Christian Form and Anti-Feminism in Clarissa

Christian Form and Anti-Feminism in Clarissa Lois A. Chaber Twenty-five years ago, in the radical days ofthe 1970s, when I was teaching Clarissa in Albany, New York, I had made for myself a T-shirt emblazoned with the feminist logo of the clenched fist combined with female sex sign, and the words "Write On Clarissa," which I proudly wore to class, a gesture which epitomized my conviction then that Samuel Richardson's novel was the ultimate feminist text of the eighteenth century. My present views on Clarissa are much more ambivalent.1 Although I do not agree with Jerry Beasley's asseveration diat "Clarissa is in fact the most authoritative and doctrinaire affirmation of patriarchal ideology not only in Richardson's body ofwork but in all ofeighteenth-century fiction,"2 and although I do not deny that space is given in the text to an exposure and (partial) condemnation ofthe repressive, anti-feminist tenets and practices in the family, in society, in the law, and in the Church, I do feel that Richardson built into die plot and characteriza1 This article is a revised and extended version ofa paper presented to a graduate class in the eighteenth-century novel, by invitation ofthe lecturer, Eleanor Wikborg, at the University ofStockholm in April 1994. 2 Jerry C. Beasley, "Richardson's Girls: The Daughters ofPatriarchy in Pamela, Claiissa andSii Châties Giandison," Neto Essays on Samuel Richardson, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York: St Martin's Press, 1996), p. 51n21; see also pp. 37-38, 41-43. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 3-4, April-July 2003 508 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION tion ofthe novel a considerable vein ofChristian patriarchal authoritarianism , which has not yet been fully illuminated and traced in the text. Moreover, because Siobhan Kilfeather, in a dense survey of"The Rise ofRichardson Criticism," maintains that Richardson's "feminist champions," who have included such distinguished critics as Terry Castle, MargaretAnne Doody, Terry Eagleton, Carol Houlihan Flynn, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, and Katherine M. Rogers, have been "more persuasive" than his detractors, supporting the view that Clarissa is "a major feminist text precisely because it argues that women's rights to self-determination begin with rights over die body and with economic rights,"3 I would like to play devil's advocate in this paper. Even amongst Richardson's critics there is ambiguity: some,Janet Todd, for instance, find in the novel a subversive proto-feminist potential that is ultimately undercut by a final reaffirmation of patriarchy, while others such as Toni Bowers find that the novelist's patriarchal ideological intentions are finally subverted by the cacophonous and destabilizing epistolary text.4 To some extent, however, characterizing this ideological mixture in the novel is like describing the proverbial glass ofwater: is it half empty, or half full? On the level of religious ideology alone, the level I wish to explore, one contradiction in Richardson's novels emerges from the conflict within Pauline doctrine itself between the belief in the primacy of the individual conscience and the belief in the divinely ordained subordination of women.5 Another one, on which I focus here, is the way in which the workings ofa divine Providence, embedded in die text—Richardson's answer to the burgeoning scepticism and Deism ofthe age—elevates women but at the same time oppresses them, reducing Clarissa from an autonomous agent to a passive patient. Siobhan Kilfeather, "The Rise of Richardson Criticism," Samuel Richardson: Tercenlenaiy Essays, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 258. Janet Todd, Women's Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 64-68; and Toni Bowers, ViePolitics ofMotherhood: British Writingand Culture 1680-1760 (Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 205, 207, 218, 222. See Margaret Olafsun Thickstun, Fictions oftlieFeminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Repiesentalion ofWomen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. ix, x, 6, passim; and Lois Chaber, "This Affecting Subject':An 'Interested' Reading ofChildbearing in Two Novels by Samuel Richardson," Eigliteenlli-Centuiy Fiction 8 (1996), 240-41. CHRISTIAN FORM AND ANTI-FEMINISM509 Richardson and the Christian Heroine Profound and explicit analogies are well established between Clarissa and Milton's Paradise Lost,6...