luther finished his theses, merged with one another. In our time, we are living in the aftermath of a more bitter, more global, revolutionary defeat. For what was St. Bartholomew’s day but a foretaste of Jakarta? And what was Yeltsin’s coup of ‘93 but another sitting of the Convention Parliament?

We are at the dawn of our own, long 18th century, its Kabinettskriege made more dangerous by nuclear warheads, its superstitions sharpened by new technologies of ideological production, its voiding of religion dressed up in a therapeutic language of secular salvation, and its anti-politics made all the more theatrical by the persistence of formal parties.

At least the first time around produced the novel.

Who knows what we’ll get this time.