Clarissa’s Insomnia

Abstract

Abstract This essay focuses on the attention to sleep and sleeplessness in Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, Clarissa (1747–1748). It places Clarissa’s insomnia in the context of a historical change in cultural attitudes toward sleep in the eighteenth century by which the understanding of sleep shifts from a symbolic and moral one to a medical and physiological one. Clarissa is on the cusp of this change. While characters within Clarissa are aware of the different symbolic meanings of sleep—both the heroine and the villain, Lovelace, interpret and represent their behaviour in the light of traditional understandings of sleep and insomnia—the novel itself evinces a medicalized knowledge of sleep, made clear in its careful documentation of Clarissa’s sleep patterns. Both symbolic and medical understandings of insomnia bear upon the questions of agency and volition that have been of interest to recent critics of the novel in addition to elaborating Richardson’s major contribution to the development of psychological realism in fiction.