Abuse and Atonement: The Passion of Clarissa Harlowe

Abuse and Atonement: The Passion of Clarissa Harlowe Peggy Thompson While still at Harlowe Place, Richardson's title character is tormented by the choice her family forces her to make: either she must enter a marriage that is physically, ethically, and spiritually repugnant to her or she must abandon the dutiful obedience by which she has always defined herself. Once Clarissa makes the agonizing decision to leave her father's house, Lovelace exacerbates the pain ofher ostracism with deception , manipulation, confinement, threats, harassment, and, finally, rape. Richardson scholars have discussed this narrative of relentless suffering in scientific, Sadean, iconographie, and biblical contexts, as well as in relation to the literary traditions of tragic drama, the seduction narrative, and the literature of holy dying.1 This essay will focus on the intersection of two additional interpretive contexts for Clarissa's suffering: her 1 For discussions ofClarissa's suffering in scientific contexts, see R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel ofSentimentfrom Richardson to Sade (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), pp. 34-35; Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980), pp. 2223 ; and especially Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), who cites Brissenden and Perry as precedents for her argument that Richardson's (and Lovelace's) method has "much in common with the investigative methods of science, particularly the sensibility experiments, which ... combine invasive entry with provocation of pain" (p. 64). Van Sant also provides a list of others who have explored the influence ofSadean eroticism on the novel (pp. 64-65n20): Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 97, 99; John Traugott, "An Essay to Find the Reader," English Literature in the Age ofDisguise, ed. Maximillian Novak (Berkeley: University EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 3, April 1999 256 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION identity as an eighteenth-century woman and her identity as a Christ figure . More specifically, I will argue that three classical theories of Christ's atonement preached widely in eighteenth-century London and evoked in the characterization ofClarissa reinforce an eighteenth-century social construct ofwoman as passive, defenceless moral martyr. Ellen Pollakprovides a powerful summary of this construct: Woman was a creature whose intellectual deficiencies and emotional instability made her unfit to govern herselfeven as they especially suited her to a passive mode of spiritual martyrdom in which her "virtue" consisted in the "art" of regulating herself according to the demands of an arbitrary masculine desire. ... An emblem of the other world, her role would be—like that of the original incarnation of perfection—to rectify human lack by means of beatific suffering. By bearing the burden of all deficiency in herself, she would vindicate the sufficiency of men.2 Rita Goldberg has demonstrated how such aburden informs the profoundly ambivalent relationship between Clarissa and Lovelace, both of whom act on a double-edged belief in the "possibility of an extraordinary woman's redeeming or damning power."3 But frequently critics have resisted seeing Clarissa primarily as a moral or spiritual martyr. Goldberg herself, for example, argues that while carrying tremendous mythological weight as a potential saviour, Clarissa struggles towards an identity that is more than symbolic, exemplary, or objective.4 Others deny that Richardson's heroine is essentially passive. Margaret Anne Doody, for example, insists that Clarissa "refuses to be a mere victim," while Elizabeth Bergen Brophy of California Press, 1977), pp. 181-82; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 23 1ff. ; Leopold Damrosch, Jr, God's Plot and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imaginationfrom Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1985), p. 219. Tom Keymer argues that Clarissa chooses to interpret her suffering self as a type of Job, "Richardson's Meditations: Clarissa's Clarissa" Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 99109 . Doody discusses Clarissa's suffering in several additional contexts: tragic drama, seduction narratives, the literature ofholy dying, and iconographie traditions; see A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels ofSamuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 99-240...