PAPER I (Torn in two pieces.)
MY DEAREST MISS HOWE,
O what dreadful, dreadful things have I to tell you! But yet I cannot tell you neither. But say, are you really ill, as a vile, vile creature informs me you are?
But he never yet told me truth, and I hope has not in this: and yet, if it were not true, surely I should have heard from you before now!—But what have I to do to upbraid?—You may well be tired of me!—And if you are, I can forgive you; for I am tired of myself: and all my own relations were tired of me long before you were.
How good you have always been to me, mine own dear Anna Howe!—But how I ramble!
I sat down to say a great deal—my heart was full—I did not know what to say first—and thought, and grief, and confusion, and (O my poor head) I cannot tell what—and thought, and grief and confusion, came crowding so thick upon me; one would be first; another would be first; all would be first; so I can write nothing at all.—Only that, whatever they have done to me, I cannot tell; but I am no longer what I was-in any one thing did I say? Yes, but I am; for I am still, and I ever will be,
Your true——
Plague on it! I can write no more of this eloquent nonsense myself; which rather shows a raised, than a quenched, imagination: but Dorcas shall transcribe the others in separate papers, as written by the whimsical charmer: and some time hence when all is over, and I can better bear to read them, I may ask thee for a sight of them. Preserve them, therefore; for we often look back with pleasure even upon the heaviest griefs, when the cause of them is removed.
PAPER II (Scratch’d through, and thrown under the table.)
—And can you, my dear, honoured Papa, resolve for ever to reprobate your poor child?—But I am sure you would not, if you knew what she has suffered since her unhappy—And will nobody plead for your poor suffering girl?—No one good body?—Why then, dearest Sir, let it be an act of your own innate goodness, which I have so much experienced, and so much abused. I don’t presume to think you should receive me—No, indeed!—My name is—I don’t know what my name is!—I never dare to wish to come into your family again!—But your heavy curse, my Papa—Yes, I will call you Papa, and help yourself as you can—for you are my own dear Papa, whether you will or not—and though I am an unworthy child—yet I am your child—
PAPER III
A Lady took a great fancy to a young lion, or a bear, I forget which—but a bear, or a tiger, I believe it was. It was made her a present of when a whelp. She fed it with her own hand: she nursed up the wicked cub with great tenderness; and would play with it without fear or apprehension of danger: and it was obedient to all her commands: and its tameness, as she used to boast, increased with its growth; so that, like a lap-dog, it would follow her all over the house. But mind what followed: at last, some how, neglecting to satisfy its hungry maw, or having otherwise disobliged it on some occasion, it resumed its nature; and on a sudden fell upon her, and tore her in pieces.—And who was most to blame, I pray? The brute, or the lady? The lady, surely!— For what she did was out of nature, out of character, at least: what it did was in its own nature.
PAPER IV
How art thou now humbled in the dust, thou proud Clarissa Harlowe! Thou that never steppedst out of thy father’s house but to be admired! Who wert wont to turn thine eye, sparkling with healthful life, and self-assurance, to different objects at once as thou passedst, as if (for so thy penetrating sister used to say) to plume thyself upon the expected applauses of all that beheld thee! Thou that usedst to go to rest satisfied with the adulations paid thee in the past day, and couldst put off every thing but thy vanity!—-
PAPER V
Rejoice not now, my Bella, my Sister, my Friend; but pity the humbled creature, whose foolish heart you used to say you beheld through the thin veil of humility which covered it.
It must have been so! My fall had not else been permitted—
You penetrated my proud heart with the jealousy of an elder sister’s searching eye.
You knew me better than I knew myself.
Hence your upbraidings and your chidings, when I began to totter.
But forgive now those vain triumphs of my heart.
I thought, poor, proud wretch that I was, that what you said was owing to your envy.
I thought I could acquit my intention of any such vanity.
I was too secure in the knowledge I thought I had of my own heart.
My supposed advantages became a snare to me.
And what now is the end of all?—
PAPER VI
What now is become of the prospects of a happy life, which once I thought opening before me?—Who now shall assist in the solemn preparations? Who now shall provide the nuptial ornaments, which soften and divert the apprehensions of the fearful virgin? No court now to be paid to my smiles! No encouraging compliments to inspire thee with hope of laying a mind not unworthy of thee under obligation! No elevation now for conscious merit, and applauded purity, to look down from on a prostrate adorer, and an admiring world, and up to pleased and rejoicing parents and relations!
PAPER VII
Thou pernicious caterpillar, that preyest upon the fair leaf of virgin fame, and poisonest those leaves which thou canst not devour!
Thou fell blight, thou eastern blast, thou overspreading mildew, that destroyest the early promises of the shining year! that mockest the laborious toil, and blastest the joyful hopes, of the painful husbandman!
Thou fretting moth, that corruptest the fairest garment!
Thou eating canker-worm, that preyest upon the opening bud, and turnest the damask-rose into livid yellowness!
If, as religion teaches us, God will judge us, in a great measure, by our benevolent or evil actions to one another—O wretch! bethink thee, in time bethink thee, how great must be thy condemnation!
PAPER VIIII
At first, I saw something in your air and person that displeased me not. Your birth and fortunes were no small advantages to you.—You acted not ignobly by my passionate brother. Every body said you were brave: every body said you were generous: a brave man, I thought, could not be a base man: a generous man, could not, I believed, be ungenerous, where he acknowledged obligation. Thus prepossessed, all the rest that my soul loved and wished for in your reformation I hoped!—I knew not, but by report, any flagrant instances of your vileness. You seemed frank, as well as generous: frankness and generosity ever attracted me: whoever kept up those appearances, I judged of their hearts by my own; and whatever qualities I wished to find in them, I was ready to find; and, when found, I believed them to be natives of the soil.
My fortunes, my rank, my character, I thought a further security. I was in none of those respects unworthy of being the niece of Lord M. and of his two noble sisters.—Your vows, your imprecations—But, Oh! you have barbarously and basely conspired against that honour, which you ought to have protected: and now you have made me—What is it of vile that you have not made me?—
Yet, God knows my heart, I had no culpable inclinations!—I honoured virtue!—I hated vice!—But I knew not, that you were vice itself!
PAPER IX
Had the happiness of any of the poorest outcast in the world, whom I had neveer seen, never known, never before heard of, lain as much in my power, as my happiness did in your’s, my benevolent heart would have made me fly to the succour of such a poor distressed—with what pleasure would I have raised the dejected head, and comforted the desponding heart!—But who now shall pity the poor wretch, who has increased, instead of diminished, the number of the miserable!
PAPER X
Lead me, where my own thoughts themselves may lose me; Where I may dose out what I’ve left of life, Forget myself, and that day’s guile!—— Cruel remembrance!——how shall I appease thee?
[Death only can be dreadful to the bad;* To innocence ’tis like a bugbear dress’d To frighten children. Pull but off the mask, And he’ll appear a friend.]
* Transcriber’s note: Portions set off in square brackets [ ] are written at angles to the majority of the text, as if squeezed into margins.
——Oh! you have done an act
That blots the face and blush of modesty;
Takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And makes a blister there!
Then down I laid my head,
Down on cold earth, and for a while was dead;
And my freed soul to a strange somewhere fled!
Ah! sottish soul! said I,
When back to its cage again I saw it fly;
Fool! to resume her broken chain,
And row the galley here again!
Fool! to that body to return,
Where it condemn’d and destin’d is to mourn!
[I could a tale unfold——
Would harrow up thy soul——]
O my Miss Howe! if thou hast friendship, help me,
And speak the words of peace to my divided soul,
That wars within me,
And raises ev’ry sense to my confusion.
I’m tott’ring on the brink
Of peace; an thou art all the hold I’ve left!
Assist me——in the pangs of my affliction!
When honour’s lost, ’tis a relief to die: Death’s but a sure retreat from infamy.
[By swift misfortunes
How I am pursu’d!
Which on each other
Are, like waves, renew’d!]
The farewell, youth,
And all the joys that dwell
With youth and life!
And life itself, farewell!
For life can never be sincerely blest. Heav’n punishes the bad, and proves the best.
Image of Paper 10
What do these amazing letters tell you about Clarissa's identity–her sense of it and ours? And what do they reveal about Richardson's capacities as a novelist?
These letters are striking because Clarissa writes the letters to her family and Anna in a stream of consciousness and the “poems” use animal allegories to refer to what has happened between her and Lovelace. I think these letters show how brilliant a mind Clarissa possesses although it's broken and disjointed at this moment. When reading the letters you can almost hear Clarissa rambling or sobbing. Richardson's capacity as a novelist shines here, at least for me, because he captures human emotion that feels real rather than literary. He shows a knowledge of the human condition. Clarissa's letters reflect something one might find if a modern day survivor wrote them. The letters even appear like something one might find in the journal or attempted letters of someone who was going to commit suicide — you can just see that Clarissa is devastated. Her sense of identity is loose and appears every now and then. She states in Paper II that she doesn't even remember her name. Poor Clarissa is lost.
I was particularly impressed with Richardson in this part of the novel. I feel like each of these fragments show a very different side of Clarissa's current psyche, but they all very much read as her, only exaggerated by the current grief and terror she is feeling.
I think my favorite moment was after the fragments and before her letter to Lovelace when he writes that “The reading of [her letter to him] affected me ten times more than the severest reproaches of a regular mind.” Even in the midst of this turmoil, Clarissa's writing is particularly compelling. And I agree that the letter to Lovelace is indeed compelling. The first part is emotionally laden but purposeful, and the second part where she is clearly in a different mindset but still requesting to be sent to a mental institution to live out the rest of her days alone is heartbreaking.
I think the above comments capture what many of us are likely to feel in encountering these letters–the power of Clarissa's mind and writing, even in such grief and turmoil; Richardson's brilliance in capturing/creating her so well here; and, of course, the real emotional response we cannot help but feel (Megan's “heartbreaking” is so accurate).
Kendra and Megan have touched on several issues involving Clarissa’s identity that I also noted when reading this section. These letters simultaneously represent Clarissa’s fragmented self after the rape and show her ability to still be “compelling” (to borrow Megan’s term). The fragments represent who she is/was to her family members, Anna, and Lovelace. Up until now, these many “selves” or identities were somehow cohesive. After the rape, though, she loses her unified sense of self and feels compelled to write to each person she feels she has “let down” (the fact that she takes the blame in many of these excerpts could lead to another fruitful discussion, to be sure).
On a similar note, this letter was also very Ophelia-esque in a way because we sense a loss of sanity and a descent into madness – a madness that Clarissa recognizes herself, as she asks Lovelace to take her to the madhouse; however, because she is so convincing in some of the letter fragments, I am having a difficult time seeing her as completely mad or lost, as she seems to suggest.
And because I just can’t stop myself from reiterating this point, I find the materiality of the letter and the fragmentation of the letters in this section very interesting in thinking about the link between body/self/letter (Kvande). These letters here—their fragmentation and the various angled statements in the margins—could not be a clearer representation of this inextricable link. Clarissa writes and tears the letters into pieces, fully revealing how she interprets her self and body. Her physical body has been violated and so has her psychological well-being which emerges very clearly in these pieces of letters.
I agree that this is heartbreaking. Earlier in this letter, Lovelace says he wants to show Belford “how her mind works now she is in this whimsical state.” Why document this when Lovelace himself says he's giving Belford even more reason to criticize him? So in looking at these “pieces” and “scraps” from Clarissa's writing, knowing the condition she was in when writing these, I see this letter to Belford as grossly voyeuristic. On top of that, since Lovelace knows Belford is already angry at him for raping Clarissa, could Lovelace be trying to express guilt?
On what others have said about the link between Clarissa's body and her writing: we haven't seen Clarissa this way, have we? In the novel both she and Lovelace have been prolific even when distraught. In these scraps of paper we see many starts and stops. When writing is a significant part of how she sees herself, makes sense of her circumstances, and communicates with others, we have to notice (as Keri said) the materiality of the letters. In scraps and thrown under her desk.
These letters are remarkable. There is no precedent for anything like this, I think, until we get to someone like Joyce. The direct representation of stream of consciousness, the relation between the fragmented self and the fragmented text, and the absolutely mind-blowing way of rearranging the page in the last of the letters. I keep wondering where does this come from. Here we have the most direct evidence of the relation among writing, self, and identity, even to the level of syntax and form.
Many people have read the letter about the bear or tiger to be an admission of guilt or responsibility on Clarissa's part. I don't see it this way. But I do think it remarkable (I keep using that word) how she metaphorically renders the deep differences between what is natural and unnatural. She is unnatural; he, his predatory nature, is natural. It's almost Darwinian. And then in the later letter where she describes him as a “pernicious caterpillar, that preyest upon the fair leaf of virgin fame, and poisonest those leaves which thou canst not devour!”: it's almost Blake.
I like Jessica's and Debra's comments above (and Keri's and–well–everybody else's). Richardson so creatively dislocates language here, in the service of Clarissa's dislocations, in the service of the emotional reaction to rape and the newfound discoveries of the reality of the awful world (oh, what a world is this)–it's almost like Clarissa's mad letters are Richardson's trump card which shows us how very well he has managed the novel and its readers (that would be us).
I was wondering about this, too, Debra–she doesn't seem to take or accept responsibility on herself, yet she does seem to offer an explanation of such a horrid event on remarkably non-judgmental terms. Why did Lovelace do this? She could answer with her own guilt, or using the concept of God's punishment, or fate, as we've seen her discuss before. But here she simply attributes his act–at the distance of an allegory or fable, without any personal pronouns–to his nature. Much to her credit and strength, she does it without specifically berating herself for not seeing it before.
I was thinking about you, Keri, when I got to these letters and the almost “stage directions” for how they would have appeared, if they had been in manuscript rather than print.
Even the differences in the conditions of both of the damaged letters–
#1 to Anna is “torn in two pieces” [which Lovelace interrupts and says he cannot re-write!! and will have Dorcas do it instead! SO telling!] while
#2 to Clarissa's father is “scratched through, and thrown under the table”
I can't figure out if this is more brilliant on Richardson's part as foreshadowing or merely representing the state of the relationships as they are in the present, or were in the past:
Her letter to Anna, like their current correspondence (thanks to Lovelace's interventions and duplicity), is torn asunder–as we see in Anna's next letter, where she is questioning whether their friendship will survive if Clarissa has finally married Lovelace after all–and, of course, as Clarissa's body itself has been torn asunder, violated.
And her letter to her father, like their relationship, has been “scratched through,” a different act of violence or effacement, and “thrown under the table,” discarded as Clarissa herself felt and feels she had been rejected, or ejected, from her family's trust.
To echo the sentiment expressed here, Richardson has amazing control over so many things at once, including his characters, their reactions, the verisimilitude that allows us to inhabit Clarissa here despite the vast differences between our situation and hers (time, position, etc.), and Clarissa's relationship to the page, to her letters, to her narrative–all of it.
As I was reading the letters, I noted two things I found particularly fascinating:
1. The audience of each of the letters–from Anna, to her father, to the fable, to herself, to her sister, and then some of the later letters which seem to be both directed at herself or Lovelace, and yet I can also read as addressed to God in some manner (6 and 7, in particular, and maybe 10).
2. The use (or lack) of pronouns in constructing and communicating that audience (of her letters) to us as readers, no matter the century. In the first few letters, she references other characters such as Anna or Bella directly, but after those, it's up to us to scan for those pronouns and interpret her letters based on our contextual knowledge of the novel.
Lots of “thou” and “you” and “I”–and shifting audiences, too, in the last “letter” that looks like a poem on the page. Who is the “thee” in “how shall I appease thee?” in the first stanza. Because, if I read this as a poem, the turn can be read when she addresses Anna as “Oh my Miss Howe” throughout the last couple of stanzas–but she doesn't seem to be writing directly to Anna throughout “Paper” 10.
Also–he just labels them as “papers.” What to make of that? Are they not letters because not addressed (explicitly? yet?) or because discarded (preempting any possible delivery)? Or are they identified by their materiality (medium?) because they cannot neatly be categorized by their content or even identified in their intent?
Sorry to keep going on–but I really got a lot out of this one “letter” 261, which is multiple letters, one letter from Clarissa, book-ended by letters from Lovelace, and inclusive of 10 “papers” of Clarissa's (transcribed by Dorcas), the last of which looks and reads like a poem–intertextuality and genre, oh my.
Oh, yeah, I really like your point about them being labeled as “papers” rather than “letters.” I will have to think more about that, but I think that the questions that follow your observation could be a really good justification for this different label.
Your point about the different manuscript-y things happening here is really interesting, too, in thinking about Clarissa's relationship with the people she is supposedly writing to — “scratch[ing] through” her father's letter, I think, is particularly indicative of not necessarily how Clarissa thinks about her father, but perhaps how she perceives his renunciation of her. She seems to think that there is no point at all in completing this “letter” or “paper.”
I just want to chime in here to echo Kendra, Megan, and Keri's comments about identity at this remarkable place in the novel. For me, this is the place, ironically, where Clarissa's identity is least “performed” and most unified, even though it comes through in fragments and in relationship to others. The task for Richardson here is to make Clarissa read as disjointed, but still make her unmistakably read as Clarissa. That there is a Clarissa that I (as the reader) recognize in the text of these “mad letters” is an impressive feat, but more – it points back to Clarissa as an essential being in a way that nothing else in the novel so far has done for me.
What I'd like to perhaps add here is in response to Debra's comment about Joyce. I was thinking about Mrs. Dalloway as I read through this, and thinking about the “mad letters” as an forerunner of stream-of consciousness as well. Even more when I came to the memoranda that the compiler of the letters includes later on in the volume. Both examples point back to Richardson's choice to compose an epistolary novel instead of something else with a point of view that might give us more direct access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters. I'd love to take him to lunch and ask him why.