Nothing in Richardson’s (1748) novel is more powerful and complex than Clarissa’s antagonist, Robert Lovelace. Or does he finally seize, by the power of his language and his presence, a role as the novel’s conflictual parallel protagonist—a full-bodied character born out of Richardson’s own complex consciousness, created and judged by that same consciousness, and inevitably escaping it?
Our early picture of Lovelace (before we encounter his own powerful and complicating language) seems simple—almost stereotypical. He is a known libertine, but an unusually attractive one—a scholar, a wit, a generous landowner, a brave and skilled swordsman, yet too disciplined to waste his resources on drink or gambling. But as we discover upon encountering his first letter to his closest friend, John Belford, he is unusually and most importantly, a writer—self-conscious, remarkably fluent, gifted, playful, seductive, driven—the moral opposite and creative challenge to the remarkably fluent, self-conscious, gifted but not playful or seductive Clarissa.
The letter is a tour-de-force. At the start, he announces his ability write “that, indeed, I can do; and as well without a subject as with one. And what follows shall be a proof of it” (Letter 142, Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 142). And that proof is vivid and witty indictments of Clarissa’s family, and their treatment of her; high praise for her extraordinary gifts, mixed with gentle mockery of her too-strict virtue; extravagant expressions of surprised love; apt quotations from Dryden, Otway, Cowley, and Shakespeare about all these subjects; the admission that his conflicted double desires—revenge upon the hated Harlowes, love for Clarissa—provide him “such a field for stratagem and contrivance, which thou knowest to be the delight of my heart” (Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 147).
With Lovelace, we enter—in the 18th century—Bakhtin’s (1981) world of heteroglossia, in which every language is unmasked as…a mask. Lovelace writes—and lives—out of an ideology that values performance over all else. He has wooed Clarissa by letters, of course, but also by surprising her in the garden of her house, where he enacts all the verbal and gestural behaviors of the sincere lover (begging her patience on bended knee, making extravagant professions of love, kissing her hand, consoling her on her family’s harsh treatment [Letter 36]). The family alarm that convinces her to flee with him—complete with shouted warnings and calls for a pistol—is another carefully crafted performance, contrived with the help of his spy Joseph Leman (Letters 94-95). Once he has lodged her at Sinclair’s private brothel, the performances continue: making himself deliberately ill by consuming ipecac in order to win her tender concern (Letter 211); hiring a criminal compatriot to play “Captain Tomlinson,” who is offered to Clarissa as a friend of her Uncle John, who has come to help her toward reconciliation with her family (Letter 214); staging a night-time fire to alarm Clarissa into his arms while she is in a state of near undress (Letter 225); even hiring two higher class whores to impersonate his aristocratic aunt and cousin, who will then intervene to persuade her toward marriage (Letter 255).
The letters in which he reports all these schemes to Belford enact textual performances equal to those schemes’ complexity and extravagance. The “ipecac letter” vividly narrates the onset of his “illness” and Clarissa’s alarmed concern, but also digresses wittily on such subjects as the medical profession, the nature of language (“the little words in the republic of letters, like the little folks in a nation, are the most significant” [Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 677]), and the letter’s own self-conscious textual oddities. The letter reporting the introduction of Captain Tomlinson is staged beautifully like the performance that it really is, complete with dramatic directions. His narrative of the false fire is wildly dramatic, while also providing the most vital description in the novel of Clarissa’s physical beauties, his own surprise that his “reformation” is secured as now he “never shall love any other woman”—apt poetic quotation from Robert Green’s Pandosto—more surprise at the depth of Clarissa’s resentment of his midnight embraces, and admission of his sense of growing power over her, which he intends to act upon ever more strongly.
And such wit and textual extravagance threads through many other letters. When he copies for Belford Anna’s intercepted letter warning Clarissa away from him and trying to help her toward a secure escape, he indexes 108 passages for which he will exact vengeance upon her (Letter 229.1). Reporting upon his acquisition of a formal marriage license—which he calls “a good whimsical instrument”—allows him to lay out his own wittily argued case for marriage reform that any marriage be but for a year, with renewal chosen or annulled at the end of that term (Letter 254). No wonder Terry Eagleton (1982) lavished upon him such terms as protean (p. 51), fantasmal (p. 60), a satirical question mark (p. 88), polymorphous and auto-erotic (p. 53)—a menu of heteroglossic praise. But in this long and wildly complicated “courtship” of Clarissa, Lovelace himself catches his character just as vividly, admitting to Belford that he is “mad with love—fired by revenge—puzzled with my own devices” (Letter 216, Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 694).
Lovelace’s astonishing textual abilities and love of performance have prompted a critical argument that there is no meaningful self behind the language, or behind the mask of his public performances. Eagleton (1982) wrote of Lovelace’s “terrible lack of being” (p. 60), and James Turner (1989) grounded his argument about the paradoxes of libertinism in general on the same idea, concluding his essay with the claim that Lovelace is “the ‘decentered subject’ proposed by recent literary theory; he is an empty space on which various contradictory discourses leave their trace” (p. 88). Lovelace’s best (and perhaps offended) answer to such speculations might well be this simple assertion of his identity in a late letter to Belford: “a man of six or seven and twenty, in high blood and spirits, of a naturally gay disposition, who can sing, dance, and scribble, and take and give delight in them all” (Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 1310). That the self at the center of all this prodigious language and scheming and acting is mysterious (as is any self) does not mean that it is inexistent. (Perhaps a useful metaphor through which to register that mystery is the cosmological black hole—a reality we can’t precisely conceptualize, but which has the power to organize an entire galaxy around it.)
Ironically, it is Clarissa who, in the end, negates the self at the center of her textualizing. The process that begins this negation lies first in the hands of others—when her relatives, for example, silence her by refusing to read her letters; when Lovelace undertakes to deceive and seduce and re-define her (as ideal love object, as focus of his vengeance, as publicly presented “wife”). As she tellingly writes to Anna, “I am but a cipher, to give him significance and myself pain” (Letter 174, Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 566). As textually productive as is Lovelace, Clarissa presents us with just as mysterious a self; one might say that in her final writings and meditations, that self evaporates into her textualizing—which embodies her into an immutable language of her own choosing and creating. Unlike Lovelace, she rejects the Bakhtinian assertion that no language can “claim to be an authentic, incontestable face” (1981, p. 273), believing that such a language must establish the truth of her fading self and her tragic story.
In The Rape of Clarissa, Eagleton (1982) described the novel as a “great warring of discourses” (p. 79). The conflicting selves that create those discourses—Clarissa and Lovelace—must in the end escape any reader’s “full” understanding. We know what we know of them solely through their warring languages—but they are languages of an unusual range and depth and fullness. As Bakhtin (1981) instructed us, all languages are “forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values” (p. 292). (Confronting the fact that Clarissa might truly die, Lovelace writes of her as one “whose mind / Contains a world, and seems for all things framed.” [Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 1335]) But Bakhtin (1981) also reminded that, because language is unfailingly social, “the word in language is half someone else’s” (p. 293). And so Lovelace’s and Clarissa’s texts must share and contest the meaning of such terms as virtue, love, honesty, honor—words that dangerously entail some of our most important real-world acts and emotions.
Confronted with such a novel as Clarissa, confronted with Lovelace and Clarissa and the texts that they (through Richardson) produce, perhaps our best gesture of response is to embrace the nature of creative mystery itself—to recognize, as Susan Sontag (1961) argued, that “real art has the capacity to make us nervous,” and that interpretation strives to make art “manageable, conformable” (p. 8). Sontag (1961) is brave enough to ask that we accept “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are” (p. 13). This can all be put less generously, and Sontag (1961) does that too—describing reductive interpretation as “the compliment that mediocrity pays to art” (p. 8-9). It is a “compliment” that we should withhold from Lovelace, from Clarissa, from Richardson.