Classical Myth in Richardson's Clarissa : Ovid Revised

Abstract

\ •'/fi ? . ' · '· V1(I "Europa." Printer's ornament from Clarissa, reproduced by permission ofBrown University Library. Seep. 117. Classical Myth in Richardson's Clarissa: Ovid RevisedDouglas Murray Interpreters have long accorded mythic status to the events recounted in Richardson's novel Clarissa. They have assumed—and rightly, I think—that the text contains myths, those culturally privileged images of experience and scripts for behaviour.1 The first critic to interpret Clarissa's story as myth is, perhaps not surprisingly, that accomplished reader Robert Lovelace, who in his letters to Belford imagines himself recapitulating two timeless patterns. He announces himself, first, as the archetypal king and conqueror. He compares himself as conqueror to Hannibal (IV, 357; //, 494) and later calls himself "Robert the Great" (V, 64; ///, 26)? Secondly, he presents himself as the archetypal tempter, a modern Satan to Clarissa's Eve.3 Hence his famous allusion 1 For this definition of myth, I am indebted to Froma Zeitlin, "Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth," in Rape, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 122-24. 2 In the absence of a good modem text of Clarissa, I have adopted a double citation system modelled after that used in Margaret Anne Doody's and Peter Sabor's Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Since I do not have access to the textually superior third London edition, I cite first the eight-volume London edition of 1785, which retains Richardson's capitalization and italicization; then, in italics, I cite the fourvolume Everyman edition (London: Dent, 1962). For the textual history of Clarissa, see Florian Stober, "On Original and Final Intentions, or Can There Be an Authoritative Clarissa!" TEXT: Transactions ofthe Societyfor Textual Scholarship 2 (1985), 229-44; and Margaret Anne Doody and Florian Stuber, "Clarissa Censored," Modern Language Studies 18 (1988), 74-88. 3 John Carroll and Jocelyn Harris discuss Lovelace's desire to interpret himself as the tyrant of legend (Carroll, "Lovelace as Tragic Hero," University of Toronto Quarterly 42 [1972], 1819 ; Carroll, "Richardson at Work: Revisions, Allusions, and Quotations in Clarissa," in Studies in the Eighteenth Century 2, ed. R.F. Brissenden [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973], EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 3, Number 2, January 1991 114 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION to Milton's Satan when he unmasks himself in Clarissa's Hampstead retreat: / started up in my own form divine, Touch'd by the beam ofher celestial eye, More potent than lthuriel's spear! (V, 83; ///, 41) Perhaps Richardson intended Lovelace's transformation of himself into mythic figures to spur readers to trace other legends as well. John Carroll and Jocelyn Harris find in Lovelace a Don Juan figure.4 Gillian Beer has read the novel as a reworking in prose of Milton's myth of chastity, Cornus.' Margaret Anne Doody sees Clarissa as an Arachne transmuted into Pallas Athena.6 To account for the power and appeal of the story, other readers have argued that the novel encapsulates and transmits a "mythic" version of the social and economic history of Richardson's era. According to Dorothy Van Ghent, for example, Richardson's narrative transcribes the preoccupations and values of his class and century in a story which is "larger than life"7 and thus dramatizes "powers that are assumed to have universal authority" (p. 53). Leslie Fiedler also grants the novel a "mythic resonance" and calls it "a sacred book and a treasure house of symbols dear to the rising bourgeosie."8 Such readers generally present the novelist merely as a transmitter of his 65-66; Harris, Samuel Richardson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], pp. 7682 ). BoUi Carroll and Harris also consider Lovelace as Satan (Carroll, "Lovelace as Tragic Hero," pp. 20-21, "Richardson at Work," pp. 66-67; Harris, pp. 66-67). 4 Carroll, "Lovelace as Tragic Hero," 24; Harris, "Richardson: Original or Learned Genius," in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, pp. 198-200; and Harris, Samuel Richardson, pp. 6869 . 5 Beer, "Richardson, Milton and the Status of Evil," Review of English Studies n.s. 19 (1968), 262-64. 6 Doody, "The Man-made World of Clarissa Harlowe and Robert Lovelace," in Samuel Richardson : Passion and Prudence, ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myer (London: Vision...