In the vivid postings about Letter 261—which presents Clarissa’s “mad papers”—Debra observed that Volume VI is “the dark heart of the book.” What makes it so is that this volume is marked by a number of terrible ruptures: physical and psychological, textual and narrative. Their source is Lovelace’s schemes in pursuit of Clarissa. And at their center is the most important rupture of all: Lovelace’s rape of the drugged Clarissa.

At the simplest level, the narrative’s ruptures involve Lovelace’s interference with Clarissa and Anna’s correspondence. Rachel reminded us (responding to Letter 310) that “they assume their letters maintain/contain a unified whole that will be, is, and should be undisturbed.” Lovelace’s direct disturbance of the narrative that Clarissa and Anna construct in writing to each other—both by intercepting letters and by the forgeries he then passes along to each of them—is a deep violation. How deep a one is indicated by Keri’s comment that Clarissa’s most important letters are “a part of her self and body.” It would not be an exaggeration to call Lovelace’s interference with their correspondence a kind of epistolary rape.

When the physical assault of the rape is finally enacted, Clarissa undergoes the central psychological rupture of the book. Now the actual narrative of her life is interrupted; for a period, the narrative of that life is lost to madness, immediately captured in the disjointed “mad letters”—fragmented, scattered, half-destroyed. Yet they also vividly embody, in their textual power, the violation of this awful moment in her life.

And that textual power, which Clarissa never loses, will provide the deepest answer to and the means of dealing with what Lovelace has done to her. Commenting on Letter 295, Debra noted that the rape has plunged Clarissa into an atypical “incoherence of self,” importantly because this act “has not yet been re-narrativized into the new story” she must make of her life. When Clarissa recovers her senses, she begins the task Debra referred to as “documenting her case” (Letter 317), writing to such figures as Lady Betty and Mrs. Moore for their aid in working out “exactly what everyone did.” Only in this way can she make the new narrative that her life now is continuous with the narrative that was her life before the rape. We are returned, in a sense, to the very first letter of the novel, where Anna advises her “your account of all things . . . will be your justification.”