Notes on Clarissa – Letters 1-68

Clarissa is the beast.  It’s War and Peace, without the war.  To read War and Peace is to scale the Urals, to compass Russia, and to stand astride Europe.  To read Clarissa is to think about moving from one’s bed to the divan at the foot of one’s bed.  Clarissa is every bit as long as War and Peace, and takes far longer to read, what with Richardson’s propensity for paragraph-long sentences, page-long paragraphs, and pervicacious coxcombs whose punctilio is insufficiently palliated but to arrogate to themselves the prerogative to prowl in the purlieu of some young maiden’s coppice, much to the maiden’s asseverated obliquity.

Richardson is the master of psychology.  I have seen this written, but not understood what it meant until I read him.  Sixty-eight letters into Clarissa, I have not a clue about the true nature of any of the principals (except that their doom is foretold – Clarissa‘s ending is too well known to escape even my notice).

The reason is not that Richardson has not told me anything about the characters, but rather that he has told me everything about them.  These characters live and breathe with more reality than most people I know.  They are awash in contradictions.  They are one minute passionate, the next reasonable.  They say one thing, and then do another.  They are predictable, determined, wild, and wavering.  They know themselves with astounding insight, and are blind to the nature of their own actions.

Clarissa herself will serve to illustrate.  Clarissa is a young lady famed for her intelligence, her learning, her assiduous morality, her beauty, and her compassion and devotion to her family.  Or so her friend Anna Howe, who gets about a quarter of the text, tells us.  By the end of Letter 68, Clarissa has been locked into her rooms and is being forced into marriage with an obliging stranger on account of her correspondence and interviews with a rake, against her father’s explicit instructions.  Are these the actions of an intelligent, moral, and devoted child?

Clarissa refuses at all costs to marry the stranger, one Mr. Solmes, on account of his greediness and ugliness both of person and of character.  “Death first,” she writes, over and over again.  Meanwhile, she carries on her correspondence with the rake, on the grounds that ceasing to correspond with him will give him cause to do violence to her family.  Her family, more and more concerned that she will run off with the rake, urges her to marry Solmes.  She refuses, but offers to promise not to marry Lovelace, the rake.

On the one hand, all of this looks very bad for Clarissa.  Superficially, looking at this from a long way off, we would say that this is a classic case of a young English lady who has allowed her heart to be carried off by a rake, and will soon allow him to take more precious prizes, ruining herself and dishonouring her family.

But Clarissa provides us with oh-so-many arguments for extenuating circumstances.  She only was polite to Lovelace in the first place because he had initially been well-received in their house.  She only corresponded with him to placate him for the rudeness of other members of her family.  She didn’t mean to meet up with him, he just snuck onto their property unbidden.  She didn’t know he would be at Anna Howe’s house when she visited there.

But seriously, Lovelace doesn’t even matter – if there were no such man as Lovelace in the world, she still wouldn’t want to marry Mr. Solmes.  He is greedy, and has commented one too many times on how fortun-ate the joining of the family properties will be.  He is uneducated, and will bore her.  He is ugly.  She wouldn’t be a good wife for him because she doesn’t love him.  He has entailed too much of his property to her family in prejudice to his own relations.

Plus, her family is so very unreasonable.  Her father refuses to speak to her, and returns her letters unopened.  Her brother and sister are set against her and treat her with disrespect because they want her share of the inheritance.  Her mother is a weakling, secretly on her side but afraid to say anything.  All she wants is a hearing, but they won’t let her speak her case (excepting several dozen letters sent to various family members).  Her uncle and her aunt are secretly on her side, but also bullied by her brother and sister.  She was locked in her room too soon, it is so undignified.  And on, and on, and on.

If I have given her complaints the air of levity, it has been accidental.  The sympathy of the aunt, uncle, and mother do an excellent job of bolstering Anna Howe’s case that Clarissa is actually a good, amazing person who has been put into an untenable situation by the evil machinations of her brother and sister, and Lovelace.  The aunt, uncle, and mother, as well as several other characters, support Clarissa’s reputation for learning and morality.  Clarissa’s own extensive complaints, by their very repetition gain credibility, and the letters of her brother and sister contemn themselves out of their own mouths.

The reputation for morality is itself problematic.  One of the cases where it gets the most play is when, in her correspondence with Clarissa, Anna Howe finds occasion to criticize Clarissa’s family.  Clarissa inevitably rebukes Anna Howe for such criticisms, saying that it is wrong of her to listen to criticisms of her family, and wrong of Anna to put her in such a position.  Anna humbly accepts Clarissa’s rebukes, and acknowledges her superior moral judgment.  This entire sequence happens not once, but over and over again, to the point where it is nearly a leitmotif, or marker, of Clarissa and Anna’s correspondence.

So the question is this: does the lady protest too much?  Sure, Clarissa says she can’t listen to such criticisms, and says she is angry, but what is the effect?  It just keeps happening.  Can you be sorry for something you keep on allowing to happen?  Does pointing out a wrong thing when it happens make you a moral person?  I would think the answer is no to both questions.  As her family points out on other moral points, actions speak louder than words.

But to conclude that Clarissa is immoral, a hypocrite of sorts, is problematic too.  It’s hard not to see Clarissa as some sort of morality tale (especially, again, knowing that it ends with Clarissa’s abduction, imprisonment, tearful reconciliation, and death).  It’s particularly hard given the background of the Puritan movement; reading Clarissa at times recalls Hogarth, although I believe the former preceded the latter by some decades…  But if it’s a morality tale, who is the hero?  The only plausible one is Clarissa herself; she is the only principal held up as an example of good morality, the only character that other characters praise, and aside from the relentless drumbeat of obedience and authority from the parents, the only character to give voice to any moral precepts whatever.  If, by Letter 68, Richardson has used a mouthpiece at all, it has been Clarissa.

Notwithstanding all of Clarissa’s apparent faults and failures, Richardson does an excellent job of making sure every other character is at least equally blackened.  Her father is implacable, wrathful, greedy.  Her mother is spineless.  Her brother is spoiled, impetuous, rash, and greedy.  Her sister is ugly, jealous, and greedy.

I would be fascinated to discover where Richardson lies on the Puritan-Anglican divide, but I will not look it up until I finish the book (only 517 billion letters to go) and make my own best guess.  On the one hand, as I said, Clarissa seems set to be the hero.  The prim, proper, and ostentatious morality of Clarissa is quite Puritan.  But so also is her parents’ emphasis on money, obedience, and authority – a gloomy reversion from Jesus to Yahweh if ever there was one.  But Richardson appears to be condemning all and sundry.  Does that make him an atheist?  It would seem that anyone with sufficient insight into human nature to write Richardson’s characters would have a good understanding that there are no heroes and villains, only people.

A few words about Lovelace: in the first place, Richardson’s transition in style from the letters of Clarissa to the letters of Lovelace is brilliant.  The immediate insight into the minds of the characters by the contrast of their writing styles, without any focus on particular facts or sentences, is something I have never seen paralleled in any literature.  Secondly, Lovelace is commonly supposed to be the villain of Clarissa.  But at least by Letter 68, Lovelace is no more contemnable than Clarissa, on the grounds that we have contemned her.  His intentions are honourable.  He wishes marriage, he is generous of spirit, wishes to do people well, has humbly born much insult from Clarissa’s family, and forebore doing Clarissa’s brother any harm in a duel.  It is only that the end of all his good intentions is coercing Clarissa into secret correspondence and scandalous meetings that makes him a villain.

In preparation for  Clarissa, I read a few modern novels: At Risk, No Place Like Home, The Broker, True Believer, to name a few.  One of my great disappointments was the lack of character psychology.  These writers know how to turn a plot, but their characters are mere hodgepodges of traits.  Richardson was the master.

Shakespeare – Story of Civilization VII.iii.i-VII.iv.vii

Durant sums up the case for Shakespeare as follows: “These are the three epochal gifts of the world’s drama, and we must, despite our limitations, welcome them all to our deepening, thanking our heritage for Greek wisdom, French beauty, and Elizabethan life.  (But, of course, Shakespeare is supreme.)”

What confluence of forces produced Shakespeare?  We must first acknowledge that, like Michelangelo, Shakespeare was not produced by his environment, but only made possible by it.  The wealth and prosperity of England, the religious ebb that gave free rein to dramatic performances, and the scholarly tide that introduced nearly all of the classics into England in just a few decades, made Shakespeare possible.  But Shakespeare was unique.

But perhaps to understand Shakespeare fully, we must understand his background.  In reading about Elizabethan literature, I found a quite striking thesis in the figure of Sir Philip Sidney.  He argued, in brief, that the purpose of literature was to elucidate morality.  Philosophy, he acknowledged, could do this, but it tended to get lost in the general precept.  History also could touch on morality, but was relentlessly confined to the inane details of what actually happened (or worse, an ignorance thereof).  Literature, Sidney argued, provided the happy medium; in accessible examples, it could speak to men of concrete, specific things – thereby escaping philosophy’s shortcomings – while avoiding the problem of relying on the limited storehouse of examples that history provides.  Perhaps, in literature, there could even be a beauty that even the best philosophy struggles to attain.

Sidney’s argument was, in a way, an apology for the prevalence of extremely moralistic allegories as one of the chief literary forms of his time.  Shakespeare’s early drama, like other drama of the time, was to some degree an outgrowth of allegorical fiction.  In the early tragedies, like Richard II and Richard III, the principle characters are personifications of qualities, about which the story turns, and a moral is pointed.

Shakespeare’s genius lay (among many, many other qualities) in his eventual ability to overcome this overly symbolical way of writing and achieve complex characters; modern taste cites Hamlet as the best example of this achievement.  Without Shakespeare to lead the way, would the subtleties of Thackeray, or the moralistic novellas (Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca) of our own era ever have come into existence?  Probably, but perhaps after much lost time.

For the time being, we will follow Durant in thinking Shakespeare the greatest of the great.  Many of his works have been added to the Recommended Reading.