Will you give me your honour, Madam, if I consent to your quitting a house so disagreeable to you?—
My honour, Sir! said the dear creature—Alas!—And turned weeping from me with inimitable grace—as if she had said—Alas!—you have robbed me of my honour!
I hoped then, that her angry passions were subsiding; but I was mistaken; for, urging her warmly for the day; and that for the sake of our mutual honour, and the honour of both our families; in this high-flown and high-souled strain she answered me:
And canst thou, Lovelace, be so mean—as to wish to make a wife of the creature thou hast insulted, dishonoured, and abused, as thou hast me? Was it necessary to humble me down to the low level of thy baseness, before I could be a wife meet for thee? Thou hadst a father, who was a man of honour: a mother, who deserved a better son. Thou hast an uncle, who is no dishonour to the Peerage of a kingdom, whose peers are more respectable than the nobility of any other country. Thou hast other relations also, who may be thy boast, though thou canst not be theirs— and canst thou not imagine, that thou hearest them calling upon thee; the dead from their monuments; the living from their laudable pride; not to dishonour thy ancient and splendid house, by entering into wedlock with a creature whom thou hast levelled with the dirt of the street, and classed with the vilest of her sex?
What do you make of Clarissa contextualizing Lovelace's crime within the nature and history of his own family?
I think she is turning the screw. She later says that even though not from a noble family she was worthy to marry into his. But now she is not. I think it is sometimes difficult for some of the novel's characters–let alone modern readers–to understand what she sees as the nature of the insult to her. It doesn't matter to her if Lovelace wants to marry her now. She has been dishonored in an absolute sense. She won't participate in the fiction of being married as a virgin, because it is a fiction. Honor–corproreal and intellectual–isn't a relative virtue, but an absolute state of being.
This contextualization is really interesting, too, because Clarissa is positioning Lovelace within his family in a way similar to how Clarissa views herself in her own family. It places emphasis on what Clarissa sees as being most important in fulfilling the role of daughter or son — to try to please the family and uphold its honor.
“…and canst thou not imagine, that thou hearest them calling upon thee; the dead from their monuments; the living from their laudable pride; not to dishonour thy ancient and splendid house…” Clarissa even refers to Lovelace's dead relatives here to try to convince him of how dishonorable and abusive his actions have been. His living relatives are not the only ones suffering from his disgrace–the honor of his ancestors has been insulted too. This move kind of reminds me of something taken out of a Greek epic.