Writing as Communicative Power

In some of her last letters in the novel, Clarissa reminds us of her beginning with Lovelace. Her relationship with him, however it has progressed and regressed, began with writing. Clarissa wrote to Lovelace, in part, because she loved writing: “I love writing; and those who do are fond, you know, of occasions to use the pen” (Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 47). Thus, we see early on the power of writing to create a relationship where before none existed—and see, too, how Clarissa initially defines herself, or identifies, as a writer.

Throughout the early volumes, writing maintains its strength in letters that connect Clarissa to the world, her only form of communication as she struggles first with her family and then with Lovelace and his dastardly crew. Regardless of her acknowledgement that her first step to “ruin” began with writing, Clarissa engages intimately with writing, through writing, until the end: asking for permission to write to her relatives and Anna, reading and responding to writing with care, reaching out to her family and Lovelace’s through the complicit social agreement of letters. In these moments, the power of writing extends beyond the materiality of ink, paper, and wax seals. The communicative function of letters allows Clarissa not only to connect with those outside her immediate physical reach, but also to influence people and events in the novel.

Writing as a Record of Self

Moving forward in the novel, Clarissa continues to embrace letters as a vehicle for communication with the outside world. However, as her circumstances worsen—and she is further ensnared in Lovelace’s contrivances—she no longer writes as a young woman sharing her story with a dear friend. Instead, she must write to record her “History of a Young Lady” so that others (including Anna, Belford, her family, and us as Richardson’s readers) will know her version of the story—the events leading up to, and spiraling out of, the violence of her rape in Volume 6, and ultimately her escape from the tyranny of Robert Lovelace in death.

On a literal level of course, in this epistolary novel, without writing, Clarissa would have no voice. However, ultimately, what matters more in terms of her agency as a writer and as a character is how Clarissa writes herself not only for herself—but rather, for her readers, both immediate (Anna) and distant (us). In many ways, her writing serves as a reflection of her constitutive self, which she sees as whole. Even after the violence of rape, after she recognizes that her body (like her letter to Anna) has been violated, Clarissa maintains her initial ideal of what a self still should be—inviolate, whole, no division between physical and spiritual, public and private, just one unified self. It is for this reason that she can claim that Lovelace has ruined her reputation even before anyone else knows: “Ruined me in my own eyes; and that is the same to me as if all the world knew it” (Letter 266, Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 909).

With her sense of an inviolate self in place, Clarissa is not writing to construct a self—she writes to record it. And this is why—remarkably—even after her body has been violated, she reasserts her sense of self (her innocence combined with the religious tropes of suffering) even in her “mad” papers (in Letter 261). Even though Lovelace has violated her physically, he has not shaken her central notion of a whole, unified self, which we see in her agency in the language and stance of resistance that shine through in Volume 7, in response to both her attacker and the women who assisted him.

And it is this inviolate sense of self—reflected in her writing itself—that Belford notes in Volume 9, after her death: “there never was a lady so young, who wrote so much, and with such celerity. Her thoughts keeping pace, as I have seen, with her pen, she hardly ever stopped or hesitated; and very seldom blotted out, or altered. It was a natural talent she was mistress of” (Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 1368). When she faced difficulty with the page, it was because she was distressed about the inability of language to capture what had happened to her with any pretense of social propriety (“What dreadful things have I to tell you! But yet I cannot tell you neither,” she writes to Anna in Paper 1, Letter 261 [Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 890]); it was that she couldn’t write what happened, not that she didn’t know what to write (as Lovelace often wrote). Clarissa was ultimately not writing to construct a self—she was not scratching out, revising as she went along; instead, she was writing to record the self that she believed in from the beginning, and carrying it through to the quite bitter end.

Writing as a Narrative End

The first thing Clarissa does when she realizes she has been raped, as the drugs are beginning to wear off, is write (Letter 261). Similarly, as soon as she escapes Lovelace’s grasp at Mrs. Sinclair’s, she writes (beginning with Letter 295). And then she hits an impasse, where her weakness keeps her from writing much of her story (in Letter 333, for example, when Belford begins to take over the narration of Clarissa’s story of being arrested). At this point, Clarissa’s agency as a writer yields to—or perhaps aligns with, or follows—Richardson’s skill as a writer. In Volume 9, at the narrative level, Richardson both distances us even farther from Clarissa’s own letters and direct experience and reveals her agentive identity as a writer through posthumous letters and her will. In Letter 333, for example, we see Belford relating Clarissa’s story to Lovelace, which has to be relayed to him from Mrs. Sinclair, Polly, and Sally, three highly unreliable sources with their own motives and biases. Yet this narrative act creates a web in which Richardson (like Clarissa in her final letters) implicates the majority of our cast of characters in some way—Lovelace, of course, Mrs. Sinclair and the other women, the Harlowes, even Belford himself becomes further implicated by trying to help Clarissa and pledge his allegiance to Lovelace at the same time. Everyone is implicated; everyone is guilty.

As Clarissa’s body breaks down, so too does her ability to write—her last letter written by her own hand is Letter 465, her last signature to a dictated letter in 473.2. For the rest of the novel—all the way through Letter 537 and the Conclusion—narrative power lies in someone else’s telling of her story. However, even as we are distanced from Clarissa’s narrative, we are drawn deeper into it as well. In The Rape of Clarissa, Terry Eagleton (1982) posited the letters in Clarissa as fetish, as objects that are wept over, torn, carried, circulated as property. Once Clarissa is unable to put pen to paper, we realize how much the letters must still be part of her “end,” just as they have acted in a sense as her “ends” all along. And what she is able to do in the last volume of the novel—and what Richardson does through her—is enact her agency one last time through her posthumous letters and her will.

For one so young, and so “inexperienced” as she is assumed to be by Lovelace, Clarissa is strikingly maturely and thorough in planning and clearly writing out her own end. She says to Belford, “I love to do everything for myself that I can do. I ever did,” emphasizing that “Every other material point is so far done and taken care of” (Letter 450, Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 1304). Even though Bedford is wielding the pen here, Clarissa is still doing everything in her power to shape her story. This includes writing letters that will be delivered after her death, writing her will, inscribing her own coffin, and facilitating the circulation of letters already written.

This seems a key moment to distinguish between story and narrative, between the different kinds of agency at work here. Clarissa no longer writes letters by the end of the novel, but she still exercises narrative power—in very material ways—in planning and anticipating events as they will occur in the time after her death. Giving voice to the rape and the many stories that would otherwise remain unspoken, Clarissa exercises agency in her continued unified sense of self as it intertwines with the narrative power of writing to inscribe her agentive identity right up to—and even after—her death.