The Americanization of Clarissa

In his Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood lists Clarissa among such works as The Vicar of Wakefield and Chesterfield’s Letters which Americans cherished for warning them against “[t]he evils of parental tyranny and the harsh and arbitrary modes of child rearing of an older and more sage age.” ¹ Nor is this distinguished American historian alone in suggesting the influence of Richardson’s novels on a pre-Revolutionary American readership. In making his claim, Wood draws on Jay Fliegelman’s influential Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, which argues that Samuel Richardson’s heroines can be listed among the many victims of patriarchal tyranny whose stories fed growing colonial animosity toward king and Parliament. By virtue of its criticism of an authoritarian father, Fliegelman contends, Clarissa’s fate “offers more than a conveniently invoked literary parallel to America’s flight from its parental tyrant, England. . . .” ² Indeed, if he had his way, we would imagine Richardson’s heroine “was to the eighteenth century what the Maid of Orleans had been to the fifteenth: a martyred heroine who had led a revolutionary cause.” ³ Tantalizing as I find this explanation for Richardson’s appeal to a colonial readership, I must question its presupposition that such readers could have responded so enthusiastically only to a plot which translated directly into their political relationship with England. Such a one-to-one relationship between fiction and politics raises at least as many questions as it answers.

First is the obvious gender discrepancy: Clarissa is a girl. If in England she demonstrated a distinctly feminine power, the power of passive aggression, then we have to ask ourselves how, once in America, the same character could suddenly turn into an active revolutionary. Even assuming that Richardson’s American readers would have linked Richardson’s heroine iconographically with Joan of Arc, we still have to deal with the fact that Clarissa did not lead armies into battle. Nor, for that matter, did the various kinds of American fiction published in imitation of Richardson—beginning in the late 1780s and running for about thirty years—celebrate women who engaged in the Revolutionary struggle. ⁴ Beyond his own ingenious reading of Richardson, Fliegelman provides no basis for thinking that Americans would have been willing to imagine themselves as rebellious daughters during the pre-Revolutionary period. Further troubling his reading is a historical discrepancy. If Clarissa was indeed popular for ideological reasons before the Revolution, when readers could presumably sympathize with a rebellious daughter, then on what basis would the story of a rebellious daughter have gained in popular appeal during the years following American independence from England? For gain it did.

The mainstream of American novel criticism tells a contrasting masculine history of American literature, which in turn presupposes a different basis for national identity. Despite the pioneer work of such feminist literary historians as Cathy Davidson and Jane Tompkins, the great tradition of American fiction—as established by the authors of the 1917 Cambridge History of American Literature, rearticulated by F. O. Matthiessen, and supplemented by Leslie Fiedler—remains well entrenched. When it comes to literary value, we do not pay homage so much to the domestic novel as we do to the tradition that runs from Cooper through Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James on to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. If one characterizes the English tradition as feminine by virtue of its strong domestic tradition, then it is only reasonable to gender the American novel masculine. Compelling arguments on behalf of what Tompkins calls “the other American Renaissance” and Shirley Samuels, “the culture of sentiment” have not yet dislodged the enduring equation between American fiction and a boy’s adventure story of westward expansion, frontier encounters, racial struggles, and great metaphysical contests, all of which reproduce in secular form the heritage of the puritan fathers. ⁵ Both the tradition of reading and the narrative form of the novel seem to weight the scale between one of two gendered options. Fliegelman actually confirms this faith in the masculinism of our literary tradition, paradoxically, when he translates the...