Details and Frankness: Affective Relations in "Sir Charles Grandison"

Samuel Richardson's The History of Sir Charles Grandison is epistolary and prolix, and it concerns an ideal man of virtue who loves two admirable women simultaneously, Lady Clementina della Porretta and Harriet Byron. Sir Charles' famously divided heart occasions the novel's primary tension and takes several volumes to resolve, but the novel is not a psychological study of its titular character. Recent studies of eighteenth-century novels and eighteenth-century culture suggest that Richardson's final novel is merely a failed attempt to represent a male Pamela or Clarissa. Preoccupied with character and interiority, many eighteenth-century critics have discussed the immateriality of characters as nobodies, the business of inner meaning, the "afterlife" of character, and emergence of the modern self around 1780.¹ Even more recently, we have learned that the misfit—the Robinson Crusoe type—is the true figure of eighteenth-century individualism, a character forged in opposition to the forces of family and village.²

While Richardson is perhaps the novelist most readily identified with such notions of character, individualism, and interiority in the eighteenth century, he follows up the great psychological intensity of Clarissa—a novel in which the heroine's connections to her blood relations fracture and fail as the marriage plot goes horribly wrong—with something quite different: Sir Charles Grandison mediates upon the mechanisms through which affective communities are constructed. To be sure, there are various characters in the Grandison circle who resist complying with the demands of affective relations, who are so strong-willed that they embody a destructive individualism. The Grandison father, for instance, is the misfit that Armstrong foregrounds; he is a libertine who both abuses and neglects his family. But Richardson's final novel uses the drawn-out affair of Sir Charles' two loves to investigate how affective relations might be shaped and regulated through an ultimately successful, if complicated, marriage plot. This is a novel concerned to narrate how the members of the Grandison circle come together as an affective community—in other words, how these people fit in.

Sir Charles Grandison thus takes as its subject matter the shaping of kinship relations, not individual self-determination apart from the forces of family and village. As Ruth Perry has recently argued, kinship was changing in the eighteenth century from a model based on blood relations and inheritance to one based on marriage, a shift that allowed families to "be conceived of as constructed, even earned, rather than simply given by birth." For men across classes, the benefits of this transformation were immediate and profound: "men began to make their own way economically." ³ While the traditional bilateral cognatic kinship system had offered women opportunities analogous to those men enjoyed, the unmooring of the consanguineal family model in the eighteenth century produced a different, and less advantageous, reality for women.⁴ Perry explains:

The transfer at marriage of their subordination from fathers to husbands, the movement from father patriarchy to husband patriarchy, the weakening of their ties with their brothers, and the increasingly child-centered nature of the family probably resulted in a net loss of social power for women.⁵

Of particular interest to Perry is that this historical loss is obfuscated in novels from the same period that emphasize sentimental and affective relations between married people as a salve. The rise of sentimentalism is therefore merely, and misleadingly, an aesthetic compensation for women's real-world loss.⁶

What, then, is remarkable about Sir Charles Grandison is that it charts the acquisition of Harriet Byron's social power as a member of her affective community, though it does so in terms that evoke the traditional kinship structure that was historically in decline. The affective communities in which Harriet has a central role are two-fold, with her blood relatives at Selby-House and within her conjugal network of the Grandison circle. Rather than imagine a conjugal world in which Sir Charles and Harriet are emotionally focused on themselves and their children, Richardson deploys a nostalgic model in which consanguineal ties co-mingle with conjugal ties, in which Harriet forges close...