Disinterested Selves: Clarissa and the Tactics of Sentiment

I. Mandevillian (mis)reading

Exiled from England for nearly thirteen years, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu spent the winter of 1752 in the Northern Italian village of Gottolengo. On March 1 she “finish’d” a “case of Books” she had received from her daughter two weeks earlier. ¹ “I believe you’l think I have made quick dispatch,” she remarked with modesty: in those two weeks Lady Mary read and commented on no less than twelve novels. Among these twelve, amazingly, was Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48). “To say truth,” she noted, “I have read night and Day” (CL, 3:7). Apparently resistant to the new modes of identification introduced, as Catherine Gallagher has recently shown, by the very fictions she read, Lady Mary considered each novel a “secret history.” ² The Adventures of Mr. Loveill (1750) “gave me some entertainment, thô there is but one character in it that I can find out” (CL, 3:7), and she “found” in Francis Coventry’s History of Pompey the Little (1751) “many of my Acquaintance” (CL, 3:4). She objected to Charlotte Lennox’s Life of Harriot Stuart (1751) for its “monstrous abuse” of “Lady B[ell] F[inch],” who is “clearly meant by the mention of her Library, she being the only lady at Court that has one” (CL, 3:8). ³ Lady Mary, in reading, searched for familiar figures.

In Clarissa she found herself. Its “first volume soften’d me by a near ressemblance of my Maiden Days” (CL, 3:9); indeed, as critics have noted, Clarissa’s early plot uncannily reproduces Lady Mary’s courtship. ⁴ Promised against her will in marriage by a patriarch who knows “no happynesse but Equipage and furniture” (CL, 1:141), Lady Mary corresponds secretly with Edward Wortley Montagu. She fears her father’s “Threat” to deny her “a shilling, except I comply” and to make her life “as miserable as lay in [his] power” (CL, 1:123), and her promise “in atonement for not marrying whom he would, never to marry at all” is, like Clarissa’s same promise, rejected (CL, 1:134). Remaining, however, as committed to filial obedience as Clarissa, Lady Mary insists that “passive Obeidence is a doctrine [that] should allwaies be receivd among wives and daughters.” Wortley can “take” her “on no other terms than those of my Father” (CL, 1:54). Lady Mary escapes to Wortley (set to meet her “under this Garden wall . . . some little distance from the summer house” [CL, 1:150]) only when her father has bought wedding clothes (as Mr. Harlowe plans to do) and confined her to her “chamber” (CL, 1:163) as prelude to a forced marriage.

Beneath this parallel plot lies a deeper “ressemblance,” however, that has been overlooked: both women struggle to prove their sincerity to resolutely skeptical readers who routinely “call all things Criminal,” for whom “Confusion . . . is Peevishnesse, and . . . sincerity is design” (CL, 1:82). ⁵ “You Judge very wrong of my Heart when you suppose me capable of veiws of Interest,” she affirms over and over. “No body ever was so disinterested as I am” (CL, 1:30, 64). Conscious of being misinterpreted, frustrated at failing to prevent such misreading, bent on proving her disinterestedness, Lady Mary tries to dispel Wortley’s skepticism by disclosing up front how much he sacrifices by marrying her. She reminds him that her “fortune only follow[s] my obedience” (CL, 1:123) and warns him not to expect future rewards from reconciliation with her family. “I will deceive you in nothing,” she insists. “I am fully perswaded he [her father] will never hear of terms afterwards” (CL, 1:153). She frequently frees Wortley from any promises to her to “shew you I had no design upon your Fortune” (CL, 1:143). “You talk to me of Estates as if I was the most interested Woman in the World,” she complains. “Whatever faults I may have shewn in my Life, I know not one Action of it that ever prov’d me Mercenary” (CL, 1:153). She reminds Wortley that she too sacrifices by their elopement, since her...