Please, Miss Pert, no more of your pathetics

Clarissa read-along: Letters 29 to 35

Mar 18, 2023

Dear friends,

Another bleak week in Clarissa land. It began with Clarissa writing to her brother and sister, echoing some of Anna’s words and holding very little back: “I am your sister and not your servant.” I was cheering her on! It’s been a week of appeals to anyone who might help. Clarissa has implored her two Uncles to join sides with her, and pleaded with Mr Solmes to drop his case. All to no avail.

It seems like Clarissa, in all her youth, is the only one who truly understands what is at stake for a woman in marriage:

“Marriage is a very solemn engagement, enough to make a young creature’s heart ache, with the best prospects, when she thinks seriously of it!— To be given up to a strange man; to be engrafted into a strange family; to give up her very name, as a mark of her becoming his absolute and dependent property: to be obliged to prefer this strange man to father, mother — to everybody: and his humours to all her own… Surely, sir, a young creature ought not to be obliged to make all these sacrifices but for such a man as she can approve.”

Meanwhile, the replies from her male relations are littered with misogyny. Her brother James uses his letter: “To forbid you to plague me with your quaint nonsense. I know not what wit in a woman is good for, but to make her over-value herself, and despise everybody else.” But I was completely unprepared for the severity of Uncle Anthony who bids Clarissa to listen to James: “He is your brother; a third older than yourself; and a man.” There is a troubling tendency to blame women for the actions of men — Lovelace would not persist in his advances if Clarissa didn’t give him cause. Once again, she cannot win.

“I had not been a bachelor to this time, if I had not seen a mass of contradictions in you all,” writes Uncle Anthony. I’m beginning to wonder if the source of his anger lies in failed romantic ideals of his own. It’s clear he holds a grudge against the entire female population: “I have always found a most horrid romantic perverseness in your sex. To do and to love what you should not, is meat, drink, and vesture to you all.” This frustration that women cannot be controlled, this anger that women will love whomever they choose, feels eerily close to modern day incel culture.

We’ve had an interesting discussion in the Instagram chat group this week about male attitudes to female intellectualism — about the novel’s men not wishing to be bested by Clarissa’s skill at letter writing. The Harlowes are evidently sore about their own inadequacies. Even Clarissa’s sister takes delight in denigrating her, painting her cleverness in a negative light, as sly and manipulative:

“You are a fond, foolish girl, with all your wisdom. Your letter shows that enough in twenty places. And as to your cant of living single, nobody will believe you. This is one of your fetches to avoid complying with your duty… I only desire that you will not, while you seem to have such an opinion of your wit, think everyone else a fool.”

There’s no doubt that Clarissa is insightful. I enjoyed her thoughts about pride — her belief that haughty behaviour is a manifestation of insecurity and that to be, “proud of exterior advantages” is a “stop-short pride” that should make us mistrust the “interior.” This contrasts so perfectly with Lovelace’s own perception of pride that we see how ill-suited the pair are. For Lovelace it would be hypocrisy to deny his advantages in being well dressed, handsome and debonair. And to pretend intellectual advantages when he has few, “would be to strut, like the jay, in borrowed plumage.” He is all exterior.

This very revealing letter from Lovelace to his friend John Belford is perhaps the best so far. His flamboyant language and poetic leanings bring something quite different to Clarissa’s measured style. He speaks about her with divine imagery, describing her as the “loveliest of persons” — we might almost believe him genuinely in love. Yet she is also a “charming frost-piece” and her duty to her family, “mere cradle-prejudices.” The family are playing into his hands and he knows it. Lovelace intends to further manipulate the situation, cutting Clarissa off from anyone else who might be inclined to take her in (using uncle Anthony to get to Anna’s mother for instance). “Fly she must” and she must fly to him. The positioning of this letter here (31) brings dramatic irony to the next, in which Clarissa writes to her Uncles. We already know her pleas won’t succeed.

It also becomes clear that Lovelace has a very different idea of love than we might hope. Just as Solmes displays questionable ethics in pursuing a woman who so clearly despises him, Lovelace fails to consider the impact of his meddling on poor Clarissa herself. Of her brother he says: “I am playing him off as I please; cooling, or inflaming, his violent passions, as may best suit my purposes.” But it is Clarissa who pays the price. And, most shocking, Lovelace openly admits his interest in her owes as much to games as it does to love:

“There are so many stimulatives to such a spirit as mine in this affair, besides love: such a field for stratagem and contrivance, which thou knows be the delight of my heart. Then the rewarding end of all — to carry off such a girl as this, in spite of all her watchful and implacable friends; and in spite of a prudence and reserve that I never met with in any of the sex. What a triumph! — What a triumph over the whole sex! And then such a revenge to gratify, which is only at present politically reined in, eventually to break forth with the greater fury.”

Eighteenth century ideas about seduction are beginning to emerge. In his next letter to Belford, Lovelace writes about an innocent young woman he names Rosebud, pleading with Belford not to ruin her — one mustn’t ruin a virtuous girl who has no other advantages to fall back on. He muses on the ‘natural’ masculine desire to seduce innocent women and the game it involves:

“And yet where there is not virtue, which nevertheless we free-livers are continually plotting to destroy, what there even in the ultimate of our wishes with the? — Preparation and expectation are, in a manner everything: reflection, indeed, may be something, if the mind be hardened above feeling the guilt of a past trespass: but the fruition, what is there in that? And yet, that being the end, nature will not be satisfied without it.”

I can’t help feeling that this doesn’t bode well for Clarissa. If the most enjoyable part of seduction is the chase, where might Clarissa be left at the end of it. Do you think Lovelace has enough enthusiasm for reforming his past? Is his experience of being jilted an easy excuse for his womanising? And how deep does his desire for revenge against the Harlowes and the entire female sex really go? I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

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