Reasonableness and Domestic Fiction

"Such a strange perseverance in a measure so unreasonable!" Clarissa exclaims in response to her family's insistence that she marry the odious Solmes.¹ Later she sends an indirect message to Lovelace, explaining, "I will oblige [if I oblige (2:69)] those whom it is both my inclination and duty to oblige in everything that is reasonable" (241); and she continues: "God forbid that I should ever think myself freed from my father's reasonable control" (327). When Anna learns that her mother has prohibited correspondence with Clarissa, she protests: "I am astonished that my mother should take such a step—purely to exercise an unreasonable act of authority" (548). Belford criticizes Lovelace early on, writing, "[W]e cannot think it reasonable that you should punish an innocent lady [creature (4:11–12)] who loves you so well" (555). Later he justifies Clarissa's strange death-bed rituals by exclaiming: "How reasonable was all this!—It showed, indeed, that she herself had well considered of it" (1304). Even Lovelace, in a last-ditch attempt to do right by the dying lady, promises to write his apologies "in such humble and in such reasonable terms, that if she is not a true Harlowe she shall forgive me" (1184).

But what does it mean to speak, write, or act in "reasonable terms"? Could Clarissa have exclaimed "Such a strange perseverance in a measure so irrational!" and still be taken to mean the same thing? And when she thinks of her father's "reasonable control," can we suppose that some standard is at stake whose content ought to be as readily apparent to her father—and to the rest of the world—as it is to her? Surely Belford cannot mean that it is either rational or widely accepted for a young, healthy woman to use her last money to buy a coffin, place this coffin as a desk in her bedroom, and rely on it to write her final will. After all, Belford himself disagrees with these actions: he is "shocked at the thoughts of the coffin thus brought in" (1304), and he repeatedly tells Clarissa to remove it from her proximity and to gear up for life instead of preparing for death. Nonetheless, he believes that these actions are reasonable, explaining that "weighing the lady's arguments, I know not why I was so affected—except as she said, at the unusualness of the thing" (1305). On Belford's account, then, actions might be shocking and unusual and might fail to serve a person's interests while at the same time being reasonable.

In colloquial usage "reasonable" and "rational" have become interchangeable terms; both designate an act or a claim that is amenable to reason. "Rational" often seems more abstract or technical, while "reasonable" more affective and intuitive, but for the most part we take them to confirm reason in the same way: measuring a claim or an act with a preexisting and incontrovertible standard, whether we define this standard in terms of technical computations or in terms of commonsense.² John Rawls, however, has recently distinguished reasonableness from rationality. He defines rationality as "the powers of judgment and deliberation," which an agent exercises "in seeking ends and interests peculiarly its own," and reasonableness as "the desire to engage in fair cooperation as such," which entails a commitment to "specify[ing] the reasons we are to share and publicly recognize before one another as grounding our social relations."³ For Rawls both "rational" and "reasonable" are constructivist measures—criteria that agents construct through their preferences and actions, rather than ones that inhere objectively in the world. But while rationality is derived from the deliberation of a single agent, reasonableness is derived from deliberations among multiple agents. To establish the rationality of an act or claim, we can reason alone; but to establish the reasonableness of an act or claim we must reason with others.⁴

Rawls's reasonableness, then, might be understood as a collaborative construction: a form of evaluation that has no free-standing content (or authority) but is produced in concrete instances of collective deliberations. It is not...