“Let me now repeat my former advice—If you are not married by this time, be sure delay not the ceremony. Since things are as they are, I wish it were thought that you were privately married before you went away. If these men plead AUTHORITY to our pain, when we are theirs—Why should we not, in such a case as this, make some good out of the hated word, for our reputation, when we are induced to violate a more natural one?”

I lifted this from the “Clarissa Harlowe and Anna Howe” section, because it’s been rattling around in my brain. In the comments after this post, several (Megan and Keri in particular) observe that, while Anna tends to write about the “bigger picture” in the novel, Clarissa tends to take events one at a time and respond to them accordingly. While Clarissa is capable of being very persuasive in some individual cases, she doesn’t seem to respond in effective ways to the whole of her story—what Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen (1983) might call the “macro” narrative of her life.

It seems to me that the idea of AUTHORITY is central to the novel, and that it is bound up in the idea of authorship—so when Anna talks about men pleading authority she’s talking (at least in part) about the textual exchanges between Clarissa and her father, brother, uncles, and Lovelace. It is in these textual exchanges that Clarissa attempts to consolidate power over her own life. The evidence we get of her failure to do so is also textual; her brother writes her a letter saying she has to marry Solmes whether she likes it or not. She doesn’t see her father; her only exchanges with him are letters, and she doesn’t see Lovelace either (until the beginning of the 3^rd volume). In other words, authority is exercised in the novel primarily through written words: it’s through Clarissa’s authorship of her letters that she works toward an authorship of her life.

Since this is the case, and since Clarissa is such a gifted writer, it seems surprising that she fails so completely. Anna, in the section of the letter that I pasted here, exhorts Clarissa to exercise some authority over her reputation, which Clarissa has acknowledged she values more than her life. But I’m not sure that’s at all possible in the world of the novel. The story Clarissa writes about herself in the early parts of the novel is that she is too dutiful a daughter to marry Lovelace against her parents’ wishes, and so she is reluctant to marry him to save her own reputation. But the story Clarissa writes about herself is up against not only the stories that everybody she knows is telling about her (which is that she ran away from home to be with Lovelace) but also her own “negative valuation” (Gergen and Gergen, 1983, QA: Page) of the act of running away with Lovelace. It seems the narratives her family writes about her—“perverse girl” “ungrateful” “stubborn”—are the stories that carry the most weight—even to the point that she allows them to challenge the story she tells about herself. At first, reading through this first volume of the novel was frustrating for me because I couldn’t see why Clarissa wouldn’t just marry Lovelace and have been done with it—not the most desirable of situations, certainly, but better than being the girl who ran off with the rake. But as I read further, I began to understand that Clarissa is really kind of paralyzed in a worse way than when she was imprisoned in the house. Midway through the novel, she is torn between two narratives of herself. Is she a wise girl, a paragon of virtue, an “example of her sex,” or is she the girl who fell for the trap a vile rake set for her? I don’t think she knows. And I don’t think she knows how to be both at the same time.