A tour to Paris

Clarissa read-along: Letters 427 to 494

Sep 09, 2023

Dear friends,

“I have only to say at present— Thou wilt do well to take a tour to Paris; or wherever else thy destiny shall lead thee!!!—”

The painful to and fro is finally at an end. We have lost our dear Clarissa. No more chances to ask her family for a blessing. No more opportunities for reconciliation. The Harlowes have relented a day too late. Mrs Norton is on her knees in a fainting fit. Her mother is fitting away. Even her brother James is all remorse. And rightly so. Clarissa’s deathbed letters are, “calculated to give comfort rather than reproach,” rising above animosity. Her true character, her goodness, shines through. No wonder the Harlowes are already realising their mistake.

For weeks now, Clarissa’s death has felt inevitable, yet it still lands as a bombshell. The many, many pages Richardson devotes to speculation about a reconciliation has eked out our last vestiges of hope. Other authors might have edited this section of the novel more tightly, but I wonder if the overall effect would have been the same. Clarissa is a slow immersion in emotional torment and pain. There is no escaping the injustice and cruelty of her situation. We are trapped in the experience just as she is.

What we see in these most recent pages is Clarissa transcending beyond earthly distress and even a state of forgiveness, to an almost heavenly space in which she knows she will be accepted by God. There’s a lot of moralising, a lot of scripture.

This contrasts starkly with the reactions of Clarissa’s family who are far too willing to see the worst in her. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they are led by the prevailing discourses of the time — it was widely believed that once a woman was on the path to vice and immorality there were few, if any, opportunities to turn back. Through Clarissa, Richardson seems to be showing his readers that those opportunities do exist — that family and friends can rescue their loved ones from situations beyond their control. It is a lesson the Harlowes learn too late, and yet the message is also tempered by those about the obedience of children. To the last, Clarissa blames herself for taking matters into her own hands and agreeing to give Lovelace that fateful meeting.

For me, there’s another element of the novel that weakens its messages about the potential for ‘rescue’ and that’s the depiction of Clarissa herself. Richardson casts her as one apart, one so unlike the majority of women that the novel’s situation can hardly be applied to society at large. While Clarissa is pure, divine, angelic, other women placed in similar situations are painted as easily led, too willing to give into temptation and, once victims, become hardened into villains. Clarissa is an ideal, an exemplar, for Richardson’s female readers to model themselves on.

And so I remain conflicted about Richardson’s view of women in the novel. He utterly transports readers into the experience and trauma of kidnap and rape. He makes a case for women as intellectuals and writers. He places the blame firmly at the door of rakes like Lovelace who prey on women and bring about their ‘fall.’ And yet he also carries with him many of the era’s prejudices. I hope that the novel’s final forty-three letters will help me to resolve these feelings.

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