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CLARISSA
Clarissa [E1] [E2] [I1] [F1] [F2] [ES1] is the second novel by Richardson and the longest work in English literature (about one million words)
In this novel we can distinguish three parts:
- Clarissa is a beautiful young girl of honour and virtue with strict moral principles and she belongs to a greedy middle class family. She disobeys her family refusing to marry a rich but aged and ugly man, as she is in love with an unscrupulous libertine, Lovelace. She carries on a clandestine correspondence with him, until she decides to run away with him.
- Clarissa is now entirely in Lovelace’s power; she is innocent and does not realize Lovelace’s tricks, his attempts at manipulating her. However she proves virtuous and unwilling to compromise her moral principles. As a consequence after vainly attempting Clarissa’s virtue, Lovelace finally drugs her and rapes her while she is unconscious. Lovelace regrets his action and proposes to marry her, yet Clarissa escapes from him and will find in Lovelace’s friend Belford a protector, keeping Lovelace away. The rape leads to the final outcome of the novels, including Clarissa’ s and Lovelace’ s death.
- Abandoned by her family (who refuses to forgive her) and banished from society after breaking the moral code of the time, Clarissa prefers the idea of dying to that of marrying Lovelace and, defeated and humiliated in life, she finds in death the only way out of a hostile world where she failed to combine virtue and prudence. She dies like a martyr forgiving everyone in her life and looking forward to future joys and rewards in heaven. Her family finally repents of their attitude towards Clarissa and Lovelace is killed in a duel by Clarissa’s cousin, while Anna, Belford and all the good characters in the novel have happy marriages as a reward. Belford decides to collect all the letters that, presenting Clarissa’s story, can teach other women how to avoid such a tragic fate.
The epistolary structure of the novel is rather complex. Actually the vicissitudes of Clarissa are narrated through two separate groups of letters, providing different individual points of view of the same event: the correspondence between Clarissa and her friend Anna Howe, and that involving Lovelace and his friend Belford, two gentlemen of free lives. All these letters contribute to describe moment by moment the mental processes and the subjective reactions of characters. The inner self of characters is revealed not only through what the letters communicate but also through their way of communicating it (the language and the style can express a mind state)
The novel seems dominated by the following
themes:
- The immoral rake versus the innocent heroine.
Richardson contradicts the idea that a rake could be reformed so as to become a good husband. It is this idea that leads such a young and innocent woman as Clarissa to prefer this libertine to sober, respectable men and in thinking she could reform Lovelace she finds disaster. The novel provides a warning lesson for young girls unable to escape the danger of rakes and for their parents.
- The individual versus society . Clarissa struggles for a sense of autonomy in an oppressive society that prevents women from exerting any power, from being independent. Actually Clarissa, who is trapped by her ambitious bourgeois family and her aristocratic suitor, is to be considered a symbol of her epoch and the novel can be read as a document on the condition of the woman in the 18th century, who was starting her first struggle for emancipation in the sphere of feelings.
- The rewards of virtue and the punishments of evil. The novel has a precise moralizing purpose in its showing there is always justice in the end. Richardson applies the Puritan idea of punishment to his characters so that every person in the novel is either rewarded or punished on earth with the exception of Clarissa: good people enjoy happy marriages (Anna, Hickman, Belford), while bad people die in misery (Lovelace, Mr. and Mrs. Harlowe, Mrs. Sinclair, Belton) or marry badly (James, Arabella). Clarissa’s misfortunes and death can be considered to be a punishment for her losing innocence coming into contact with the upper class and for breaking the common code of behaviour. In fact her death is a happy moment as she feels she can only escape confinement in death. It becomes a reward, allowing her to go to heaven.
- Criticism over greed.The novel also criticizes the ambition of the middle class, whose greed was often the motivator behind actions. Middle class people tended to be eager to rise in society and to be concerned with money. Clarissa’s parents themselves show a preoccupation with money and with the improvement of their social condition.
10/15
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