"Like Tiresias": Metamorphosis and Gender in "Clarissa"

Abstract

Richardson's Lovelace has recently been castigated as a character whose thoroughly narcissistic and regressive ... 'rakishness' ... is nothing less than a crippling incapacity for adult sexual relationship, ... [and whose] misogyny and infantile sadism achieve their appropriate expression in the virulently anti-sexual act of rape.' Terry Eagleton winds up this attack on Lovelace with an equivalent attack on those who have found Lovelace entrancing: It is this character who has been by the critics as Byronic hero, Satanic vitalist or post-modernist artist.2 Warner, one of the critics Eagleton derides, has admitted in a review article that he celebrated Lovelace as the heroic practitioner of a Nietzschean style of subversive interpretation in his Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation.3 Eagleton and Terry Castle revile Warner for his misogynist attitude toward Clarissa, and Warner defends himself by claiming that his debunking of Clarissa was necessitated by the way the conceptual categories of novel criticism ... constituted a built-in bias toward Clarissa's way of reading the world; and because contemporary humanism also privileged her valorization of selfhood, sincerity, and the 'natural.'4 Warner, in his book, presents Lovelace as victim-of Clarissa's false construction of a self; Castle and Eagleton present Clarissa as victim--of patriarchal society and of hermeneutic violence. To Eagleton, Clarissa is a saint and martyr ... [whose] death signifies ... an absolute refusal of political society: sexual oppression, bourgeois patriarchy and libertine aristocracy together.5 Eagleton's attempt to claim Clarissa for feminism, Castle's feminist reading of Clarissa, and Warner's deconstructive celebration of Lovelace all involve, despite disclaimers, explicit and implicit taking sides in the textual battle between Lovelace and Clarissa: each critic denigrates one protagonist to raise the other. For Eagleton, Lovelace is reduced to a pathetic character; Warner wonders, in a remark worthy of Lovelace at his most misogynist, whether Clarissa isn't hiding something unsavory beneath her garments.6 Warner's Clarissa seems to be a bitch who can't take a joke, as Eagleton notes, and Eagleton's Lovelace seems to be a trivial cripple, as Warner notes.