C reads Clarissa

the history of a young graduate student of English Literature, in which she undertakes a semester-long guided reading of Samuel Richardson's (in)famous eighteenth-century novel NOTICE TO FOLLOWERS: The threat and reality of sexual assault, disordered eating, and suicide are significant both to the plot and themes of Clarissa, and this blog is likely to contain occasional discussion of these elements of the novel. I will be tagging all such posts with "tw: sexual assault" / "tw: disordered eating" / "tw: suicide" so that followers can use Tumblr Savoir to avoid being triggered. If ever I slip up and mention something triggering without proper warning, please tell me. Questions or comments? Ask away! The fine print: all page references are to the 1985 Penguin Classics edition edited by Samuel Ross (reissued 2004).

[c-reads-clarissa]

before they could attend her, she had found means to fly away once more: and is now, said I, perched perhaps, somewhere under Lady Betty's window at Glenham Hall; and there, like the sweet Philomela, a thorn in her breast, warbles forth her melancholy complaints against her barbarous Tereus

Lovelace, describing Clarissa to his relations, p. 1038

I'm beginning to think I should have a tag for Lovelace's creepy insistence on Clarissa being a bird...

[c-reads-clarissa]

Teaching Clarissa

This is an impossible novel in so many ways, but god help me, someday I will teach it. I will teach in all of its historically-situated literary glory, but I will also teach it as a way of educating students -- male and female -- about what "patriarchy" and "rape culture" and "misogyny" look like. I will teach it because the things that happen to Clarissa STILL HAPPEN, and society still shuns and shames women for falling victim to a crime that has nothing to do with them, and that is not okay. I will teach it because if you can read this novel and see how little has changed since 1748 and tell me we don't need feminism, you need to get your ears cleaned out.

(Tangentially: one thing that makes Richardson so hard to grapple with, at least for me, is that he seems to recognize rape culture as a pervasive and horrifying thing, and to the extent that patriarchal structures reinforce rape culture he is against them, but in other ways he is incredibly misogynist and supportive of the patriarchy. And the trouble, for a literary critic, comes in figuring out where he's representing behavior he commends vs. where he's representing behavior he condemns...especially with regards to kickass ladies like Anna Howe, whom I suspect he wouldn't want me to like nearly as much as I do...)

[c-reads-clarissa]

But such a majestic composure--seeking me--whom yet, it is plain by her attempt to get away, she would have avoided seeing--No Lucretia-like vengeance upon herself in her thought--yet swallowed up, her whole mind swallowed up, as I may say, by a grief so heavy, as, in her own words, to be beyond the power of speech to express--

Lovelace on Clarissa, after the rape, p. 900

The mention of Lucretia, who was raped and committed suicide, is a reminder that the classical and biblical registers are always somewhat at odds in Clarissa--on the one hand, Clarissa must be a virtuous modern-day (18th-c) Christian woman, but on the other, it's only in the classical period that she finds the appropriate analogues (Philomela would be another, particularly considering all of the bird metaphors that get used to describe her).

[c-reads-clarissa]

"and bread and water, without your tormentings, will be dainties; and my straw bed the easiest I have lain in--for--I cannot tell how long!"

Clarissa to Lovelace, p. 895, in the first letter she writes him after her rape

[c-reads-clarissa]

Today, in Clarissa's mad papers: it's interesting to me in the context of the paper I'm currently researching that one major expression of ecstatic experience comes in the disordered papers Clarissa writes (but never sends) in the madness that follows Lovelace's rape. I'm talking specifically about this quoted stanza:

Then down I laid my head, Down on cold earth, and for a while was dead; And my freed soul to a strange somewhere fled! Ah! sottish soul! said I, When back to its cage again I saw it fly, Fool! to resume her broken chain, And row the galley here again! Fool! to that body to return,  Where it condemn'd and destin'd is to mourn.

The stanza is an almost-verbatim quote from a poem by Abraham Cowley. The only difference? That final word is "burn" in the original instead. 

I'm interested in this passage particularly for the way it follows up on Lovelace's (much earlier) image of the starving bird within its cage, and the body as something like a prison that the soul longs to escape. 

[c-reads-clarissa]

Lovelace and the female body/soul

I mentioned earlier that Lovelace seems to be the character in this novel most interested in theorizing something like a body/soul divide -- here are a couple more examples of this, drawn from his letters:

"But I have had reason more than once in her case, to conclude that the passions of the gentlest, slower to be moved than those of the quick, are the most flaming, the most irresistible, when raised—Yet her charming body is not equally organized. The unequal partners pull two ways; and the divinity within her tears her silken frame. But had the same soul informed a masculine body, never would there have been a truer hero." (647)

Here, I'm particularly interested in the evaluation of the strength of soul vs. body and the way Lovelace sees Clarissa's soul as "tear[ing]" her physical body, which isn't strong enough to withstand her "divinity" -- also interested, of course, in L's suggestion that a man could do it better...

"We have held that women have no souls: I am a very Jew in this point, and willing to believe they have not. And if so, to whom shall I be accountable for what I do to them? Nay, if souls they have, as there is no sex in ethereals, nor need of any, what plea can a lady hold of injuries done her in her lady-state, when there is an end of her lady-ship?" (704)

Trying to follow Lovelace's logic is always a tricky subject, but seems especially so in this instance: either women have no souls, or souls have no sex (?), so either women can be treated however men please because they aren't spiritual creatures, or because their spiritual essence is unrelated to their bodily presence. I'm still not quite sure what his final comparison between "lady-state" and "lady-ship" means...

[c-reads-clarissa]

"necessary to the support of life"?

As she attended me at dinner, she took notice that nature is satisfied with a very little nourishment: and thus she compilmentally proved it—For, miss, said she, you eat nothing, yet never looked more charmingly in your life.

As to the former part of your speech, Betty, said I, you observe well; and I have often thought, when I have seen how healthy the children of the labouring poor look, and are, with empty stomachs and hardly a good meal in a week, that Providence is very kind to its creatures in this respect, as well as in all others, in making much not necessary to the support of life; when three parts in four of its creatures, if it were, would not know how to obtain it.

--Clarissa, p. 263

More here on the subject of foreshadowing, as well as some really wonky class stuff going on. This moment very early in the novel seems necessary to establish for us the context in which Clarissa will (much later) undergo what looks to most readers like deliberate self-starvation but which Clarissa continually argues isn't suicide, or even self-harm. Here we get Clarissa's theory of food, and it's also (weirdly) a theory of godly self-deprivation, of life under conditions of scarcity, of "just enough."

Clarissa herself is of a much higher status than these "children of the labouring poor" for whose condition she presumes to speak. (I personally can't read this passage without cringing. I'm pretty sure these children would have something very different to say about the relationship between what they eat and how they feel.) I think this passage actually suggests something of Clarissa's anxiety toward the powers of "Providence," which cannot provide more than "just enough" for 75% of humanity! That's not an impressive statistic, and I think even to Clarissa this justification rings false, though she would be loath to admit it. 

[c-reads-clarissa]

"I don’t know what to do, not I!—God forgive me, but I am very impatient!—I wish—but I don’t know what to wish, without a sin!—Yet I wish it would please God to take me to his mercy!—I can meet with none here!—What a world is this! What is there in it desirable? The good we hope for, so strangely mixed, that one knows not what to wish for: and one half of mankind tormenting the other, and being tormented themselves in tormenting!"

--Clarissa to Anna, p. 224

One of the things that's surprised me as I go back through this novel is how early on Richardson drops suggestions of Clarissa's eventual death. She hasn't even left her parents' house, and here she is contemplating her fate in terms of being unable to bear the world anymore.

Is it fair to see this foreshadowing echoing the mode of Christian typology? Why is Richardson introducing the possibility of suicide this early in the novel? I suspect he thinks he's introducing it in order to discredit it, to remind us that Clarissa would never do such a thing, and yet that idea is undermined by Clarissa's one suicide threat (with a penknife) and possibly by her ultimate death.

[c-reads-clarissa]

"the haughty beauty will not refuse me, when her pride of being corporally inviolate is brought down"

Lovelace on Clarissa, p. 879

Lovelace's logic here is weirdly mechanistic--by attacking the physical body of Clarissa by way of sexual assault, he believes he will be able to change her mind, suggesting a view of the body/mind connection in which the body is somehow in control.

[c-reads-clarissa]

"mere bodies"

One of the reasons my professor is encouraging me to write on Clarissa in the context of the Great Awakening is that such a connection may have the power to rewrite a strain of thinking about the development of the English novel towards sensibility and away from materialism. If Clarissa's death can be read in terms of materialism, rather than as a transcendence of the material, it would suggest a connection with the narratives of female self-starvation in the wake of the Great Awakening, which seem to be all about the focus on the body as a site of experience and control (even if that experience is painful). Alternately, it's of course possible that this hypothesis won't pan out, which is why one does research in the first place.

One thing I want to notice in this context is that a lot of the novel's concern with bodies vs. souls comes from the perspective of Lovelace, NOT Clarissa. For example:

"I am ready to regret that such an angel of a lady should even marry. She is, in my eye, all mind: and were she to meet with a man of all mind likewise, why should the charming qualities she is mistress of, be endangered? Why should such an angel be plunged so low as into the vulgar offices of domestic life? Where she mine, I could hardly wish to see her a mother unless there were a kind of moral certainty that minds like hers could be propagated. For why, in short, should not the work of bodies be left to mere bodies?" (555)

There are a lot of things to say about this passage: for one thing, Lovelace is being a real casuist here, trying to convince his readers (and perhaps himself) that his real admiration for Clarissa isn't tied to her physicality, and that what he wants from her isn't physical. NOT TRUE, but interesting. We get a lot more consideration of something like a body/soul dichotomy from Lovelace than we ever do from Clarissa. (This is not to suggest that Clarissa ever really gives in to something like spiritual materialism, or mortalism, but my memory of the novel suggests that she is less concerned with this issue than Lovelace is.)

[c-reads-clarissa]

"Now let me tell you that I have known a bird actually to starve itself, and die with grief, at its being caught and caged--But never did I meet with a lady who was so silly. Yet have I heard the dear souls most vehemently threaten their own lives on such an occasion. But it is saying nothing in a woman's favour, if we do not allow her to have more sense than a bird."

--Lovelace to Belford, p. 557

One of the things I'm interested in accounting for is the fact that Clarissa's ultimate retreat into death as a way to escape her captivity is itself part of a rich discursive system that's larger than she is. She insists, later, that she isn't starving herself; rather, it's that she never needed much food for her survival, and she isn't going to eat more than she needs. However, it's interesting that her self-starvation is prefaced in this comparison of Lovelace's.

(It's also worth considering that Clarissa's self-starvation doesn't really begin until after she's escaped from Lovelace's "cage"--this is something she does when it's quite possible she has the power NOT to...)

[c-reads-clarissa]

The Return of Clarissa

A little less than a year ago, I finished this novel for the first time. Now, in the context of a completely different class, I have somehow decided that it's a good idea for me to revisit this text and write yet another paper on it. And not just on the novel as a whole, but on one of the most disturbing and problematic aspects of the novel: Clarissa's slow death, post-rape, from something like self-starvation. (I know, I pick the cheeriest topics...)

There's a reason for it, though. I'm taking a seminar on American religious thought, and as it turns out, there are some strange parallels between Clarissa's self-starvation and the religious self-starvation of women affected by the Great Awakening, as depicted both by these women's diaries and by Jonathan Edwards' narrative of the mass conversions that took place in Northampton, CT in the early 1740s. For these colonial American women, the sweetness of conversion was perversely figured as so overpowering of their other desires that food became unappealing, and one woman whose story Edwards narrates actually died. 

Richardson was surprisingly well-read in his day, and while there is a long history of female food refusal, I suspect that it would not be amiss to argue for a connection between these events in the colonies (widely publicized in England) and Richardson's choices about the mode of Clarissa's death. My paper will seek to explore these phenomena -- one literary, others very real -- side by side in order to discover a way of reading Richardson's response to the Great Awakening.

I've also decided that it might make sense to keep up this blog as a commonplace book for my thoughts on significant quotations from the novel, even though I'm working in a context different from that in which the blog began. So expect this blog to become active once again, for about a month or so while this paper gets written.

[c-reads-clarissa]

"the eye is a traitor"

"While my story, to all who shall know it, will afford these instructions: that the eye is a traitor, and ought ever to be mistrusted: that form is deceitful. In other words; that a fine person is seldom paired by a fine mind: and that sound principles and a good heart are the only bases on which the hopes of a happy future, either with respect to the here or to the hereafter, can be built."

--Clarissa to Anna, p. 601

While at first this sounds like an important discovery on Clarissa's behalf -- finally she gets that people aren't always what they seem! -- it also raises its own set of problems. Rather than implicitly and naively trusting all things she sees as outward marks of inner character, Clarissa resolves to trust none of them, but this seems like a potential overreaction. No, there is no inherent connection between beauty and goodness, but it's just as ridiculous to say that no good people are beautiful as it is to say that all beautiful people are good.

[c-reads-clarissa]

How little confidence! as if we apprehended each other to be a plotter rather than a lover.

Lovelace to Clarissa, p. 650

Lovelace, I'll give you a hint: she may not be a plotter but she sure as hell isn't your lover, either! And she'd like to keep it that way!

On a more academically useful note, the truth of this scene is that Clarissa has no confidence in Lovelace, and Lovelace's confidence rests more in Clarissa's expected naivete than in Clarissa herself -- he may be a plotter, but he doesn't expect her to be one. (And so when, perhaps, she is, things start to get interesting.)

[c-reads-clarissa]

A dear silly soul! thought I, at the time, to depend upon the goodness of her own heart, when the heart cannot be seen into but by its actions; and she, to appearance, a runaway, an eloper, from a tender, a most indulgent husband!--to neglect to cultivate the opinion of individuals, when the whole world is governed by appearance!

Lovelace writing about Clarissa, p. 789

[c-reads-clarissa]

Had it been my beloved's hand, there would have been no imitating it for such a length. Her delicate and even mind is seen in the very cut of her letters. Miss Howe's hand is no bad one; but it is not so equal and regular. That little devil's natural impatience hurrying on her fingers gave, I suppose, from the beginning, her handwriting, as well as the rest of her, its fits and starts, and those peculiarities which, like strong muscular lines in a face, neither the pen nor the pencil can miss.

Lovelace, p. 811

It's not uncommon for people in this novel to imagine that the letters they receive give them some access to real truth about the letter-writers -- that no one can disguise themselves entirely -- but I find it fascinating how that extends even to the materiality of the letters. The "hand" Lovelace talks about here refers to handwriting! By connecting written "character" with physical "character" and mental "character," Lovelace seems to be participating in a worldview where everything is a sign and everything is legible (the letter signifies, not just through what it says, but how it says; the shape of the written letters matter just as much as the words those letters join up to form). But the fact that he makes these observations on the difference between Clarissa's and Anna's handwriting in a moment when he is forging a letter in Anna's hand suggests the very problem with his belief in legibility: even if we believe Anna's handwriting says something about her character, doesn't it sort of stop doing that when it's being written by Lovelace instead of Anna?

[c-reads-clarissa]

Her indignation filled her disdainful eye, eye-beam after eye-beam flashing at me. Every feature of her sweet face had soul in it.

Lovelace, p. 827

I don't really have anything intelligent to say about this. I just love the idea of Clarissa's flashing eye-beams. (No, I'm totally not suddenly imagining her as an avenging superhero with laser eyes, why do you ask?)