The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson, and: The Function of Criticism: From THE SPECTATOR to Post-Structuralism (review)

reviews 139 7"Ae Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson by Terry Eagleton. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. 109 pp. $9.95 (paper); $25 (hardcover). 7"Ae Function of Criticism: From THE SPECTATOR to Post-Structuralism by Terry Eagleton. London: Verso, 1984. 133 pp. $5.95 (paper); $20 (hardcover). Terry Eagleton continues to be a prolific writer. His most substantial book to date, Criticism and Ideology (1976), promised a career of sustained, ever more profound theoretical and historical reflection on a major project—the greatest and probably unsurpassable example of such a career in the Marxist tradition is, of course, Marx's own. Subsequently , however, as his 1981 book on Walter Benjamin indicates, Eagleton turned away from his earlier project, searching instead for a shorter route to—borrowing a phrase from the title ofthat book—"a revolutionary criticism." Now, his work is assuming the form ofa kind of flagship that registers, as it seeks this route, current trends and new directions among literary and cultural theorists. The Rape of Clarissa and The Function of Criticism complement one another in ways that make them almost two parts of one book. The titles themselves suggest one relationship —the often oversimplified relation between theory and practice—but this is the least interesting and least important of the links between the books. Eagleton begins The Rape of Clarissa by invoking Benjamin's challenge to criticism to "blast open the continuum of history" by forging conjuctures between the present and strategically selected bits of the past. The Rape of Clarissa and The Function of Criticism respond by forging conjuctures between the age of Samuel Richardson and our own, and these guide Eagleton as he sketches a function for criticism at the present time. Eagleton proposes "that Clarissa can now become a great novel,for us . . . because certain new ways of reading developed in our own time, closely related to the nature of our own history and to the political interests of a Richardson, have made his texts available in a new way" (R, viii). Historical materialism is among the "ways of reading" that Eagleton uses, but for a reading of Clarissa along these lines, one would do better to turn to Christopher Hill's "Clarissa Harlowe and Her Times" (Essays in Criticisim, 1955). What energizes Eagleton's book is his sometimes slippery but often brilliant deployment of the poststructuralist theory of textuality for the purposes of a Marxist-feminist reading, in which "a profound . . . political gesture" occurs when Clarissa dies to resign "from a society whose power system she has seen in part for what it is" (R, 74). The post-structuralism also links the book with William Beatty Warner's Reading CLARISSA: The Struggles ofInterpretation (1979) and Terry Castle's Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning & Disruption in Richardson's CLARISSA (1982). The reason for this recent spate of post-structuralist readings of Clarissa is suggested by Fredric Jameson's early 1970's remark that the epistolary novel foregrounds "thefact of writing itself. The effects of writing and reading are thus promoted to the status of events within the novel, and end up displacing the 'real' events which the letters were supposed to relate" (The Prison-House of Language [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972], p. 200). Even as Eagleton uses post-structuralism, however, he is anxious to distance himself from other post-structuralist readers such as Warner, whose book he indicts as "an ominous exposé of the truly reactionary nature of much deconstructionist 'radicalism,' once divorced from social and political contexts it so characteristically finds hard to handle" (R, 67-68).' Even though Eagleton thus engages in current critical controversies surrounding Clarissa, he is interested in it less as a text than as an agency in the formation of the 18th century bourgeois "public sphere" (sometimes also called a "counterpublic sphere" to traditional aristocratic power). This concept of a public sphere—which Eagleton borrows from Habermas, mainly by way of Peter Uwe Hohendahl's The Institution ofCriticism—appears in an opening bird's-eye view of Richardson and his times, and reappears in 7"Ae Function 140 the minnesota review ofCriticism, where contemporary criticism is depicted as the...