Clarissa’s Readers

Reading Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa can be, at one and the same time, an intensely intimate and off-putting affair. In one way, the novel’s letters position the reader as a privileged confidant, privy to the most delicate details of the heroine’s tragedy, as well as a powerless spectator to Lovelace’s maniacal plans. The novel, in many ways, encourages its readers to feel as if they were there; Sarah Fielding aptly conveys this model of reading when she describes her reactions to the novel: “I am all sensation; my heart glows; I am overwhelmed; my only vent is tears; and unless tears could mark my thoughts as legibly as ink, I cannot speak half I feel. I become like the Harlowes’ servant, when he spoke not; he could not speak; he looked, he bowed, and withdrew.”¹ But reading Clarissa can just as easily produce a sense of disjunction and skepticism. Familiar letters, as we know, were considered textual performances in the eighteenth century—and even if a reader believes everything that Clarissa writes, there is no guarantee of identification. How could any reader be like Richardson’s virtuous heroine?

Martha J. Koehler’s Models of Reading: Paragons and Parasites in Richardson, Burney, and Laclos (Bucknell, 2005) offers a suggestive paradigm to understand these conflicting responses—shared over the course of the novel’s reception history—to Richardson’s enormously influential model of the didactic novel. In a study that utilizes narrative and communication studies theory, along with an expansive definition of the Clarissa text, Koehler’s work asks us to question the critical assumption that Richardson offers a straightforward didactic text sympathetic to the plights of eighteenth-century women. In this way, Koehler forcefully challenges the inherited truism that Richardson’s moralism is, ultimately, a celebration of female virtue. Positing a double-barreled argument, Koehler contends that the female paragon is produced specifically through the female readership’s agreement that they are inferior to her. Enabling this reifying and ultimately denigrating structure is Koehler’s related argument that epistolarity is not a binaristic narrative form, solely between reader and addressee, but more accurately a triangulated communication among three subject positions. Every instance of communication, therefore, includes a disruptive third position—the “parasite” of her subtitle.

Underwriting Koehler’s critique of Richardson’s didacticism is a deep reliance on the communications theory of Michel Serres, which shapes the categories of analysis that Koehler uses (paragon and parasite) as well as the related notion of triangulation. In short, a parasite is a third term for the subject that is included in the triangulated exchange only to be excluded from it. What this model offers readers of eighteenth-century fiction is a way to move out of a binaristic understanding of reading, interpretation, and identity. The triangulation of the epistolary novel does not produce a “stable, unitary mode” (68), but establishes relations that are inherently susceptible to reconfiguration and that continually need to demarcate who or what they exclude, and on what terms they agree. Though briefly (and selectively) evoked, Koehler’s appropriation of Serres contributes to the already fine body of scholarship on epistolarity.

Koehler begins considering her central questions through a discussion of “the intricate textual apparatus of the paragon novel” (29), which includes not only Clarissa and its subsequent editions, but also Richardson’s correspondence with a variety of readers concerning the novel, including Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh. Thus Koehler uses this material to focus specifically on how the paragon novel imagines its readers in relation to the novel’s characters. The most remarkable aspect of this relationship is that readers, Koehler argues, are put in the position of agreeing that the paragon—in Richardson’s case, of course, Clarissa—is an ideal that no reader could ever emulate. Richardson’s mid-century text thus transforms the conventions of seventeenth-century didactic literature that presume a reader will—and can—emulate the moral ideals presented. Richardson’s text builds in a permanent failure that displaces what Koehler calls the “imitative model” (31) with one that forces readers to feel ashamed that they can never measure up to Clarissa...