Samuel Richardson and the Theory of Tragedy: Clarissa's Caesuras by J. A. Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Samuel Richardson and the Theory of Tragedy: Clarissa's Caesuras by J. A. Smith Jacob Sider Jost J. A. Smith. Samuel Richardson and the Theory of Tragedy: Clarissa's Caesuras. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Pp. 175. £60.00. At the publication of its first volumes in 1747, Clarissa billed itself as The History of a Young Lady, and scholars of our time have largely honored that subtitle by reading Richardson's magnum opus in historical terms: as a case study in eighteenth-century printing or reception study; as a witness to changing eighteenth-century ideas about religion, [End Page 66] gender roles, moral philosophy, or consumer culture; and as a chapter in the history of the English novel. Mr. Smith is not ignorant of the historiography of Clarissa. He is at home among Richardson's revisions and recastings of the novel's text, knows the printer-author's biography, and often buttresses his arguments about Clarissa with well-chosen parallels from its predecessor Pamela and successor Sir Charles Grandison. But this is a defiantly formalist, ahistorical reading: Mr. Smith argues that in order to comprehend the tragic force of Clarissa we must look not to Richardson's own theory of tragedy (as articulated in his critique of Rymer's idea of poetic justice in the novel's postscript) but rather to the twentieth-century tragic theories of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Lacan. Indeed, in its appeal to continental theory as a heuristic for understanding Richardson, Mr. Smith's study is itself refreshingly untimely, recalling William Warner's Clarissa and the Struggles of Interpretation (1979) and Terry Castle's Clarissa's Ciphers (1982), to the alliterative title of which its subtitle pays homage, even as it makes use of the intervening generation of textual and historicist criticism. Samuel Richardson and the Theory of Tragedy is organized around two central claims: first, that Clarissa is a refutation of "received notions" of eighteenth-century England, particularly the axioms that "a reformed rake makes the best husband" and that once a woman is "subdued" by seduction or rape, she remains "always subdued." Second, the novel's refutation of these insidious commonplaces is through tragedy. Posed thus baldly, the argument seems straightforward, even obvious: Richardson's readers wanted a conventional wish-fulfilling ending, but he killed off Clarissa in order to teach them, quite literally, a lesson. But Mr. Smith plays several elegant variations on this theme, showing how Richardson's straightforward didactic purpose expresses itself ingeniously in the form of his text. In his first chapter, Mr. Smith shows how "received notions" circulate in the novel, for instance when the Harlowes compulsively repeat a "language of the family" as though reiteration alone could give normative force to the clan's claims on Clarissa. The two chapters that follow argue that Clarissa's "mad papers" and Lovelace's inarticulacy and impotence in the face of Clarissa's post-rape resistance show the power of reiterated received notions brought to bay when faced with tragedy. Mr. Smith's final chapter and conclusion expand on what sort of tragedy this is. As in the tragic plots of German Baroque drama that fascinated Benjamin, Clarissa depicts a world abandoned by God in which signification breaks apart into undecidable allegories; like Antigone as read by Lacan, Clarissa follows her deepest desire (the desire to die) even when it conflicts with everything else in her life. Mr. Smith shows an impressive command of recent Clarissa scholarship, but a formalist-theoretical reading of this kind stands or falls on the strength of its own readings. These are often insightful and sometimes brilliant, as when Mr. Smith, who has been considering Lovelace's dream of holding Clarissa during her apotheosis and the contrast between the sublunary world and transcendent beyond in Nietzsche and Benjamin's readings of Raphael's Transfiguration, draws attention to the this-worldly materiality of Clarissa's coffin by comparing its arrival (announced, Belford writes, with "a sort of lumbering noise upon the stairs") to the piano delivery in Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box. But some readings are unconvincing: Mr. Smith's basic insight that the mad papers work by creating unexpected and...