In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Reason and Religion in “Clarissa”: Samuel Richardson and “The Famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton”
  • Kathryn Steele (bio)
E. Derek Taylor. Reason and Religion in “Clarissa”: Samuel Richardson and “The Famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton.” Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. 178pp. UK55. ISBN 978-0-7546-6531-1.

Productively dislodging the Lockean thought that influences many readings of Clarissa, E. Derek Taylor links Samuel Richardson with John Norris, rector of Bemerton. As argued in Reason and Religion, the theocentric philosophy of Norris and his correspondent Mary [End Page 390] Astell (both influenced by Nicolas Malebranche) allowed Richardson to explore single womanhood, take a stance in debates about women’s spiritual worth, and address the problem of narrative closure and Providence.

John Norris (1657–1711), Taylor reminds us in his introduction, was well known in the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth; he wrote poetry, philosophy, and theology. His significance has been obscured by modern scholars’ dependence upon Lockean rationalism, scepticism, and empiricism. Norris, who popularized Nicolas Malebranche’s occasionalism (the belief that God is the first and only cause of all motions and ideas), responded directly to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding by arguing, first, that given the existence of immaterial ideas, physical sensation cannot be the foundation of knowledge. Second, Norris was concerned about the way materialism rejects absolute truths. Allusions to Norris throughout Clarissa suggest that the novel participates in these lines of critique and follows Norris in seeing God as central to human experience.

Chapter 1 complicates four Lockean strands of Clarissa scholarship. Arguments that characters are formed through experience might be qualified, Taylor suggests initially, in light of Richardson’s emphasis on the soul-like aspect of Clarissa’s “sense” and the association of “traitorous physical senses” (41) with Lovelacean manipulation. Questioning the reliability of the senses accords with the Norrisian/ Malebranchian tenet that to “accept the various reports of the senses as accurate measures of physical processes was ... misguided” and “philosophically misleading and morally dangerous” (44). Although Lovelace’s exploitation of linguistic ambiguity appears to reflect a Lockean instability of meaning, Taylor’s second line of argument situates Richardson alongside Norris, who believed in eternal, objective truth. As demonstrated by Richardson’s “appeals for ‘attention’” (55) in the prefaces, correspondence, paratexts, and revisions in response to misreadings, the difficulty of the text is part of a warning that “meaning had better rest on something more solid than consensus” (52). Third, Taylor shows that the novel’s thinking about women is more closely aligned with Mary Astell’s brand of conservative feminism and was “not part of the [Lockean] liberal-contractual tradition” (66). Finally, Taylor makes his way through previous arguments about Richardson’s theology, concluding that Clarissa requires the Norris-derived framework of essential truths and experience in God that mediates between Locke’s reason and William Law’s Boehmenism.

Reminding us that feminist thought was not monolithic, Taylor broadens his discussion of the novel’s thinking about women in chapter 2. Astellian feminism argued that women had value as spiritual beings, and “Clarissa’s death works to validate” this argument (104). [End Page 391] Taylor illustrates this conservative feminism in the problem of marriage, comparing Clarissa’s situation with historical accounts of single women and taking Astell—who, like Clarissa, accepted the patriarchal view of female submission in marriage—as a model for the character. Both Astell and Clarissa turn away from humankind and fix their thoughts on God as they are dying; Clarissa’s “mystical language derives from works such as Letters [Concerning the Love of God ]” (105). Taylor’s focus on Astell results from his goal of associating Richardson with Norris and Astell; Taylor’s usual firm grounding in previous scholarship, however, underlines an omission here: Margaret Anne Doody’s examination of devotional literature in Clarissa in A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). How does this mystical language fit within the larger discursive field of the deathbed conventions that Doody explores? The chapter overall, though, is a useful intervention into the question of whether Clarissa is a feminist novel.

Taylor’s final chapter proposes that Richardson’s refusal to show the hand...

pdf

Share