Clarissa's Relics and Lyric Community

Clarissa's Relics and Lyric Community G. GABRIELLE STARR Samuel Richardson's Clarissa is, at core, a novel about the limits of emotional intimacy. From letter to letter, page to page, Richardson explores models of consensus—literally, of feeling together, the true correspondence of hearts and minds. From the beginning, however, Clarissa is a story of intimacy thwarted and correspondence violated. The novel records Richardson's attempts to mold a language that can make his heroine's inner experience available to those outside, a language of feeling composed of words and images, patterns of expression and of thought, ways of imagining emotional communication and its lapses. As other critics have demonstrated , the novel's crisis develops from the emotional and physical isolation of its heroine. She is deprived of direct communication, shut off from the presence of her father and mother, her aunt, her nurse, all those closest to her. Believing that if "they did but know [her] heart" all would be well, Clarissa attempts to create a complete correspondence with her family —as Lovelace's false etymology would have it, a union of the heart.1 Desperate, afraid, she sends letters designed to show the extremity of her plight, to represent her emotional experience so that it can be felt and understood . But as the novel progresses, at moments of high emotional intensity , a true correspondence seems impossible. Letters fragment and are replaced by relics: the ten quasi-epistolary papers she writes in near-mad127 128 / STARR ness after being raped, the careful meditations written in her sorrow, the emblematic self-elegy she orders engraved on her coffin. These impassioned inscriptions participate in lyric models of emotional consensus, models taken from religious poetry like the book of Job and George Herbert's The Temple. Epistolary correspondence converges with or gives way to lyric attempts at community, and the novel is opened up to the lyric mode. Richardson's attempt at exhaustive representation situates lyric within the novel's range of possibility, suggesting not only that the history of genre we apply to understanding the birth of the novel needs significant revision, but also that the story of the lyric involves a more complex tradition than is usually granted it. Making this case with regard to Clarissa will require some abbreviated discussion of the relations between texts and practices which contribute to the eighteenth-century history of genre, as well as detailed accounts of Richardson's aesthetic choices. My concerns here are two: Clarissa provides us with a case that challenges generic orthodoxies; in examining that challenge, in exploring Richardson's adaptation and modification of lyric, we are also given access to a new way of analyzing the connections and constraints which underlie the novel's emotional richness (and its version of the speaking subject). While most analyses of the language of emotion in Clarissa have focused on the influence of the drama or earlier epistolary works, the emotional repertoire available to Richardson was much more varied.2 Jocelyn Harris points out the breadth of Richardson's literary knowledge, noting that he published Sidney's sonnets in 1724 and knew (and quoted from) Herrick, Herbert, and Donne as well.3 In fact, in the eighteenth century, there was a wide range of models for emotional intensity, models limited or affected by genre in complicated ways. First, generic and modal distinctions functioned on shifting axes. In addition to the classical drama-epic-lyric triptych, biblical models were of great importance. Lyric was subdivided by hymn, thanksgiving, epithalamium or lament in the Biblical scheme (largely relying on the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and the Book of Job), while in other formulations, pastoral, anacreontic, ode, or elegy were the privileged (and contested) groupings. Genres seemed made for expansion and renewal. The late Renaissance and early eighteenth century are marked by an extraordinary amount of literary experimentation; whatever our preconceptions about neoclassicism might lead us to expect, there was a high degree of generic flexibility. Even distinctions between prose and poetry were complicated by developments in biblical scholarship that revealed poetry in sections of the Bible long read as prose (chief among these the greater part of the Book of Job). Clarissa's...