And so it proves in Clarissa, since it is by luring Clarissa into a secret correspondence that Lovelace first entangles her. And having trapped her in his web of words, Lovelace exploits all the slippery ambiguities of language to ensnare her, parodying other people’s styles and, indeed, coining many extravagant and idiosyncratic terms of his own. He is an übervirtuoso in the art of verbal deception, using his letters by turns to plead, mislead, persuade and exonerate, and turning Clarissa’s own words into weapons to be used against her. And so it is that Clarissa’s correspondence eventually comes to stand for her just as Pamela’s once did, with her letters discovered, opened and “raped” by Lovelace long before she is herself. (Lovelace, incidentally, is at once Richardson’s most impressive and most unlikely achievement. That a prim and portly printer could have created so breathtaking, sexy and ambivalent a villain almost defies belief—it’s worth reading the book for him alone).
Lovelace, then, glories in his mask, while Clarissa lays a high moral claim to utter transparency, asserting that there is a direct correlation between what she writes and who she is. Indeed in her very first letter she insists that she will “recite facts only, and leave you to judge of the truth.” But in this novel “facts”—never mind “truth”—are never quite as straightforward as that. In the unabridged version of the novel, Clarissa’s brother makes a spiteful observation about her “knack at letter-writing,” and we cannot but admire how she manages to hoodwink even the arch word wielder Lovelace in the famous letter toward the end of the novel in which she informs him she is “setting out with all diligence for [her] father’s house” and he may, in time, see her there, “if it be not [his] own fault.” As Belford later tells Lovelace, “A religious meaning is couched under it, and that’s the reason that neither you nor I could find it out.” So while twenty-first-century readers may identify emotionally with Richardson’s beleaguered heroine, she is not always playing it as straight as she might have us believe, even if she “mean[s] . . . no hurt.” And how do we know that? Because we aren’t the only ones reading her letters.
The Role of the Reader: “Something Should Be Left to Debate Upon”
In Pamela, the recipients of the heroine’s letters barely feature in the novel; the difference—and the greatness—of Clarissa lies in the fact that in this book Richardson dramatizes the process of reading the letters within the novel itself. Anna and Belford are the readers of Clarissa and Lovelace inside the novel, just as we are their readers outside. We, like Anna and Belford, must decide if the version of events we are given is a reliable one, and whether the writer is holding something back and, if so, why. With no omniscient third-person narrator to guide us, we must decide just how unreliable our narrators are. And that’s exactly what happens in the opening sections of the novel, as Anna probes and tests Clarissa’s texts (and it is her texts, rather than her) for all the little ambiguities and equivocations that may—or may not—reveal the truth about her feelings for Lovelace. And before you accuse me of retrofitting a twenty-first-century perspective to an eighteenth-century novel, Richardson himself was fully aware of the role the reader is required to play within the book.
Indeed, critics like Tom Keymer have argued that Richardson makes the process of interpretation and judging deliberately difficult in this novel, forcing the reader to engage with the book in such a way that the very act of reading is part of the “necessary Instruction” he wished his readers to derive from the novel. This process is enacted, inside the novel, by Belford, who begins as Lovelace’s accomplice but is converted to Clarissa’s cause (and “converted” is the right word). It’s clear from his correspondence that Richardson hoped that this process of conversion would be mirrored in the experience of the reader outside the novel. He was always particularly pleased, for example, when people wrote to him (as many did) saying that the account of Clarissa’s death had inspired them to wish such an end for themselves.
Belford reads Clarissa, and we read Clarissa, and in both cases, it is a learning experience, to use a modern phrase that Richardson would certainly have understood. Richardson intends that the reader should be changed—as Belford is changed—through an active engagement with the moral, religious and intellectual issues raised by the story. In a letter to his friend Lady Bradshaigh, Richardson described this process in some detail, saying that “in this Sort of Writing, something . . . should be left to make out or debate upon. It is not an unartful Management to interest the Readers so much in the Story, as to make them differ in Opinion as to the Capital Articles, and by Leading one, to espouse one, another, another, Opinion, make them all if not Authors, Carvers.”
What Richardson means by “carver” here is “one who chooses,” so one who decides among conflicting options. And that’s exactly what the reader of Clarissa must do. The great achievement of the novel lies in the way it holds so many possible interpretations in equilibrium, and allows so many alternatives the potential for truth. And that extraordinary, exhilarating ambivalence is reflected, again and again, both in the contemporary responses to the book, and the way it divides critics and readers even now.
As early as 1744 Richardson was canvassing the opinions of his many friends, asking them to give their opinion on early drafts of Clarissa, or help with alterations and abridgments. When it came to it, he accepted very few of them, but even at this early stage, then, there is a sense in which the process of composing this novel is influenced from the start by those who read it. And the fact that the novel was published in installments, with long intervals between them, allowed plenty of time for an active debate to develop between Richardson and his readers.
The first installment appeared in December 1747, taking the story up to the elopement from Harlowe Place. Barely a month later, an article in the Jacobite’s Journal by Henry Fielding shows how much controversy the novel was already generating, long before most of its readers knew how the story would end:
Clarissa is undutiful; she is too dutiful. She is too cold; she is too fond. She uses her Father, Mother, Uncles, Brother, Sister, Lover, Friend, too ill, too well. In short, there is scarce a Contradiction in Character, which I have not heard assigned from different Reasons to this poor Girl.
But as Fielding is acute enough to observe, all these contradictory views were already present in the novel itself. Just as Pamela preempts every criticism of the heroine by including them in the text, so every possible external perspective on Clarissa is already dramatized inside the novel:
I verily think I have not heard Clarissa condemned for any one Fault, but the Author has made some of the Harlowes . . . accuse her of it before.
Having read Richardson’s comments about making readers carvers, you might be forgiven for thinking that the sort of reaction described by Fielding was exactly what Richardson was aiming for—a heated debate, with different readers taking different sides. But as subsequent events proved, this readerly autonomy wasn’t what Richardson really wanted at all.
By the time the second installment was published in April 1748, the conflict over the “true” reading of Clarissa’s character was getting out of hand. What was worse, at least in Richardson’s mind, was that there was now a very well-founded rumor about how the novel was to end. Long before the last volumes appeared, Richardson began to be besieged by letters from readers pleading with him to reform Lovelace and save Clarissa, letters which proved to him that many—if not most—of his readers had been as deceived about Lovelace’s real character as Clarissa herself had been.
One person who wrote to Richardson at this point was an unknown lady calling herself Belfour, later to be revealed as Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh. She sent him a letter begging him to reassure her that the novel was to end happily, and asking him to place an announcement in the Whitehall Evening Post to that effect. A long correspondence ensued, in which Richardson addressed what he considered to be a serious misunderstanding of his novel. Despite her profound sympathy for Clarissa’
s plight, Lady Bradshaigh could not help “being fond of Lovelace. A sad dog! Why would you make him so wicked, and yet so agreeable? He says, somewhere or other, that he designs being a good man, from which words I have great hopes. . . .” Even after receiving an advance copy of the fateful fifth volume and the account of the rape, she was still writing to Richardson suggesting a new ending whereby Clarissa and a penitent Lovelace would be reunited on his deathbed, only for him to be restored miraculously “to life, to health, and to Clarissa.”
Richardson is by turns irritated and baffled by this, and clearly genuinely disturbed that anyone could fall prey to so profound a misinterpretation, after the preemptive action he had already taken to prevent it:
Lovelace’s Character I intend to be unamiable, as I hinted: I once read to a young Lady part of his Character, and then his End; and upon her pitying him, and wishing he had been made a Penitent, then to be killed, I made him still more and more odious, by his heighten’d Arrogance and Triumph, as well as by vile Actions, leaving only some Qualities in him, laudable enough to justify her first Liking.
Yet what Richardson failed to perceive was that his readers’ misinterpretation was a direct consequence of the inherent openness of the epistolary form, at least in the way he had employed it. Without the intervention of an editorial voice, or a reliable omniscient narrator, the reader is unable to penetrate beyond the glittering surface texture of Lovelace’s narrative, and see “all those Seeds of Wickedness . . . which sprouted up into Action Afterwards in his Character.”
If a reader as sympathetic to Clarissa as Lady Bradshaigh could still beg for a “happily ever after” something was profoundly amiss—at least in Richardson’s view. Indeed it may well have been this correspondence that convinced him, finally, that he had no choice but to intervene, to direct and correct the way the novel was to be read. On May 10, 1748, he wrote to his friend Aaron Hill, complaining that so many of his readers wanted the book to have “what they call, an Happy Ending,” that he intended to counter this by rewriting “one half of the sequel.”
And so he did. And this was only the start of a process that continued for another thirteen years, and another three editions, during which Richardson progressively ironed out ambiguities, blackened Lovelace’s character and added a whole apparatus of footnotes. All with the explicit intention of ensuring that the book was interpreted only “in the Way I chose to have it understood.” It is deeply ironic that having used the epistolary form to create such an extraordinarily bold and open and modern book, Richardson spent the rest of his writing life closing down exactly those complexities that had originally made it so.
Kinship and Control : “Our Family Has Indeed Been Strangely Discomposed”
I am extremely concerned, my dearest friend, for the disturbances that have happened in your family. . . .
This is the very first sentence of Clarissa: if this is a novel about anything, it is a novel about the family. The novel depicts family relationships and tells family histories. It examines the rights of the parent and the obligations of the child, and dramatizes what rapidly descends into a catastrophic conflict between lineage and love, filial duty and family aggrandizement.
And it is the fault line at the heart of the Harlowes that precipitates the action of the novel in the first place. Before the narrative begins, Clarissa’s grandfather has overturned the natural order by leaving his estate to Clarissa in his will, rather than to James, her elder brother and the only son. By the time the novel proper begins, the family at Harlowe Place has been violently recast: James has not only reduced Clarissa to her proper subordinate position; he has also usurped his father’s authority and established himself as the head of the family. It’s fascinating, in this context, to look at the painting Richardson’s friend Joseph Highmore produced to illustrate the novel, which shows the Harlowe family grouped around a standing male figure. In a conventional eighteenth-century “conversation piece” like this, it would be the father who would be placed at the center of the picture; here it is James Harlowe, and he has his back to us. (The painting is now in the Yale Center for British Art and can be seen at http://collections .britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1670065).
Clarissa’s own “picture” of her family is quite different. Notions of the family were beginning to change in the course of the eighteenth century, and modern historians have argued that this is when we first see the emergence of concepts of the family as a unit bound by ties of affection, rather than the purely dynastic notions of kinship that had prevailed before that. In fact Richardson’s own “novels of sentiment” were instrumental in establishing and reinforcing this idea. Clarissa certainly believes in it, seeing her own family as one animated not by ambition but affection: “We have been till within these few weeks, everyone of us, too happy. No crosses, no vexations, but what we gave ourselves from the pamperedness, as I may call it, of our own wills.”
From what we observe of them, it’s hard to believe that the inmates of Harlowe Place were ever really such a cozy household, but Clarissa continues to cling to the power of this increasingly illusory idea to the end of her life. In fact, her fantasy of family comes close to destroying her: as the ever-astute Lovelace observes, she may be “something more than woman, an angel, in some things, but [she is] a baby in others: So father-sick! so family-fond!” And this desperate and, yes, perhaps rather childish desire for love and inclusion is brutally exploited first by her brother, and then by Lovelace himself. James threatens her with expulsion from the Harlowe family if she will not accede to his wishes and marry the odious Solmes, while Lovelace holds out the tantalizing prospect of marriage into his own family, where she will be both welcomed and beloved: “All my friends expect you, madam!—and all your own are determined against you!”
At the very moment of the elopement, Lovelace promises he will be “a father, uncle, brother, and . . . a husband to [her], all in one,” but Lovelace’s idea of family is even more perilous for Clarissa than her brother’s. When he takes her to what he claims are respectable lodgings in “Dover Street,” he introduces the residents as the Widow Sinclair and her husband’s nieces. But in Lovelace’s perverted looking-glass world, nothing goes by its “right name,” not even the street. The house he has taken Clarissa to is an infamous brothel, and the women in it notorious whores. But even though Clarissa suspects there is some covert meaning in the glances the women exchange with Lovelace, the possibility that he could have lodged her in a whorehouse is as alien to her imagination as the idea that he could stoop to pass off two prostitutes as his aunt and cousin so that he can ensnare her, finally and fatally, back into his clutches, after she has escaped him to Hampstead.
It’s only after the rape that Clarissa can see these impostors for what they really were, and her long death is devoted in part to the creation of a new and genuinely affectionate “family” of her own at Mrs. Smith’s lodging house:
“Never having been, till very lately, from under her parents’ wings, and now abandon’d by all her friends, she is for finding out something paternal and maternal in every one . . . to supply to herself the father and mother her dutiful heart pants after!”
Space and Setting: “I Have Only Escaped from One Confinement to Another”
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said that reading Richardson was like being in “a sick room heated by stoves,” compared to Henry Fielding’s novels, which were an “open lawn on a breezy day in May” by comparison. And I know what he means. But to be fair, that sense of stifling oppression is exactly the atmosphere Richardson is seeking to conjure in Clarissa, whether within the claustrophobic architecture of Harlowe Place, with its rigid and overformal Dutch-taste garden and its dark yew hedges, or in “Dover Street,” where a genteel exterior masks the real character of the sinister inner house.
There’s another fascinating angle to this, which relates to changes in the layout of domestic architecture in the early eigteenth century.
For the first time, space inside the house was starting to be used for different purposes, and by different people—there were grand drawing rooms for receiving guests, private parlors for intimate conversation, dining rooms for formal eating and closets for private reading, writing and devotions. These new territories within the house were also divided along gender lines: the library or study became a male preserve, while parlors were seen as more feminine, especially when used for taking tea. And women were now claiming “rooms of their own,” even if their private closets were always the smallest and the farthest removed from the physical and social center of the house. This juxtaposition between masculine and feminine space—and private and public space—is a recurring theme in all Richardson’s novels.
In Clarissa, even more than in Pamela, the action of the novel takes place within interiors, as the conflicts between Clarissa and her family, and Clarissa and Lovelace are all externalized in terms of the rooms, walls, doors and gates that surround or separate them. The drama of both Pamela and Clarissa is thus a drama of constraint—constraint exercised by men and resisted by women: men move, women are static; men control space, women are confined within it. But in Pamela the trajectory of the book is from confinement to freedom, with Pamela, the former maidservant, eventually taking possession of the whole house as its legitimate mistress, complete with a “room of her own”; in Clarissa, this movement is reversed.
At the beginning Clarissa has her own estate and her own parlor hung with her full-length portrait “in the Vandyke taste,” but as the novel progresses, she is first marginalized within Harlowe Place, then confined to her closet as a virtual prisoner. She escapes, at first temporarily, to meet Lovelace in the garden, and it’s a measure of the greater richness of Clarissa compared to Pamela that the geography of Harlowe Place operates on a symbolic as well as a literal level. Just as in her “stratagem” letter, her father’s house is also her Father’s house, with the garden standing for the Eden from which she is excluded, after she passes through the forbidden garden door, and is lost in the “wilderness of doubt and error” beyond. And that fateful step once taken, her family enacts their bitter revenge on her blameless likeness, ordering that the portrait should be “taken down, and thrown into your closet, which will be nailed up, as if it were not a part of the house. . . . For who can bear to see [it]?”