My head is gone. I have wept away all my brain
Clarissa read-along: Letters 220 to 262
I should probably begin this edition of the read-along with a warning that the material is difficult and likely to be upsetting. Over the last two weeks things have been getting increasingly difficult for Clarissa. First she escapes Lovelace but he soon finds her, faking letters and using disguises to convince Clarissa to return to London where he feeds her opiates and drug rapes her. As we close the book this week, Clarissa has entered a state of panic and delirium which Lovelace unfeelingly writes-off as a side-effect of the drugs. Richardson holds back the details of the ‘event’ itself until Clarissa’s letters later in July. It will make difficult reading. For now, we witness her trauma from the outside.
As Lovelace has systematically cut Clarissa off from all her friends (intercepting and faking letters from Anna Howe) the last 250 pages have been given over almost entirely to his point of view. His lack of empathy is shocking to modern readers, particularly his inability to conceive how the theft of Clarissa’s virtue by force could impact her emotionally. Time and again, we see him trivialising rape. First claiming her virtue is no consequence to anyone but her future husband, next suggesting Clarissa’s attachment to her chastity is merely a “romantic” notion (its loss being something most women would pay no heed to). Finally, he claims his application of opiates is due to “mercy.” Once again we see Lovelace clinging to his privilege and his identity as a ‘rake’ which gives him free license to disregard the law. At this time, the offence of rape carried the death penalty. He writes to Belford:
“For a rape, thou knowest, to us rakes is far from being an undesirable thing. Nothing but the law stands in our way, upon that account; and the opinion of what a modest woman will suffer rather than become a viva voce accuser, lessens much a honest fellow’s apprehensions on that score.”
Over the course of this week’s letters we have seen Lovelace run out of options. It was clear Clarissa’s virtue could not be taken without force. In letter 244 he concedes that she is unlikely to give ‘direct consent’ and instead he hopes for ‘yielding reluctance’ at the vital moment (which he insists dispels any claim of rape). Such an acknowledgement by Lovelace ought to have been an end to his test of Clarissa’s virtue. Even Belford agrees. And so it is here where Lovelace’s true motives come to light: the rape is about power, it is is about breaking Clarissa, isolating her from society, and subduing her into into his control when she has no-one else left — “once forgiven, will be for ever forgiven.” Before the rape, in letter 256, Lovelace writes:
“Abhorred be force! — be the thoughts of force! There’s no triumph over the will in force! This I know I have said. But would I not have avoided it if I could? — Have I not tried every other method? And have I any other recourse left me? Can she resent the last outrage more than she has resented a fainter effort? — And if her resentments run ever so high, cannot I repair by matrimony? She will not refuse me, I know, Jack; the haughty beauty will not refuse me, when her pride of being corporally inviolate is brought down; when she can tell no tales, but when (be her resistance what it will) even her own sex will suspect a yielding in resistance; and when modesty, which may fill her bosom with resentment, will lock up her speech.”
Lovelace has never liked the fact Clarissa is morally superior to him, perhaps even intellectually superior. He is a man that likes to have the upper hand, to have control. Lovelace fails to grasp that as a consequence of his abuse, Clarissa, in her words, “shall never be myself again.” In robbing her of her pride and self-respect, the Clarissa he ‘loves’ is forever changed. He is already disappointed, “My charmer has no passions; that is to say, none of the passions that I want her to have.” Now she is brought low, he plans to try again. What he really wants his her consent, “since her insensibility has made me but a thief to my own joys.”
His next mission is to convince Clarissa to live with him unwed, “was not cohabitation ever my darling view? And am I not now, at last, in the high road to it?” In his gaining all of this, Clarissa’s diminished feelings about herself are key. She is already beginning to believe the lies her family have told her about herself, “I have been a very wicked creature — a vain, proud, poor creature — full of secret pride — which I carried off under an humble guise, and deceived everybody — My sister says so — and now I am punished.” As modern readers, it is impossible not to detest Lovelace for this. What kind of a man brings a woman so low to suit his own aims? Richardson has succeeded not only in painting a picture of a despicable villain but in shaping our ideas of what a gentleman should be.
“But now we are come to the test, whether she cannot be brought to make the best of an irreparable evil? If she exclaim (she has reason to exclaim, and I will sit down with patience by the hour together to hear her exclamations, till she is tired of them), she will then descend to expostulation perhaps. Expostulation will give me hope: expostulation will show that she hates me not. And if she hates me not, she will forgive: and if she now forgive; then will be all over; and she will be mine upon my own terms: and it shall then be the whole study of my future life to make her happy.”
We can see here just how misguided Lovelace’s grasp of love is. Not unlike Mr Solmes before him, Lovelace sees happy marriage as being underpinned by male power and female fear. He cannot hope to win the affection and love of a woman like Clarissa by these methods. He is doomed to fail and she with him. All of this leaves me wondering how long Lovelace’s desires will last; whether he will, in fact, be tempted to cast Clarissa aside. He is already bored. “I am really sick at heart for a frolic,” he writes in letter 261 — a tone deaf desire that’s all the more heinous because it follows Clarissa’s own delirious and distressed attempts to put her trauma into words. Lovelace has always maintained the chase is better than the ‘event’ and is already setting his sights on the seduction of Anna Howe. There’s even a reference to the horrific and unhinged Isle of Wight kidnap plot in letter 252.
Lovelace is a very little man who, even in his brief moments of remorse, blames corrupted women for his own actions, “more I curse these women who put me upon such an expedient.” Of Clarissa, he writes, “ it will be her own fault if she be unhappy.” Is there a more deplorable villain in all of literature?
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Featured image is Before by William Hogarth courtesy of The Courtauld
These letters have been really gripping. I'm noticing all the different forms Richardson is playing with, with tampered letters, false ones, fragments of letters and even scenes scripted like a play. We always knew Lovelace was not a good man but the extent of his evil and callousness is a genuine surprise as is the lengths he will go to achieve his ends and the huge resources at his disposal.
Now he's got what he wants, the book can only be a long, slow, sad decline for Clarissa.