Princesse de Clèves. These French and English predecessors-almost exclusively female, we should note- helped to generate both Lovelace and Clarissa.
Though Lovelace clearly derives from the boisterous rakes of English Restoration comedy, Richardson has given him a layer of French refinement that makes his cruelty all the more appalling. He spent his formative years 'at the French Court,' and his troubles with women -88- may derive from an early misunderstanding of the French initiation game, in which the young man is 'put into the world' by a fashionable seductress like Ninon de L'Enclos, and then left to fend for himself. Lovelace can never overcome his fury at being conquered and abandoned in his teens by a woman of his own class, a 'Quality-jilt,' and he harps on this episode whenever he tries to explain why he must persecute and ruin
Clarissa also resembles the spirited heroines of Restoration comedy, sexually virtuous but free enough in wit and style to match the rakish hero. Discussing Lovelace with her confidante, she slips into the sparklingly offhand tone of Congreve's Millamant, suggesting not just worldly intelligence but amusement and even conspiratorial pleasure in his addresses: 'Bashfulness in Mr. Lovelace, my dear!'; 'The man, you know, has very ready knees'; 'What will not these men say to obtain -89- belief, and a power over one?'; 'What shall I do with this Lovelace?' He is a 'contradictory creature,' an 'impatient creature,' an 'artful wretch'-all terms that with a tap of the fan could turn from insult to endearment. Her flustered response to a supposed offer of marriage-'Would he have had me catch at his first, at his very first word?' (letter 107) — sounds like Millamant during the proviso scene in The Way of the World, a parallel all the more poignant since Lovelace is deliberately preventing their confrontation from evolving into a courtship ritual with a happy ending. Even her tragic perplexity is tinged with drawingroom slang: 'I am strangely at a loss what to think of this man. He is a perfect Proteus!' The horror of Clarissa's predicament increases, then, when we see her as a worldly heroine in a Restoration comedy situation that has been grotesquely hardened, translated into a realm where the comedic resolution is impossible and where her gracious liberty of style must fight to the death with the predatory violence of libertinism.
The Congrevean comedy-heroine is expected not only to outwit her brutal father and trounce the deadly alternative suitor (as Clarissa does with the repulsive Solmes, her father's choice), but to grill her future mate with merciless wit and penetration,only to soften by the final act and accept his proposal of marriage. (This is precisely what Charlotte Grandison does in Richardson's kinder, gentler fiction.) Lovelace constantly complains about Clarissa's 'penetration,' which «obliges» him (so he claims) to proceed 'by the Sap,' by secret military tunnels (letter 99); his rape of her unconscious body may be read as a crude physical counterpart to this quality that he fears in her. Clarissa sees through Lovelace, perceiving, where others find aristocratic confidence, only the nervous arrogance of the upstart, an insecurity that could erupt or implode into violence. In the psychological realm it is she who is the aristocrat and he the parvenu-a precise reversal of the social position of their families. Clarissa's critical yet fascinated vision of Lovelace dominates the start of the novel, since Richardson cleverly withholds the man's own letters for nearly two hundred pages. As he closes in, and his real intentions become agonizingly apparent to the reader (though not to Clarissa), she continues to exercise her suspicious intelligence on the character he presents to her, exposing the 'half-menacing strain' of his compliments, the contradiction between his sugared words and the 'lines of his own face,' his habit of 'visibly triumphing… in the success of his arts' (letter 98). After her capture they still play the game of scrutiny, like the alert and predatory couples of comedy, 'great watch-90- ers of each other's eyes; and indeed… more than half-afraid of each other' (letter 125). Clarissa continues to play the tragic Millamant, verbally reducing her partner/opponent to 'a simpleton, hesitating, and having nothing to say for himself' (letter 107), and Lovelace recognizes her power to 'beat me out of my play,' to silence his speeches and disrupt the trained seducer's well-oiled sequence of moves. Her tone becomes inevitably darker after her violation, but the dynamics are the same: 'Abandoned man! — Man did I say?… well may'st thou quake; well may'st thou tremble and falter, and hesitate, as thou dost!' (letter 263). Only her resolution to die gives her a more effective role.
Lovelace is himself a dramatist, theatrical in his actions and in his letters (which are thick with quotes from Restoration drama and sometimes written out in play form, with speaking parts and stage directions). But Clarissa is similarly creative, even though her desire to shape the world is thwarted; the letter fragments she scatters after the rape, for example, cite the same heroic plays that Lovelace loves to quote, giving us an eerie sense of the compatibility that underlies their destructive deadlock. They struggle, however, over what kind of drama will emerge. Lovelace-who is always contriving plots to rival Horner, dressing up cronies to impersonate respectable characters, and giving episodes theatrical tides like 'The Quarrelsome Lovers'-obviously wants to define the whole business as a Restoration sex comedy, with Clarissa as the fallen woman. This genre assumes that issues of sex and power are fundamentally lightweight, that women really like to be outwitted or violated by 'Men of Spirit,' and that the rake, however wicked he has been, can save everything by an offer of marriage in 'the last Act' (Lovelace's very words). Clarissa hopes that she might be involved in an eighteenth-century sentimental comedy, where the rake reforms sincerely and intends marriage from the start. Once the rape destroys all vestige of this illusion, however, she improvises a tragedy out of what few resources are left her-quite literally, snatching up scissors or a penknife to impersonate Lucretia, or spending her last few pounds on a coffin decorated with emblems of her own design. Richardson draws attention to this generic shift in his letters to outraged readers; his goals are Pity and Terror, the high emotions of classical tragedy.
Like his predecessors in drama and real life, Lovelace prefers the artifact of seduction to the pleasures of union. Perverted creativity inspires both his original attraction to Clarissa and the cat-and-mouse games he plays thereafter. 'I love dearly to exercise my invention,' he -91- explains; 'I have ever had more pleasure in my Contrivances than in the End of them. I am no sensual man; but a man of spirit'-adding, with gratuitous misogyny, that 'One woman is like another.' (This passage was restored to the third edition in an attempt to darken Lovelace's character.) He must force Clarissa into sexuality (to prove that 'every Woman is the same'), and yet sex is empty and disgusting for him-'a vapour, a bubble!' He craves intimacy with her, and yet cannot imagine sexual love within marriage, since he equates consummation with linguistic and emotional vacuum; like Dom Juan in Molière, he fears that once he has conquered 'there is nothing more to be said.' Lovelace repeatedly gloats over the 'illustrious subject' that Clarissa provides 'to exercise [his] pen upon,' as if the chief motivation of his pursuit were to stimulate the act of writing. As Clarissa stubbornly refuses to conform to his scenario, writing becomes a compensatory fantasy realm, where 'Robert the Great' controls everything according to his 'imperial will and pleasure' (letter 99). He tries to think of Clarissa as a fiction, an author's character who must simply be what he dictates: 'I might have had her before now, if I would. If I would treat her as flesh and blood, I should find her such' (letter 157.1).
But Lovelace also presents himself as the passive agent or mouthpiece of a «subject» outside himself. At times he blames his 'plotting villain of a heart,' as if that organ did not belong to him ('I so little its master!' [letter 153]). Sometimes he blames the place, hoping that the move to London will solve all his problems automatically. Then he blames the women in the London brothel, who urge him to carry on with the rape. Most of all, he blames Clarissa, ascribing to her all the «Power» that in reality he has stripped away from her; while she is treated like a Middle Eastern hostage, constantly spied upon and physically barred from approaching the windows and the door, Lovelace wails that 'every time I attend her, I find that she is less in my power, I more in hers' (letter 99). In an extreme version of this conceit, he imagines that Conscience has stolen his pen and written moral reflections into
