The Columbia History of the British Novel

his text; he then proceeds to beat and choke this female Conscience figure to death. In a text stuck on with wax to the main letter, Lovelace admits that he is 'afraid of the gang of my cursed contrivances' and 'compelled to be the wretch my choice has made me!' The paradox of libertine freedom could hardly be taken further. Richardson has created a tormentor who perceives his own futility and yet seems powerless to change it: 'I am a machine at last, and no free agent' (letter 246). -92- Richardson's «extraordinary» libertine does not repent, of course, but flings himself even more deeply into the character that conventional society expects of him: 'Am I not a Rake, as it is called? And who ever knew a Rake stick at any-thing?'; 'Were I now to lose her, how unworthy should I be to be the Prince and Leader of such a Confraternity as ours! — How unable to look up among men!' (letters 127, 104). Lovelace frets about the «figure» he will make in 'Rakish Annals,' afraid of not matching up to a pre-scripted libertine identity. And for all this, Clarissa must pay: 'If I forgive thee, Charmer, for… these contempts, I am not the Lovelace I have been reputed to be; and that thy treatment of me shews that thou thinkest I am' (letter 103). When Laclos's Valmont shifts the blame to his victims or to the way of the world, we always read it as a cynical maneuver, but Lovelace seems genuinely indignant and genuinely unaware of the contradiction that sustains his pursuit of Clarissa and reduces it to stalemate: one the one hand, he tries to force her into his own script, to impose a prefabricated character on her (much as her father wants to do with his monstrous arranged marriage); on the other hand, he continually describes himself as passive and 'female,' casting her in the active role of initiator, of definer, of 'subject.' Even when «Conscience» holds his pen, he presents himself as the victim of a larger circumstance: 'What a happy man… had I been, had it been given me to be only what I wished to appear to be!' (letter 246). The fate he wishes on Clarissa-to be a fiction wholly controlled by someone else's will, with no gap between projected appearance and inner essence-he really desires for himself.

A total revolution of manners

Though critics treated the magisterial Clarissa with far more respect than the upstart Pamela, they still worried that the intensity and directness of Richardson's realism-the very quality that made his work so compelling-might undermine his moral intention. No one doubted his power to arouse the most intense emotions, but many readers (even among his friends) thought it was used irresponsibly. The rape arouses «Horror» rather than the nobler Pity and Terror. Endless scenes of attempted seduction have the effect of pornography (the same argument that was used in Pamela Censured, which Richardson obviously took to heart). The long-drawn-out treatment of cruelty and death impose a kind of torture on the reader-or else we may be corrupted by -93- a perverse delight in another's suffering. Samuel Johnson famously praised the «Sentiment» of Clarissa rather than the story (if you read it for the story you will hang yourself), but «Sentiment» may bring on an unwholesome kind of sympathy that undermines our judgment. Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, found Richardson emotionally irresistible and socially deplorable: she wept like 'an old Fool' over Clarissa and yet despised his «miserable» style and «low» characters (far from being role models, Anna Howe is 'a more vicious character' than the prostitute Sally Martin, Clarissa should be locked up in Bedlam, and Charlotte Grandison should have 'her Bum well whipp'd'). Richardson's confusing mélange of «tenderness» and impropriety 'will do more general mischief than the Works of Lord Rochester.'

Richardson insists relentlessly that Clarissa must be worshiped as a Christian paragon and that Lovelace, if not absolutely evil, is much too vicious to be attractive. Some of Richardson's friends did recognize the powerful critique of patriarchal aggression in Lovelace: Astraea Hill calls for a Protestant nunnery to protect women from 'mask'd male Savages' (Lovelaces, Solmeses, and Harlowes); Sarah Fielding sees that Lovelace destroys 'every thing that is valuable, only because everything that is valuable is in his Power.' But most readers found Lovelace more entertaining, Clarissa more culpable, her rape more arbitrarily cruel, and her death more devastating, than Richardson had intended. The heroine was widely criticized for overdelicacy, rashness, excessive delay in accepting Lovelace's offers of marriage, inadequate knowledge of her own heart, and failure to escape once she knows the extent of his villainy-all developments of the portrait of unconscious desire first sketched in Pamela. Even the sympathetic Johnson notes that 'there is always something which she prefers to truth,' though he (like Diderot) praised those complexities and contradictions that other contemporaries paraded as faults.

Richardson asked for such criticisms-quite literally, since he insisted on sharing his manuscripts and provoking a detailed analysis in reply. Readers in his inner circle responded, not with detached technical observations, but with intense emotional outbursts and detailed proposals for alternative scenes and endings. As Diderot put it, the reader plays an interactive 'rôle' in the drama of Clarissa. Richardson's correspondents display a sensibility bordering on erotic excitement: Sarah Fielding becomes 'all sensation' as she reads; Colley Cibber cruises London in search of girls who look like Clarissa; Lady Brad-94- Brad- (who wrote under a romantic pseudonym) alternately blushes, cajoles, and throbs with pain. Clarissa stimulated not only the feeling heart but the fiction writer in the reader. Lady Bradshaigh sketched out, and her sister Lady Echlin actually wrote, an alternative ending for Clarissa running to 136 pages, with a critical preface. Sarah Fielding produced Remarks on Clarissa as a short story, in which the characters reveal themselves by their obtuse or sympathetic responses to the great book; those who dismiss women's issues as trivial ('Letters wrote between Misses!'), those who cannot endure any narrative longer than an almanac, those who blame Clarissa and exonerate Lovelace, are matched to their obnoxious counterparts in Clarissa itself. Fielding's brother Henry, whose fiction-writing career had been launched by the desire to puncture Pamela, praised Clarissa by sending Richardson a «Narrative» of the emotions that overwhelmed him during the rape and its aftermath: 'God forbid that the Man who reads this with dry Eyes should be alone with my Daughter when she hath no Assistance within Call!' Henry Fielding's «Heart» breaks down the barriers between fiction and life, mingling Clarissa and his own daughter for the thrill of imagining virtue in danger.

Lady Echlin's preface and alternative ending encapsulate the problems forced upon the reader of Clarissa. The heroine's 'conduct is quite inconsistent with her character,' since she could not possibly be so credulous as to let herself be recaptured after once escaping from the brothel. Lovelace's belief that every woman can be «subdued» is in fact ratified, not disproved, by the terrible actions that follow. The reader becomes 'too much oppresst, or distracted, to admitt a rational sensibility.' Nor is justice properly done; the wicked siblings are not punished enough, and Lovelace is removed by the arbitrary and anti-Christian means of a duel. Echlin avoids all this by giving the villains sudden attacks of conscience as they try to recapture Clarissa: her wasted form shocks them so deeply that they convert and repent. This narrativestopping device brings Clarissa into line with Pamela and Grandison, and throws into greater relief Richardson's «extraordinary» decision to make Lovelace an exception to his general weakness for sentimental conversions. Echlin's desire for a happy ending (or at least a wistfully sad one, since the reconciled Clarissa and Lovelace still die of 'consuming Illness') shows how threatening Richardson's tragic vision could seem. Threatening and perhaps misogynistic: significantly, Echlin's version hinges on female agency and 'sensibility,' since it is Sally -95- Sally-devilishly unrepentant in the original Clarissa-who first breaks down in remors and destroys the plot.

Richardson's response to these improvements, as to all the calls for a happy ending, seethes with the indignation of the artist defending his integrity and of the moralist exposing upper-class indulgence. Since Lady Echlin's Lovelace stops short of the 'capital Crime,' he actually did no evil; why then kill him off at all? Why not shower him with rewards, make him 'a Governor of one of the American Colonies,' where he could shine 'as a Man you had reformed'? This echoes his withering criticism of the happy-ending school in the postscript to the 1751 edition: after trampling on Clarissa, murdering other women by forcing them to die in clandestine childbirth, and 'glorying in his wickedness' for years, Lovelace has only 'as an act of grace and favour to hold out his hand to receive that of the best of women, whenever he pleased, and to have it thought that Marriage would be a sufficient amends for all his enormities to others, as well as to her.' Those who would let Lovelace off the hook trivialize women's oppression and turn Clarissa's suffering into entertainment (they would keep the earlier scenes 'for the sake of the sport her distresses would give to the tenderhearted reader'). Richardson's spirited defense raises as many problems as it solves, however. His sarcastic praise of Echlin's «good» characters and 'excellent Heart' hints at a scandalous truth, that the needs of a good heart and a good novel might be diametrically opposed. (Richardson tried to heal this rift in Grandison, with doubtful success.) His argument for the necessity of rape-as if all Lovelace's coercion and mental cruelty amounted to nothing, and only vaginal penetration were real-resembles the libertine creed more than the Christian. And Richardson shares Lovelace's main assumption, that Clarissa's «trials» are necessary to prove her virtue and so must be escalated ad infinitum. The more scenes of sexual torment the novelist dreams up, the more moral the novel must be, and so on to the logical conclusion: ' Clarissa has the greatest of Triumphs… in, and after the Outrage, and because of the Outrage.' Richardson repeatedly insists that