Writing as Obsessive Construction

Why does Lovelace write so much? This seems a key question throughout the novel. In the early volumes, his primary correspondence is with Clarissa, and he has several volumes to do some vital work: to demonstrate his prowess in writing and in reason; to present himself as a preferable choice to hideous, uncouth Solmes; and to convince Clarissa to continue their correspondence and to trust him enough to meet him in the garden, where he then absconds with her. In his own clearly insidious way, his work in the beginning of the novel is to write her into a position of obligation—knowing her well enough to know she will follow the dictates of polite manners to the extreme—so that she feels she must at least meet him again face-to-face, a moment which begins to seal her doom.

And that’s when Lovelace begins to show his obsession with writing even more—when we progress to the middle volumes and see his primary correspondence shift from Clarissa to Belford. In Volumes III, IV, and V, we can trace his growing obsession with writing as record, writing as venting, writing as distraction, writing as whatever Lovelace needs writing to be in the moment. In Volume IV, he even becomes obsessed with Clarissa’s writing, too, attempting to steal her letters and read her correspondence (see Letter 202, for example). We discussed throughout the class how difficult it was for us to attain any accurate sense of a Lovelace’s interiority in particular, yet he seems quite clear on attaining inside knowledge into Clarissa’s “interiority” in her letters. He has a spy in her house in the early volumes, reads and eventually intercepts and mimics her correspondence with Anna—because he knows it is vital to his shaping of Clarissa’s identity.

Writing as Shifting Identity

And yet I think it most fascinating that we often cannot locate Lovelace’s own identity beyond the identification of his obsession—much of which, as we also discussed, is spent in the position of the rationalizing, justifying defender of his own actions. In some ways, he seems to want to defend his position to Belford (pulling out all the rhetorical stops of trials, tests of Clarissa’s worthiness even after he rapes her, etc.)—yet he doesn’t really have to defend himself to Belford, his fellow rake, at least not until much later in the novel. Lovelace seems to have little to nothing to gain or to lose by acquiring Belford’s approval or acceptance before or immediately after the rape. And Lovelace even tells him so and plans on continuing down his initial path no matter what Belford might write in return.

Therefore, I wonder how much of his writing as defense is not really defense at all but, rather, merely further play with obsessive self-expression. He has already decided his own fate, and that of Clarissa, and has chosen to narrate events as he sees them—not necessarily for posterity or for real communication, but using the letters, in a sense, as a journal. He writes, perhaps, because he is obsessed with his own voice, much more of an ego boost than the act of writing is for Clarissa—but it can be seen in this way as a form of self-expression in addition to any communicative purpose of the letters.

And yet—after the rape—he writes largely out of duress. He cannot communicate with Clarissa, who will not see him, and then, even before she escapes him physically in Volume VII, she seems to escape him in the sense that she refuses to give in to his assumptions of what would happen once he raped her. Instead of acting powerless, she asserts herself to both Lovelace and Mrs. Sinclair and the women of her house. And then she finally manages escape—all of which is conveyed through Lovelace’s letters to Belford, letters that are marked by his own distress at not being able to “author” the unfolding narrative as strictly as in previous volumes, since his contrivances no longer produce the effects he expects.

Writing in Erosion of Narrative Power

Thus, when he writes in Volume VII (see Letter 335), “’tis impossible that Miss Harlowe should have ever suffered as thou hast made me suffer, and as I now suffer!” (Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 1069), I think this is supposed to read as genuine emotion from Lovelace on his loss of power in his own narrative agency. It is, at the very least, as genuine emotion as we get from him before the last volume (in which he demonstrates a similar kind of madness to Clarissa’s, revealing perhaps more method in madness than previous volumes).

If, as we often suggested (and I offered above as well), Lovelace’s identity shifts to meet the needs of the moment, he changes in order to accomplish his rhetorical ends, whether those ends are seduction through letters or conquest through violence. However, while Lovelace may have told the bulk of the story in Volumes III, IV, V, and VI, Clarissa resurfaces in Volumes VI and VII—and her story and legacy are the impetus for the rest of the action in Volumes VIII and IX. As a result, in the end, when the narrative choices no longer seem within his power—when Clarissa defies his expectations of behavior—the “self” he has thus far rhetorically constructed seems to slip entirely.

At first, Lovelace can position himself (as in Letter 335 above) as suffering like Clarissa. However, as he realizes he will not be united with her again to “close out” the narrative he initially established, once her suffering ends and leaves him haunted by his own lack of power to “rewrite” her story or his, Lovelace seems adrift, puzzling out what happened just as much as we are. As Bakhtin (1981) wrote in The Dialogic Imagination, “Behind the narrator’s story we read a second story, the author’s story; he is the one who tells us how the narrator tells stories, and also tells us about the narrator himself. We acutely sense two levels at each moment in the story…while we puzzle out the story itself” (p. 314). This seems a place of robust exploration for much of Richardson’s novel, but I think it’s particularly appropriate to apply to Lovelace in the end. We can “acutely sense two levels at each moment in [his] story”—one from his perspective and one from Clarissa’s—and we simultaneously “puzzle out the story itself” (this is where Richardson and his readers, including us, come in). And I would argue, this is where Lovelace gets lost, too—in puzzling out his own story, once he is no longer its agentive “author.” And once that occurs, he seems to give in, in a sense, to his own death by duel at the hands of Colonel Morden—and, in the end, does not write the last letter but instead mutters his last words asking for forgiveness from the dead woman he so terribly wronged and once thought he would one day control.