Clarissa: A Study in the Nature of Convention

Abstract

In critical works dealing with Richardson's Clarissa one finds reappearing a strange note of discomfort-a feeling which the reader may well understand when he has closed the eighth volume of the novel. For Clarissa, we have always been told, is a highly didactic novel, almost a tract, the avowed purpose of which is to demonstrate the conventional virtues. We would expect such a novel from a man of Richardson's reputation for moral concerns. All the characters with whom the author claims sympathy speak vociferously and at length in praise of a strict moral code, and the contemporary audience of the novel applauded it for its purity. And yet, something is wrong. The scenes of passion and lust are portrayed with so much immediacy that more than one critic has been led to comment wryly on the moralist's preoccupation with sexual experience.' If the novel is a lesson in conventional morality, its outcome is unsatisfactory. Readers have long found the virtuous heroine almost intolerable much of the time, while the black villain is too often curiously sympathetic. A French critic has even called the novel anti-sociale.2 Somehow, Clarissa does not fulfill its expectations, and it is a great novel just because it does not. Readers have misinterpreted Clarissa in assuming that it is simply the pathetic story of poor Clary Harlowe and her brutal mishandling by the villainous Lovelace.3 I shall attempt to prove in this paper that the action of Clarissa is the battle in