The Body in Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa": Contexts of and Contradictions in the Development of Character (review)

300 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:2 distinctive Haywoodesque, eighteenth-century flavour. A very selected bibliography is included . Scholars and teachers of eighteenth-century fiction must applaud Oakleafs efforts to present a readable, affordable text that is perfect for classroom use. Mary Anne Schofield Wethersfield, Conn. Brigitte Glaser. 77ie Body in Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa": Contexts ofand Contradictions in the Development ofCharacter. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1994. 221pp. ISBN 3-8253-0231-8. Brigitte Glaser's book contains a wealth of information about the contexts of Richardson 's Clarissa. With Foucault as her presiding genius, Glaser announces that her study "concentrates not only on the examination of the novel's discursive context and culturalhistorical background but also on the investigation of particular, occasionally neglected, themes, such as the body, power, the care of the self, gender and friendship." Explaining that her approach "reveals the novel as located within a specific cultural context while at the same time influenced by various literary traditions as well as mythological notions and concepts" (p. 1), she promises to use the various discourses offered by other genres and literary forms and examine "the changing conception of gender, the new attitudes toward sexuality and desire, the growing emphasis on subjectivity, and questions of power and class" (p. 32). Frequent subheadings identify the wide range of themes she draws on to demonstrate how thoroughly the novel is constructed by its own particular historical moment. For instance, after a chapter establishing the history and terminology of her subject, her second chapter, entitled "Gender and Conduct: The Social Circumscription of the Body," focuses on the origins and transformation of gender roles, the normalization of genderrelated conduct in the early periodicals, the idea of spheres of influence, the effects of mythologies, of contemporary adaptations of classical notions, and of the Lucretia myth, together with the power of female archetypes, the eighteenth-century myth of the paragon, and representations of "female nature." Further contextualizing chapters headed "Constructions of the Body in the Fields of Medicine and Religion" and "The Realization of the Self: Disciplining the Body as Management of the Mind and the Soul" gather up an extremely useful collection of references, although Glaser's very scrupulosity in acknowledging her sources does draw attention to the fact that they are often secondary. She can strike out on her own, however, as when she discusses the relevance of Clarissa's knowledge of such religious classics as Drexelius and Francis Spira, or reads Clarissa's refusal of food as Christian asceticism. The second half of Glaser's book contains perceptive close readings of the discourses of power, resistance, desire, and the shaping of the self. But when she elides the gap between author and text I find her arguments difficult to accept. For all her up-to-dateness about contemporary literary theory, Glaser occasionally lapses into the old assumptions that used to blight Richardson's reputation. For instance, as part of her argument that illness, sensibility, and disease afflict women and men alike, she calls him hypochondriac, which is hardly fair now we know how sick he actually was. And she harks back again to those condescending readings of Richardson which portrayed him as an idiot savant writing REVIEWS 301 better, or differently, than he knew, when she argues that "By endowing a character with contradictions ... Richardson undermines his own intentions and thus risks the collapse of his projections" (p. 38). I believe that Richardson knew exactly what he was doing, and was much more informed and self-aware than was once thought. His "contradictions" may well be the complexities of a master craftsman. And in any case, can we talk about "intentions" when Clarissa is as much process as product, a text in continual flux from the first sheets of manuscript to the last corrected edition and beyond? If alterations and late-come thoughts pour on through the correspondence and into the margins of Lady Bradshaigh's own copy, at what point exactly can we say that the book finds its final form? And what if Richardson's so-called "intentions" were to some extent imposed on the book after publication, by means of private correspondence, revisions, the expanded Prefaces and Postscripts...