Models of Reading: Paragons and Parasites in Richardson, Burney, and Laclos (review)

Novels of manners from Richardson to Austen obsess over the relation of the exemplary or the general to the exceptional or the particular, and this obsession frequently translates into troubling consequences for women. The conflicting claims of verisimilitude and didacticism produce female characters who represent ideal femininity yet are "real" women; the combination leaves female readers trapped by the desire to model their behaviour on an exemplary woman who turns out to be exceptional, such as Clarissa, and therefore unreproducible. The strength of Martha Koehler's book is that she precisely pinpoints how this crucial tension functions in three novels (Clarissa, Evelina, and Les Liaisons dangereuses) and how it translates into different moral claims upon female readers. Her interest is not in reading heroines for how they represent gender, but in how these texts model female reading and thereby introduce a relationship between the particular woman and the general, which is her representation in fiction. In this threesome of authors who model female reading, Richardson comes out the loser. Though the most influential, Richardson, to Koehler, is the most anti-feminist. In her afterword, Koehler explicitly aligns herself against the recent critical tradition that reads Richardson as a proto-feminist, instead arguing that his creation of Clarissa as paragon forces female readers to compare themselves to her and find themselves wanting. For women, then, the practice of reading Clarissa is one of discovering their own failures and inadequacies: "for the female reader of Clarissa, the agreement to honor her singularity entails the exclusion of oneself from her transcendent category" (12). As "misreaders" of Richardson, Burney and Laclos resist this model of reading and, by rewriting his paragon, both authors "recognize the oppressive potential of the structures that guarantee her transcendent position only be means of excluding other women" (17).

Koehler comes to this comparative conclusion with the aid of Michel Serres's theory of the parasite in triangulated communication. For Serres, all communication is triangular, not binary, and every dialogue between two people only reaches mutual understanding by its rejection of a third person, the parasite, from the conversation; this parasite "must be excluded from the channel in order for the interlocutors to achieve a successful dialogue" (11). While Burney and Laclos recognize the function of the parasite and enact forms of triangular communication that foreground the slippage in any dialogue between female reader and text, Richardson, in his desire to control his text through editing, or in his representation of Lovelace as parasite, allows for no such slippage and insists that his female readers feel shame at their own inferiority in relation to the paragon.

The book's thesis is compelling, and though I diverge from Koehler's indictment of Richardson as a misogynist and side with those who see Clarissa's disruptions as indicative of a more positive identification between reader and heroine, my own frustrations with the text force me to acknowledge that her reading is valid. What I am less convinced by is the theoretical framework without which the book is simply a rehearsal of canonical readings of canonical novels. Serres's theory of the parasite is central to Models of Reading—it is included in Koehler's subtitle and is explicitly stated to be the primary model used in the preface. However, the framework of paragons and parasites seems, at times, to be mechanically forced onto the text and is not needed to arrive at the textual conclusions that she reaches. The irrelevance of the theory is most apparent when it almost entirely disappears from her readings of Evelina and Les Liaisons dangereuses. To this already diluted theoretical framework, Koehler then adds many others, which, rather than clarify, confuse the promising one with which she began. Over the course of the book, she models her own readings through theoretical concepts borrowed from René Girard, Silvan Tomkins, Jacques Lacan, and M.M. Bakhtin, to name just a few. The...