The most destructive rupture in the novel is, of course, Lovelace’s rape of the drugged Clarissa, a physical and psychological violation which leads, eventually, to her death. It fractures Clarissa’s sense of self and of the meaning of her life, as is made clear in her first letter (Letter 295) to Anna after she has escaped for good from Sinclair’s brothel. The phrases directly quoted from the novel in postings about that letter reveal the depth of the trauma: “this vile, this hated self”; “But no more of myself! My lost self”; “I, my best self, have not escaped”; “Self, then, be banished from self.” Many of the comments reflect the depth of these reactions in their own language: “we see here a kind of incoherence of self we seldom witness in Clarissa” (Debra); “Anna is whole whereas Clarissa is broken” (Kendra); “she tries to divorce one ‘vile’ or ‘lost’ self from the other” (Keri); “at one point, she seems to have the two selves talking to each other, inventing a kind of faux dialogue” (Meghan); “Heart-breaking” (Rachel).

In the last letter he writes before the rape (Letter 256), Lovelace sneers at what he terms Clarissa’s “pride of being corporally inviolate” and assumes that when he has taken her “that modesty . . . will lock up her speech”—revealing that even he grasps that her virginity is of central importance to her identity. And so, in Rachel’s fine phrase, the rape “utterly destroys Clarissa.” And yet, as Keri notes, Lovelace’s one-line letter on the rape (Letter 257) ends with the sentence “Clarissa lives.” Keri commented on this and explained that “This short sentence demonstrates something of a resurrection of the strong-willed Clarissa we have seen throughout the novel.”

First, though, Clarissa must endure the immediate psychological damage done by the drugs and embodied in the “mad letters” (Letter 261). Delirious and fragmented as they are, even here Clarissa begins the work of repairing the physical and psychological ruptures of her self. She writes to reconnect with Anna (“I am no what I was in any one thing.”); with her father (“though I am an unworthy child—yet I am your child”); with Arabella (“my sister, my friend . . . pity the humbled creature”); with her very self (“How art thou now humbled in the dust, thou proud Clarissa Harlowe!”). She writes to indict Lovelace. She quotes half a dozen literary texts that allow her to find expressive language that echoes her fragmented self while groping toward her lost wholeness. And in commenting on Letter 295, Debra isolates the one reality that will ground all of her recovery: the knowledge “that her will was never violated.”

Within days of recovery from her delirium, Clarissa begins to wrest back control of her identity from Lovelace—and from the once-terrifying Sinclair. She confronts Lovelace directly, asserting that because of his actions she is “ruined in my own eyes, and that is the same to me, as if all the world knew it”—and announcing her absolute renunciation of him: “I never, never will be yours!” (Letter 266). Shortly after the rape, Lovelace cavalierly writes Belford that “Miss Clarissa Harlowe has but run the fate of a thousand others of her sex—only that they did not set such romantic value upon what they call they honour; that’s all” (Letter 259). But Clarissa will not accept such a reduction of her identity. Four days after this encounter, she confronts both Lovelace and Sinclair with amazing steadiness of mind, cowing them with force of argument and personality, as well as the double threat of her own suicide and the eventual retributions of the Law (Letter 281). Our blog posts reflect how convincingly Clarissa has restored crucial strands of her identity, Debra noting that her power now lies “in her absolute trust in herself,” and Keri that “Clarissa’s agency has reached its absolute highest peak.” Kendra describes her as “once again a paragon” and Jessica reports that even as mere witness to the scene “I felt a bit awed . . . This is what Clarissa looks like when she has power.”

Eventually, Clarissa finds the power to heal every rupture that defines Volume VI—of her own self-narrative, her textualities, her body and mind. She refuses to let herself be broken as Lovelace and Sinclair intended. In our class discussion, Rachel observed that “Clarissa never turns away from what has happened to her.” We are, therefore, never allowed to turn away from it either.” It is the ground of her tragedy—and of her tragic triumph.