The Dialectic of Love in Sir Charles Grandison

The Dialectic of Love in Sir Charles Grandison Wendy Jones Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison is structured around an event that seems to defy both the novel's insistent and pervasive moralistic tone and its characterization of Sir Charles as a moral paragon: Sir Charles is in love with two women at the same time. Love for more than one woman is precisely the quality that distinguishes the rake, the kind of man Sir Charles himself excoriates. How can the exemplar of English integrity, who is not merely another worthy hero but a "vision of Christ as a realistic eighteenth-century gentleman,"1 be involved in what he himself rightly defines as a "divided or double Love"?2 Why is this paradox necessary for Richardson? Sir Charles suffers a divided love because Richardson wants to endorse competing and contradictory cultural ideals: what recent writers have called "companionate" and "sentimental" love.3 English society's 1 Jocelyn Harris, Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 140. 2 Samuel Richardson, 77i« History ofSir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 3:76. References are to volume and page of this edition. 3 See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex andMarriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), esp. chap. 8; Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Lovefrom Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 162 and chap. 7; and Erica Harth, "The Virtue ofLove: Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act," Cultural Critique 9 (Spring 1988), 123-54. I use these terms anachronistically to describe eighteenth-century modes of feeling on the assumption that the categories they describe were cultural ideals even if contemporaries did not specifically identify them as such. Indeed, naturalized ideological categories are frequently nameless to those who experience them. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 1, October 1995 16 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION endorsement of married love generated a dialectic: a tripartite dynamic of ideologies, motivated largely by class interests.4 Companionate love, espoused primarily by the middle classes, arose in response to the need for a rational basis for married love. Comprising prudence and judgment , it provided a suitable alternative to blindly impulsive romantic attraction and pure physical desire, both associated with the aristocracy. But this category was itself subsumed by "sentimental love," a dialectical resolution of reason and passion, which also became an acceptable basis for marriage. As I hope to show, this dialectic, which Grandison represents, facilitated an alliance between the aristocracy (identified with the landed interest) and the middle classes (identified with the moneyed interest). Such multiple origins and interests give rise to conflicts within what can be called the ideology of love.3 The formal features of novels often provide an especially legible and self-conscious exploration of this ideology, while the artifice of plotting serves to resolve contradictions at the level of form that re-emerge when such categories are seen outside the mechanism of narrrative. Grandisona double plot bisects the novel along the lines of Sir Charles's divided 4 I follow Michael McKeon in my use of the term "dialectic." See Origins ofthe English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). McKeon's analysis and my own bring up the vexed issue of whether we can talk about "class" in the eighteenth century, and if so, whether we can talk about a generalized middle class. On this subject, see R.S. Neale, Class in English History, 1600-1850 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981); W.A. Speck, Society and Literature in England, 1700-1760 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), pp. 42-45; and E.P. Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" Social History 3 (1978), 133-65. 1 use the term "class" to designate different hierarchical social groups, whose boundaries were not always clearly demarcated (e.g., the gentry and professionals confused the boundaries between the upper and middle classes). Contemporaries saw their society as divided into social groups. For instance, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe speaks of a "middle station" between the "higher or lower Part of Mankind." Robinson Crusoe (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 4. 5 This view assumes that...