Tired with a succession of fatiguing days and sleepless nights, and with contemplating the precarious situation I stand in with my beloved, I fell into a profound reverie; which brought on sleep; and that produced a dream; a fortunate dream; which, as I imagine, will afford my working mind the means to effect the obliging double purpose my heart is now once more set upon.
What, as I have often contemplated, is the enjoyment of the finest woman in the world, to the contrivance, the bustle, the surprises, and at last the happy conclusion of a well-laid plot!—The charming round-abouts, to come to the nearest way home;—the doubts; the apprehensions; the heart-achings; the meditated triumphs—these are the joys that make the blessing dear.—For all the rest, what is it?—What but to find an angel in imagination dwindled down to a woman in fact?——But to my dream——
As Lovelace gains more and more distance from the rape, do you see his attitude about it, and about Clarissa, changing in any way?
I think he ultimately does change, as he increasingly realizes that Clarissa will never marry him. Later in the novel, in the midst of one of his bravura letters, he says something about he can't keep up this farce. I think at some level there is disappointment and even guilt. But then as he goes on to say, admit, it was the contrivance rather than the person Clarissa he cared about: “What, as I have often contemplated, is the enjoyment of the finest woman in the world, to the contrivance, the bustle, the surprises, and at last the happy conclusion of a well-laid plot!”
After the act, and once he has incorporated Clarissa's response into the “text” of their relationship in a way that he can justify to himself, Lovelace seems to tire of the whole plot. Thus, he invents new contrivances–new disguises or plots, someone else to pretend to be Clarissa–while, really, the only “excitement” he seems to get in this later section of Volume 6 is to coax Clarissa back inside after her many escape attempts, and to soothe over the situation with his usual deceitful finesse with the women of the house and other passersby.
Weirdly (we can take this out later if it goes amiss) I'd like to point out that maybe this was the real point of the drugging. Clarissa, because she is (presumably) unconscious while he's raping her, is there in body, but not in fact in some important ways. The “Angel” in Lovelace's imagination has a lot to do with Clarissa's mind and spirit (that's what he's often most intrigued by). Drugging her has effectively separated the “Angel” he's afraid to encounter from the “Woman” he feels more comfortable asserting himself over.
Oo! I don't think this is weird at all, Steve. I think it makes a lot of sense. Lovelace has admired Clarissa's spirit all along–it seems like this admiration was part of what had prevented him from attempting to rape her before this. If she's unconscious, it's much easier for him to forget that fact, and therefore easier for him to see her as another female he can control (as icky as that sounds).