Why Look at Clarissa?

“Methinks I can’t bear to be look’d upon by these Men-servants; for they seem as if they would look one thro’.” ¹ So Pamela, writing of an early, unwanted sexual advance made by her fellow servant, Harry, voices what is for many female characters in Richardson’s novels a home truth. Kristina Straub has argued of Pamela that, in order to re-educate male readers, Richardson deconstructs this gaze and reconstructs it. ² Incidents in which men look at women are also important in Clarissa, where, as one facet of the greater complexity of epistolary form Richardson achieves in that novel, sharply contrasting male descriptions of the heroine produce a more complicated exploration of what it means for men to look at women. Through these descriptions, Richardson enlarges a critique of earlier novels of love and seduction begun in Pamela, revising a literary tradition in ways that would have important consequences for later English fiction. The present essay discusses Lovelace’s and Belford’s physical descriptions of Clarissa and shows just how nuanced (and problematic) is this aspect of Richardson’s style. Comparison with such a typical erotic text as Eliza Haywood’s Memoirs of a Certain Island adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1725) suggests that in Lovelace’s descriptions of Clarissa, in spite of redefining how the gaze functions, Richardson encountered considerable difficulties reforming the traditional “warm scene.” A strong didactic purpose is evident in all the physical descriptions in Clarissa, but Richardson’s elaboration of Clarissa’s body through Belford’s accounts of her arguably reestablishes the spectatorial apparatus he would discredit. This being so, Richardson’s revision of what it means for men to look at women depends ultimately on the novel’s offering an alternative way of visualizing and knowing Clarissa, one constructed by Clarissa herself.

The assumptions about women that men’s looking at them encodes have been a perennial topic in Richardson criticism, the question of voyeurism an occasion alternately for moral condemnation, for accusations of clandestine pleasure, or for charges of serious misreading. ³ As a result of recent work in film theory, in particular the feminist theorizing of a “male gaze” generated by the apparatus of narrative cinema and offering (in the now classic formulation of Laura Mulvey) visual pleasure for men and problematic choices for women, ⁴ it is possible to formulate a more complex appreciation of both what Richardson has achieved and failed to achieve in his physical descriptions of women. In the essays by John Berger and Susanne Kappeler from which my essay draws its title, the question “Why look?” asks not simply what is made of the object looked at, but also what processes of self-definition the looking subject carries out through the contrast he makes between himself and the other he constructs as object of his gaze. ⁵ Physical description of Clarissa is bound to the business of defining woman, but it is not only the conception of “woman” that is on trial in this novel. Increasingly, Lovelace comes to ground his sense of identity in the extent to which he can control Clarissa; and as he marshals historical and literary allusion to claim the widest possible significance for their struggle, he associates that sense of identity, as Clarissa will come to do, with everything he means by “man.” This, too, is on trial.

Because he was using erotic situations to explore such issues, Richardson assumed that readers could not help but construe those situations with his own sense of high moral purpose. But within the wider literary context, the notoriety of “warm” passages in the novels of Haywood and others meant that in using physical description at all Richardson was risking readers’ making their own associations and drawing inferences he did not want. After the strong criticisms of warm scenes in Pamela, he was sensitive to audience response to this kind of “realism,” well aware that conventionally moralistic readers would think any description (or even mention) of Clarissa in a state of undress undercut his moral purpose. The physical descriptions that most strongly test his claim to have, as he stated...