Readers of classical fiction have observed that there is a literary affinity between Madame de Lafayette's French Princesse de Cleves and Richardson's Clarissa. Ernest A. Baker points out that Clarissa is a variation on the theme of popular romance. . . . link . . . was not Marivaux . . . but Madame de Lafayette, author of La Princesse de Clkves (69). But there is a psychological affinity as well. heroines are two of the earliest examples of the perfectionist woman who suffers from an unresolved psychological conflict between the desire to please the parental society in the choice of a husband and a desire to exert the self to achieve personal happiness. It is with this psychological dimension that this essay is concerned.' particular psychological type displayed by the heroines is the woman who seems to be arrested at that stage in her psychological development the Electra stage where she is overly attached to the father. Therefore, when she meets a man whom she sees as a father figure, she is fearful of an emotional involvement with him. However, she is usually very much attracted to despite the fact that this similarity to the father, which she imagines, remains unconscious because of its incestuous implications. These heroines not only suffer from the universal conflict of the Electra complex, but they are also in conflict with the authoritarian influences of their society. In other words, the heroines have that conflict with the society that they had with the father in terms of submission and control. Hence their attraction to the lover' on whom they might exercise their control. woman's control of the malleable lover results from her fear that she cannot experience an intimate relationship with a man who is her intellectual equal. Thus this type of woman attempts to make her husband a child, while acting as a mother to him (Freud 133-34). Karen Horney suggests in The Over-valuation of Love that this feminine