Why Lovelace Must Die

Abstract

Samuel Richardson designed, composed and published Clarissa in the shadow of the failed 1745 Jacobite uprising; the fate of his villain, Lovelace, is intricately connected to the fortunes of the Jacobite prince. Charles Edward Stuart does not haunt the margins of Clarissa as he does Tom Jones, but the novel, like Fielding's, is designed to rout the Young Pretender. Clarissa works more allusively than Tom Jones, casting the struggle between Stuart pretensions and the Georgian establishment in terms of rival cultural productions rather than rivals: Richardson pits the theater against the novel, Lovelace versus Clarissa. Rather than focusing narrowly on gender, I argue that Clarissa's crisis can be best expressed in terms of genre, as the mid-eighteenth century found the Georgian novel struggling for legitimacy, demanding the cultural respect and ideological power the Restoration had accorded to the theater. This generic tension means that play becomes an immensely overfreighted term in Richardson's text: it denotes Lovelace's amorous intentions, his sexual play; gambling, or deep play; and his plot against the entire Harlowe family, which he styles the playing out of his revenge. Play also and primarily means drama. The novel's biggest play is the Restoration drama Lovelace has been composing since his character's introduction, for Lovelace embodies an ideologically and aesthetically corrupt genre; he is a product of the heroic mode that Stuart apologists like John Dryden used to celebrate absolutism and Stuart Restoration. The surprising early successes of the recent Jacobite rebellion, coupled with the personal charisma of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who was still at large, demonstrated the continued appeal of the Stuart aesthetic and ideology.' The Georgian establishment reacted to the events of 1745-46 by systematically extirpating every last vestige of Jacobitism. Clarissa is part of that reaction. Richardson's novels, like his conduct manuals, are overtly concerned with the improvement of morals and manners. But unlike the Society for the Reformation of Manners and other, similar, eighteenth-century reform movements, Richardson directs his attention to words rather than deeds. The Familiar Letters