"Sufficient to the Day": Anxiety in Sir Charles Grandison

"Sufficient to the Day": Anxiety in Sir Charles GrandisonLois A. Chaber Sir Charles Grandison, aptly characterized by Sylvia Kasey Marks as "the stepbrother of Richardson's other novels,"1 has suffered from its reputation as a foray into social comedy in which the novelist abandoned the religious profundity and the psychological complexity of Clarissa. Richardson's new approach allegedly entailed, at worst, a smug complacency , at best, an idealism and optimism—a stolid faith in the efficacy and benevolence of social institutions. Even recent, sympathetic critics of Grandison have failed to challenge directly Alan D. McKillop's long-standing excoriation of the novel for its "complacent assumption that polite society can stand, when properly purged of vice and error."2 1 "Sir Charles Grandison": The Compleat Conduct Book (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1986), p. 13. 2 Alan D. McKillop, The Early Masters of English Fiction (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1956), p. 81. Similarly dismissive views of Grandison can be found in the following recent crides: T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 398, 615; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth-Century Puritan Character (Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1972), pp. 176, 194, 225, 227, 233; Carol H. Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man ofLetters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. xi-xii, 5, 48-49; Rita Goldberg, Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 25-26; Gerard A. Barker, Grandison's Heirs: The Paragon's Progress in the Late Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), pp. 13-52. More sympathetic readings of Grandison, on the omer hand, may be found in Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson : Dramatic Novelist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 279-394; Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 241-367; Jocelyn Harris, Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 138-64. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 1, Number 4, July 1989 282 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Jean Hagstrum's discussion of the novel epitomizes the way in which even sympathizers generally turn a blind eye to its more sombre ambiguities ; after generously praising its depiction of human love, he raises the possibility of "a potentially darker side" to the work only to dismiss this idea completely, retaining the conviction that Grandison "is unredeemed by the psychological depth one finds elsewhere."3 For a different perspective on Grandison we can take our cue from Gerard Levin, who warns, in a psychoanalytic study of Richardson's novels, that an exaggeratedly assured tone is actually "a sign of uncertainly or anxiety."4 But while Levin's approach is orthodox Freudian, my own reading makes use of Anglican homiletic motifs from Richardson's own milieu, not for the sake of proving an influence, but for probing beneath the misleading surface pomposities of Grandison in order to expose and explore disquieting veins which both complicate and enrich the text. To be sure, there is a school of thought which eschews altogether the relevance of Christian themes to the eighteenth-century novel; nevertheless, Leopold Damrosch, Jr's claim that it is timely to reassert the significance of religious themes in Clarissa after the recent onslaught of poststructuralist criticism (and the two approaches need not be mutually exclusive , as I hope to indicate) may be extended to the rest of the author's canon.3 Moreover, I align myself with both Damrosch and Rita Goldberg , in their recent studies of Clarissa, in insisting on the complexity and tension within Christian ideas themselves and on the problematic—even subversive—fictional deployment of these ideas by Richardson.6 An investigation into the imputed smugness or "serenity"7 of Gran3 Sex andSensibility: IdealandErotic Lovefrom Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 214-16. 4 Richardson the Novelist: The Psychological Patterns, Costerus: Essays in English and American Language and Literature, n.s. 9 (Amsterdam: Rodolphi, 1978), p. 117. 5 God's Plot and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1985), p. 213. The classic case for the pertinence ofChristian...