The defining theme of Clarissa is that of victimhood. Clarissa Harlowe, browbeaten by her family, runs away with the rake Lovelace, and then he rapes her. In retaliation, she starves herself to death, bringing blood vengeance against Lovelace, and well-deserved grief to the family who drove her into his arms.
What is victimhood? Victimhood is the state that a person enters when he has suffered a crime so heinous that it deprives him of his free will. I do not mean that only those who suffer mind control, zombification, or a large dose of rufilin can become victims. On the contrary, I think that in almost all cases, the workings of victimization (the process by which people enter victimhood) is much more subtle.
A metaphor may better explain. If life is a painting, and man an artist always creating and refining that painting, to become a victim is to suffer large splotches of paint to be dropped on one’s painting at random. The struggle of the victim is the struggle of the artist to retain control over his painting, to incorporate the blotches meaningfully and beautifully into the finished painting.
In Clarissa, using a conventional definition of victimhood, one might say that Clarissa becomes a victim as soon as Lovelace has raped her. I do not think this is accurate. As bad as rape is, Clarissa’s material prospects for future happiness are not much damaged by the rape itself. After running away from Lovelace, Clarissa receives generous offers from his family that will guarantee that he make “reparation” by marrying her, and provide lavishly for her happily ever after. In the painting metaphor, though the rape itself is a blotch, it need not affect the regions of the painting distal from itself.
But true damage from the rape comes not from the physical violation itself, but rather from the psychological aftereffects. Clarissa becomes depressed, loses her appetite, rejects almost every offer of help she receives, and obsesses over death, even to buying her coffin and arranging it in her bedroom. Eventually, death comes for her. In summary, every moment of Clarissa’s life from the rape to her death is determined by the rape itself, every one of Clarissa’s actions is an attempt to adjust or respond to the rape. Even the minor actions of Clarissa’s life, down to dressing and lodging, are affected by the actions she takes to respond to the rape. In short, the artist has had to completely reshape his painting around the blotch.
(For conventional readers: This interpretation holds even if you accept Clarissa as, not an anorexic miscreant, but a paragon of Christianity: her struggle is to forgive Lovelace; the achievement of a state of mind suitable for Christian salvation, as a result of the crimes against her by Lovelace and her family, requires hours and days of meditation, prayer, reflection, and of course letter-writing, and even at the very end of her life, the balance of this Christian state of mind is so fragile that Clarissa desperately avoids seeing Lovelace for fear that he could upset the balance.)
Clarissa is not Lovelace’s only victim. He has raped or seduced several other girls, at least some of whom became employees at a whorehouse. Richardson (the author) spends much ink arguing that Lovelace morally corrupted these girls, by which Richardson means that Lovelace turned them from the path of a decent life, which appears to end in salvation, to a debauched life, which appears to end in hell. If this is true, then these girls are also victims, having suffered not just Lovelace’s violence or lies, but also material alterations in their future behaviors.
The essential problem of victimhood is how to escape it, and regain one’s free will, or control over one’s own destiny. Clarissa tries to do this by trying to forgiving Lovelace and engaging in extreme asceticism. The whorehouse girls try to do it by making the material best of their own situations, and embarking on what was probably one of the few careers available to women in Richardson’s London.
In a way, the response of Clarissa and the whorehouse girls is both the same. As in the metaphor above, they adjust their lives or their paintings around the insults and blotches offered to them. Neither regains control in the end, because the attempt adjust a life around a blotch requires a pretense: that the blotch was part of the artist’s design. Be the adjustments ever so clever, the discerning observer will note the artist’s artifice. Since art is order directed toward a goal – and so is a good life – the randomness of the blotches and insults is rarely for the best, and in our crudely-adjusted paintings, it will be obvious that the artists have failed to execute their original intentions. And so they are victims.
Other responses to the state of victimhood are possible. One could seek vengeance, for example. Vengeance is an attempt to cut off or isolate the blotch. The avenger says, “This, over here, is what Nature has done to my painting; it has blotched it, insulted it. Now, over here, on the other side, is my answer to Nature: the antithesis, the repudiation of the insult offered to me. Nature has done its will; now I have done mine.” But vengeance is as unsatisfying as the response of Clarissa and the whores, for vengeance is often hard. Not only is the part of life that suffered the insult lost, but so also is the part of life subtracted from it to achieve vengeance. In this way, the avenged crime robs the artist of even more of his painting than the adjusted-around crime.
To the victim, ways of escaping from victimhood are hard to see. How are we to execute masterpieces of our own lives? Often it is impossible to see a way of correcting a large blot, and incorporating it with a minimum of disruption, into the original picture. Clarissa was forced to abandon her vision of herself, happily settled on her paternal estate, doling out charity and virtue, almost entirely.
What’s a victim to do?
Posted by Catiline 
