Volume IIincludes Clarissa’s “Ode” (Letter 54). Keri noted that the Ode might be Richardson showing “generic versatility,” but more, that it is an instance of Clarissa using writing both as an escape and as a way of thinking through the situation she’s been forced into. It “helps her write her way into a new identity capable of handling difficult situations while maintaining her sanity and a relatively strong sense of self.”
Jessica wondered about error in Letters 59 and 60, specifically “what do we make of this silence on the distracting punctuation and spelling in Solmes’s letter?” In “a culture steeped in letter writing,” she continues, Richardson’s use of error in the letter to characterize Solmes raises questions about connections between writing and character. Rachel wondered if Clarissa’s silence wasn’t due to a sense of delicacy – would it be bad manners to point such a thing out? And so Clarissa’s lack of response becomes a way for Richardson to use the letter to characterize her, as well; Debra pointed out the contrast Richardson draws here between Solmes as “buffon” and Clarissa as mannered.
Writing
We saw issues of writing, and how they are related to issues of identity in the very specific back-and-forth between Clarissa and Anna in Letters 9-11. Keri, responding to Letter9, wrote she found the “author-reader relationship quite interesting and the ways in which Clarissa works through her own thoughts and feelings about Lovelace through her writing.” This letter, Keri suggested also contains “a lot of moments where the writing seems more for Clarissa herself than to Miss Howe. Several places contain punctuation such as dashes or several exclamation marks, which, in context, suggest the immediacy of the letter-writing that mimics the style of personal diary or journal more than a letter to a friend. . . . Some thing as seemingly insignificant as the punctuation here shows that Clarissa is, in fact, working through her own emotions and feelings about these gentlemen while writing to Anna. In addition, the back-and-forth nature of Clarissa’s request demonstrates the immediacy with which Clarissa writes, and there are moments within this letter and in others where Clarissa goes for quite a while without directing the content to the reader at all.”