Pity, or the Providence of the Body in Richardson's Clarissa

Abstract

Beginning in the late seventeenth century, pity, which traditionally had been seen as a morally suspect rhetorical effect, is embraced as an authenticating vehicle of social consensus and political critique. This essay examines pity's mediatory instrumentality, the historical rationale for its rise in the eighteenth century, and the corresponding ways in which its new sociopolitical status inspires formal innovation and alternative visions of ethical communion in Clarissa. Anxious about change but eager to develop a vision of human nature and social coherence antithetical to the Hobbesean version, its proponents conceived of pity as a natural reflex, an embodied yet sanctified impulse capable of transforming fictional suffering and readerly experience into a medium of solidarity. By transferring to the affects the ethical-spiritual authority and the aesthetic function conventionally afforded to the will, reason, and their equivalent literary conventions—poetic justice, Horatian decorum, and the unified plot—in Clarissa, I argue, Samuel Richardson seeks to make pity a dynamic engine of social, literary-formal, and religious reformation.