Samuel Richardson and the theory of tragedy

Clarissa 's caesuras

James Smith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781784997977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

Samuel Richardson and the theory of tragedy is a bold new interpretation of one of the greatest European novels, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. It argues that this text needs to be rethought as a dangerous exploration of the ethics of tragedy, on the scale of the great arguments of post-Romantic tragic theory, from Hölderlin to Nietzsche, to Benjamin, Lacan and beyond. Taking the reader through the novel from beginning to end, it also acts as a guidebook for newcomers to Richardson's notoriously massive text, and situates it alongside Richardson's other works and the epistolary novel form in general. Filled with innovative close readings that will provoke scholars, students and general readers of the novel alike, it will also serve as a jumping off point for anyone interested in the way the theory of tragedy continues to be the privileged meeting point between literature and philosophy.

1

Richardson’s fictions were associated with representing reality with unprecedented convincingness early on. The villagers of Slough and Preston may or may not have jubilantly sounded the church bells on reading of Pamela’s marriage to Mr B, but the significance of the anecdote’s popularity in the eighteenth century is that it didn’t seem implausible that they might have done.¹ Reflecting on Clarissa, the poet and dramatist Aaron Hill summed up this effect when he wrote to Richardson ‘that we can find no difference at all, in the impression of things really done, and past, and recollected by us – and the things we read of, in this intellectual world which you have naturalized us into’.² But whatever Richardson’s established place in the history of realism, his claim in the preface to Clarissa that his novel was written to diagnose and to overturn ‘commonly received notion(s)’ suggests that, as much as he wanted to invite readers to revel in the marvellous plausibility of his ‘intellectual world’, he was also seeking to provide an interruption in the smooth running of the real world as it is. The operation of Clarissa was that it should leave its readers capable of standing critically apart from the more specious assumptions about gender, class, God and power doing the rounds in the world outside the text, even as they became more and more absorbed in the minute dilemmas and exercises of feeling going on inside it.

The rest of this book will show that as Clarissa develops it increasingly raids the archive of tragedy for alternative forms of expression and knowledge to such conventional received notions. But prior to this tragic turn, Richardson spends a considerable amount of Clarissa’s first instalment demonstrating how those received notions managed to gather the authority and the appearance of truth they had in the first place. Let us take the key example of a received notion as Richardson uses the term in the preface: ‘a reformed rake makes the best husband’ (C 36). In the novel’s earliest letters, Richardson is already showing how that maxim has been allowed to take hold. In her first letter, Clarissa describes her elder sister Bella’s attitude to Lovelace during his initial courtship of Bella. She regarded him as ‘wild’, Clarissa writes, ‘very wild, very gay; loved intrigue. But he was young; a man of sense: would see his error, could she but have patience with his faults, if his faults were not cured by marriage’ (C 42). Lovelace surprises Bella by taking her conventionally coquettish rejection of his initial advances at its word and, in pretended disappointment, begins to court the younger sister instead. If the family’s first hope was that, whatever rakishness there was in Lovelace’s youth it would soon be ‘cured by marriage’ to Bella, that idea gets neatly transposed to this second love interest. As the sisters’ uncle remarks, Clarissa ‘would reform him if any woman in the world could’ (C 45).

At the start of the novel, then, the ‘dangerous … notion’ that Lovelace’s rakishness is a small price to pay for his charm and status and, anyway, will subside after marriage to one sister or the other, does indeed seem to be ‘commonly received’: although not especially – as one might have thought – by the impressionable adolescent girls Clarissa and Anna themselves. It is an unpleasant irony of the Harlowe family’s quickly escalating cruelty against Clarissa that the courtship with Lovelace that supposedly motivates it is initially more welcomed by them than by her. Indeed, when Lovelace comes to petition Anna to speak to Clarissa in his favour, by contrast, Anna’s reply is a precise reversal of ‘a received rake makes the best husband’: ‘it was surprising that young gentlemen, who gave themselves the liberties he was said to take, should presume to think that, whenever they took it into their heads to marry, the most virtuous and worthy of the sex were to fall to their lot’ (C 216). Richardson’s examination of how spurious notions come to be regarded as truth is, it seems, to be rather more sophisticated than simply having his protagonists fall for them.

In Clarissa’s Ciphers, Terry Castle emphasises that part of what is so disturbing about the control Lovelace comes to exercise over Clarissa once he has abducted her is that it goes beyond the merely physical, extending to the very language and conceptual vocabulary available to her for processing her experience. ‘Metaphoric aggression’, Castle suggests, is ‘Lovelace’s first and most basic affront against Clarissa. It becomes the prototype for every other kind of abuse he wages against her’, whether in presenting false personae of himself and his confederates, lying about their geographical location, or – most disastrously – finally assuming to interpret and to speak for her desire itself in the rape. But if Lovelace is endowed with special linguistic gifts that allow him to succeed for a time in these kinds of invasions of Clarissa’s language, he by no means has a monopoly on ‘linguistic persecution’. In fact, says Castle, in the novel’s first instalment, Clarissa’s family’s ‘persecutions prefigure those of Lovelace’, as they work hard – if not always successfully – to deprive Clarissa of the ability to write or to contact any sympathetic interlocutors.³

This chapter builds on Castle’s insight that the first instalment of Clarissa is dominated by linguistic persecutions imposed on Clarissa by the Harlowes in a manner that anticipates the violence that is done to her by Lovelace. If it does depart from Castle, it is in arguing that the form such linguistic persecutions take is sometimes even more blunt and heavy-handed than her analysis implies. I want to show that the Harlowes’ bullying attempt to force compliance from the intransigent youngest daughter provides Richardson with an opportunity to show his idea of the received notion in action. Rumours, maxims, old bits of folk wisdom and quotations from other texts crowd the letters of the novel’s first volumes, demonstrating how ideas can gain or lose the appearance of truthfulness depending on how and how often they get quoted or retold, and by whom. The Harlowes, it seems, are old hands at this, and at several charged moments their persecution of Clarissa explicitly takes the form of quoting from each others’ letters and statements in order to build them up into accepted truths; or otherwise quoting Clarissa’s own words back to her in such a way as to discredit them. The chapter, then, begins by considering the different forms the received notion takes in the first instalment, starting with the sideways glances the text makes to a building culture of rumour surrounding the goings on at Harlowe Place and the extent to which the epistolary form itself might be implicated in such a culture. Second, it examines the Harlowes’ linguistic persecution of Clarissa at work, showing how their letters allow particular attitudes to build up into full-blown received notions. And, finally, it turns to Lovelace and the rakes, whose libertine behaviour is represented by Richardson as being less a spontaneous acting upon animal urges than a carefully structured set of behaviours enacted in accordance with – once again – certain maxims that gain their authority by being repeated.

I

Richardson’s novel is dominated by the writing voices of the small group of characters whose letters we actually get to read, but it also periodically draws our attention to a chattering culture of rumours about those characters situated just within the text’s peripheral vision. This, I argue, is Richardson’s first examination of the way received notions are created and reinforced by repetition within a culture, and it begins with a consideration of the ‘fame’ Clarissa is said to have at the start of the novel. In a recent study, Philip Hardie emphasises what he calls the ‘duplicities’ of the concept of fame, originating in the fact that in classical times the term fama could refer simultaneously to stories of the acknowledged exploits of great individuals, as well as to the more scurrilous and unstable circulation of misinformation about them.⁴ By Richardson’s day, English literature had already made substantial engagements with this ambiguity, for instance at the start of the second part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV (1596), in which Rumour appears on stage to spread misinformation about the actions of the heroes at the end of the previous play. A few years later, in Poetaster (1601), Ben Jonson recast the struggles of fame and slander among the modern London’s playwrights back into Augustan Rome, calling Ovid and Virgil onstage to expound their respective theories of fame. More recently for Richardson, Alexander Pope had modernised Chaucer’s The House of Fame (1379) – the most significant early introduction of the fama tradition into England – as The Temple of Fame, published in 1715. As Jeremy Tambling argues, English literature’s early seizing on the structural similarity of fame and rumour in examples such as these indicates its wider preoccupation with ‘the plurality of (the) circulation of messages’ and ‘the impossibility of any chronology establishing a single cause and effect’.⁵ As much ideological store as it has set by ideas of fame and reputation, an awareness of the shakiness of fame’s informational underpinnings, and the ease with which it can tumble into scurrilous rumour and rival retellings, has never been far away.

Late on in the novel, Clarissa attempts to circumvent the confusion of the two kinds of fama, proclaiming that ‘as to the world and its censures … however desirous I always was of a fair fame, yet I never thought it right to give more than a second place to the world’s opinion’ (C 1139). When applied to a woman, ‘fame’ suggests sexual virtue or virginity, and Clarissa sometimes uses the word in this sense after Lovelace rapes her. In her mad papers written in the rape’s immediate aftermath, Clarissa refers to Lovelace as a caterpillar who has destroyed ‘the fair leaf of virgin fame’ (C 892) and later thanks Anna for ‘supporting my blighted fame against the busy tongues of uncharitable censurers’ (C 1114). Clarissa wants fame in the sense of being beyond reproach sexually to be distinct from fame in the sense of being at the mercy of the ‘busy tongues’ of culture. The difficulty of making such a clear-cut division is in evidence from the very beginning of the novel.

Anna writes to Clarissa, having been confronted with rumours of the early dispute between Lovelace and Clarissa’s brother and of Lovelace’s romantic overtures to both Harlowe sisters. ‘I know it must hurt you to become the subject of the public talk’, Anna says, ‘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 everyone’s attention’ (C 39). Clarissa’s merits have made her famous, but Anna sees how easily the sympathetic ‘public care’ this engenders can snap round into insidious rumour, or as Richardson has it here, ‘public talk’. ‘There are different reports’, she continues, ‘some people scrupling not to insinuate that the younger sister (at least by her uncommon merit) has stolen a lover from the elder’ (C 40). As rumours are prone to do, this story doing the rounds that Clarissa has stolen her sister’s lover recurs somewhat later in the novel, and with the new elaboration that Bella is still infatuated with Lovelace. This rumour, it turns out, has been started by Bella’s servant Betty, who Bella – ‘lay(ing) herself in the power of a servant’s tongue! – Poor creature!’ (C 85) – has been uncareful enough to confide in.

We have seen that earlier literary engagements with fama played on the difficulty of finding where rumours originate and ‘the impossibility of any chronology’ when it comes to how they subsequently spread. Anna, however, makes a surprisingly deft attempt at tracing how this particular rumour has come about:

Betty (pleased to be thought worthy of a secret, and to have an opportunity of inveighing against Lovelace’s perfidy, as she would have it to be) told it to one of her confidants; that confidant, with like injunctions of secrecy, to Miss Lloyd’s Harriot – Harriot to Miss Lloyd – Miss Lloyd to me – I to you. (C 85)

Anna suggests that rumours are spread by each person only telling their most trusted confidante – each of whom trusts that the information would then go no further – in a process Anna tells us Lovelace has referred to as ‘the female round-about’. In her study of gossip, Patricia Meyer Spacks addresses this common gendering of rumour and argues that as much as the term has been used as a way of dismissing female forms of conversation and sociability, gossip can also be defended as an important counterweight to the officially circumscribed public discourse.⁶ There is little of this willingness to countenance a defence of rumour in Richardson’s main female correspondents, however. Both Clarissa and Anna seem horrified by it, even when it is not directed at Clarissa. Weighing up Lovelace’s attractiveness against his bad reputation, Anna decides that, even if the rumours about him are all untrue, he is still ‘guilty of an inexcusable fault’ in having allowed them to be spread about him at all. Lovelace’s sin is the one Jonathan Swift has sometimes been accused of: ‘pride in being thought worse than he is’ (C 75).⁷

‘Desirous’, by contrast, ‘of sliding through life to the end of it unnoted’, Anna tells us that Clarissa has made ‘rather useful than glaring’ her ‘deserved motto’ (C 40). When her family forbid her from attending church until she has consented to marry their preferred suitor, she recognises it as a means by which ‘every ear (will) be opened against me; and every tale encouraged’ (C 115), adding helplessly that ‘my disgraces if they have to have an end, need not to be proclaimed to the whole world’ (C 118). Clarissa continues to think in terms of how she is being represented at the level of public talk even at the most pivotal moments of the book’s first instalment. When Clarissa first despondently considers allowing Lovelace to abduct her, she reflects that

as to the world’s opinion, it is impossible to imagine that the behaviour of my relations to me has not already brought upon my family those free censures they deserve … I have no doubt that I am the talk, and perhaps the byword of half the country. If so, I am afraid I can now do nothing that will give me more disgrace. (C 349)

If this experience of having been brought low in public view momentarily emboldens Clarissa in her decision to flee with Lovelace, her panicked letter to Anna written on the other side of the escape continues to be expressed from ...