{"id":8372,"date":"2021-07-06T11:35:29","date_gmt":"2021-07-06T10:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/neglectedbooks.com\/?p=8372"},"modified":"2023-04-30T09:47:48","modified_gmt":"2023-04-30T15:47:48","slug":"rob-palk-on-why-its-wrong-to-neglect-clarissa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neglectedbooks.com\/?p=8372","title":{"rendered":"Rob Palk on Why It’s Wrong to Neglect Clarissa<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Rob
Rob Palk’s well-read copy of <\/em>Clarissa<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is a guest post by novelist Rob Palk.<\/h3>\n

If Clarissa <\/a><\/em>is a neglected read, it might have brought some of that neglect upon itself. It\u2019s 1500 pages long for a start and over the month I read it, I developed aches and pains from lugging the thing about. It\u2019s in epistolary form, a mode of storytelling that resolutely declines to come back in fashion, even in an online age. Its morals are not our own. It\u2019s about a rape, which arrives about a thousand pages in. You can see why people give it a miss. Still, you should read it. You just have to acclimatise.<\/p>\n

Clarissa <\/em>is a product of the Wild West era of the novel, when the form hadn\u2019t quite been fixed yet. A novel could be a lawless hotchpotch of philosophical dialogues, melodrama, borrowed stories and crude farce. Clarissa <\/em>played a part in domesticating the form, in erecting the dry stone walls of realism, but it still very much belongs to the rougher age. It turns, in its later pages, into something like a Christian chapbook on a vast scale. <\/p>\n

Another cause of the book\u2019s neglect might be that its author, Samuel Richardson, lacks glamour. He was, in every sense, bourgeois. He didn\u2019t have the frenzied entrepreneurialism of Defoe, the worldly conviviality of Fielding or Sterne\u2019s strenuous peculiarity. He was smug about his achievements, obsequious to his social betters and prone to tedious moralising. He wanted novels to be respectable<\/em>. He seemed unaware of the streak of lechery that runs through all his work. He\u2019d be easy to dismiss, if Clarissa <\/em>wasn\u2019t so good. Greatness doesn\u2019t always fall where it\u2019s expected.<\/p>\n

His debut novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded<\/a><\/em> (1740) is the tale of a fifteen year old servant girl whose reward for resisting her employer\u2019s sexual harassment is his hand in marriage and the riches and acclaim that go with it. Even at the time, there seemed something not right about this and the book\u2019s denouement annoyed Henry Fielding so much he spent his first two novels taking the piss out of it, going so far as to name the first Shamela<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n

Richardsons\u2019 follow up, Clarissa<\/em>, came in 1748 and at first seems more of the same. Clarissa Harlowe is young, beautiful and a paragon of virtue, this virtue expressing itself in pious reflections, acts of charity and a strict system of daily organisation, which we are given in full (it\u2019s that kind of novel). Robert Lovelace is also a looker, generous and charming, but abnormally dedicated to having it off and unscrupulous in furthering this cause. The book consists mostly of letters between Clarissa and her rather more likeable friend Anna, and Lovelace and Belford, a wavering fellow rake. Only, somehow, unlike Pamela<\/em>, it slaps. The moralist in Richardson is restrained, at least for a while, and the artist in him takes over. <\/p>\n

\"The
The eight volumes of an early German edition of Clarissa<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dr Johnson is supposed to have said that anyone reading Clarissa <\/em>for the plot would end up killing themselves, but there is a story of sorts. Clarissa\u2019s family are keen on her marrying Solmes, an unappealing neighbour, and when she demurs, they take the very eighteenth-century step of holding her captive. Lovelace, meanwhile, has spotted her and has Designs. In a panic, Clarissa flees with him to London and is promptly held captive again. Perhaps Dr Johnson had a point. Yet I was completely gripped. <\/p>\n

What matters isn\u2019t the plot so much, but something else that happens as we go on. The mad abundance of letters to and fro, the characters all being compulsive jotters down of every thought, yanks us into the action. Richardson starts to use the letters like Shakespeare uses soliloquies. His characters argue with themselves, change their minds, waver in their intents, over a long series of erotic negotiations and, perhaps for the first time in the English novel, we feel we are seeing actual human beings and can look inside their thoughts. Clarissa and Lovelace might have been supposed to represent chastity and libertinage respectively, but there\u2019s always the feeling of actual people behind these archaic beliefs, who won\u2019t always live up to them.<\/p>\n

So, Clarissa is exemplary, but also stubborn, priggish and far more attracted to Lovelace than she\u2019d like to be. Lovelace, who could have been a moustache-twirling cardboard baddie, becomes something far more complex, split between his absurd and frightening commitment to the sexual chase and his growing regard for his victim. It\u2019s an extraordinary act of ventriloquism, so that reading the Lovelace letters, it\u2019s easy to forget we are reading Richardson at all. It\u2019s as though the Puritan author poured all his buried flamboyance, libido and wit into the performance, along with a smidgeon of class resentment. Lovelace is fun to read. Richardson expressed some shock at how popular Lovelace proved, especially with female readers, but it\u2019s easy to see why this was. He\u2019s funny, he\u2019s intelligent. He is also, we learn, a rapist and, even knowing it was coming, his drugging and rape of Clarissa still has the power to horrify. <\/p>\n

The first time I read Clarissa<\/em>, her ordeal struck me as implausible. My 20-year-old self didn\u2019t believe we lived, anymore, in a world where wealthy individuals ferry teenage girls into brothels with the aid and assistance of their peers. Many years later, this disbelief has passed. Apparently likeable men do monstrous things unchallenged and Lovelace is an ancestor of every charming monster, from Humbert Humbert to James Franco. Clarissa\u2019s preoccupation with bodily autonomy is put in religious terms, but, squinting past this, it\u2019s impressive how much Richardson noticed the difficulties women face. And in Clarissa\u2019s friendship with Anna Howe, who teases her and playfully toys with her own suitor, he created -to this male reader- a convincing friendship between two teenage girls. There\u2019s something heartening in one of the founding English novels being about a young woman\u2019s act of refusal.<\/p>\n

\"An
An illustration from a 19th Century French edition of Clarissa<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After he rapes Clarissa, an alternately penitent and defiant Lovelace proposes marriage, a then standard way of saying sorry and restoring honour to all parties. Clarissa is having none of it. She forgives all who have wronged her, but is set upon leaving a world that has done its best to subject and degrade her. Here the book becomes much odder. Richardson seems to remember his business is offering life lessons and Clarissa embarks on a decline that is also an apotheosis, bidding farewell over a long 500 pages. At least half of this is great; long before they were considered diseases, Richardson seems to have understood PTSD and what looks like anorexia and the slow conversion to virtue of Lovelace\u2019s friend Belford can still move, but some of it exasperates. My own tolerance was tested when, with a good few hundred pages left, our heroine buys a coffin. Having invented realism, Richardson swerves away into melodrama at whiplash speed and we are given a series of unlikely come-uppances and moments of repentance. Clarissa herself becomes a near saint rather than the sympathetic young woman of the opening stretch. She takes longer to die than Rasputin or Clive James. The moralising side of Richardson takes over and we are given many homilies on correct behaviour, including a demented passage where he tries to convince us that women of loose morals are ugly when not wearing make-up (this argument is not made, as you might expect, in praise of cosmetics).<\/p>\n

Perhaps the problem comes from Richardson having no model of female excellence that wasn\u2019t chiefly passive. All the characters line up to tell us, at dull length, how Clarissa is the most virtuous of women, but there isn\u2019t any suggestion she could do more with her greatness than turn someone down and die. There\u2019s a gulf between our way of looking at the world and his, and Clarissa\u2019s death doesn\u2019t quite cross it. You have to think yourself back into an England where refusing to marry your rapist could be an act of shocking radicalism. If you can do this, it sort of works. <\/p>\n

If this proves too great a leap, if you can\u2019t take Richardson\u2019s forcing of characters who seemed to pulse with life into a sort of moral tableau, there\u2019s still a hundred reasons to read this book. Read it for the weird moments of recognition, for the conversations we\u2019re still sadly having, for Belford correcting Lovelace in his disbelief in female friendships, for Anna observing, after her friend is raped, that she now views seemingly good men as ones \u201cwho haven\u2019t yet been found out.\u201d Read it for the way erotic attraction and moral repulsion play against each other in Clarissa\u2019s letters about Lovelace, read it for the stream of consciousness bricolage of the letters Clarissa writes when her mind is disordered, read it for the dash and swagger of Lovelace\u2019s letters hiding an ethical abyss, read it for Anna and Clarissa\u2019s friendship, for Richardson\u2019s sudden moments of startling insight. You\u2019ll roll your eyes at times but you might find yourself dabbing them as well. <\/p>\n

\n

\"RobRob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers<\/em> (2018, Sandstone Press) and has written for The Guardian<\/em>, The Fence<\/em> and the Erotic Review<\/em> and broadcast on the BBC. He is currently seeking agent representation for his second novel, The Crowd Pleaser<\/em>. He tweets at @robpalkwriter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a guest post by novelist Rob Palk. If Clarissa is a neglected read, it might have brought some of that neglect upon itself. It\u2019s 1500 pages long for a start and over the … <\/p>\n

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