Author Archives: anthonyokeeffe01

Clarissa: Correspondence as Self-Preservation. Tony O’Keeffe.

Clarissa Harlowe’s correspondence is founded upon an unwavering desire to preserve an established, steadfast identity, rather than allow her identity to be developmentally constructed as her writing unfolds. Even in letters to her family that reject their proposed marriage between her and Roger Solmes, she continues to assert her identity as an obedient and loving daughter, willing to submit faithfully to every reasonable duty they ask of her. Jerome Bruner (1991) described the family as “a system designed for keeping centrifugal forces from working within a group of people who have to stay together” (p. 68). Clarissa’s letters strive constantly to work exactly in this way; although she simply cannot accept Solmes as her husband, she fully endorses the patriarchal situation within which her father and brother operate, the values of family life it establishes, and her traditional place within that family. She has even relinquished to her father full control of the small estate bequeathed her by her loving grandfather, observing that he “could not bear that I should be made sole, as I may call it, and independent” (Letter 13, Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 78).

Unsurprisingly, the language of Clarissa’s letters reflects the ideology within which she writes; it is “unitary” in that way defined by Bakhtin (1981), working to embody and preserve the ideology that gives rise to those terms that help establish a particular sociological stability. She would throw herself at her father’s feet as “an expression of my duty to him” (Letter 8, Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 64). Her parents and uncles are constantly addressed as “dear” and “ever-honoured,” and even as their treatment of her grows ever more cruel she continues to sign herself as “ever-dutiful,” “dutiful and affectionate,” “dutiful and obliged.” She scolds Anna for her just but sharply expressed criticisms, even writing “I am very angry with you for your reflections on my relations, particularly on my father” (Letter 421.1, Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 134).

As the novel winds toward her death, her centripetal actions and language continue. She writes humbly and apologetically to all of her family, for example asking no more of her father than that he lift his curse upon her and allow her to be buried in the family vault, blessing him effusively “for all the benefits I have received from your indulgence” (Letter 28, Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 1371). She takes strong textual control over her life and her failing body. A letter meant as Christian allegory keeps Lovelace at a remove, assuring him that he may soon encounter her in her “father’s house” (Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 1233). She composes religious meditations that express her emotions even as they instruct her soul (letters 402, 413, 418). She has her very coffin brought to her lodgings, adorning it with emblems and texts, from Job and the Psalms, of her particular choosing. Even after death, posthumous letters come to all her family and friends—even Lovelace himself—in a startling final display of self-presentation and preservation.

Over the course of every trial—whether at the hands of her family or of Lovelace—Clarissa has asserted her unwavering identity. And it may be that a striking phrase in the preamble to her will—“and as I am nobody’s” (Letter 421.1 Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 1413)—can be read as more than a sad recognition of her un-familied dying. Perhaps it can be read as a triumphant assertion as well.

The Blog as “Distributed Autobiography.” Tony O’Keeffe.

A constant theme in contemporary writing about blogs is that they offer new ways to narrate and to understand the self. Blogs create “a new form of subjectivity, a new understanding of the self” (Fitzpatrick, 2007, p. 174); they provide an especially rich site for “reflexive identity construction” (Brockmeier, 2000, p. 54); they present a “new forum for the ‘presentation of self’” that also instigates “new ways in which this ‘self’ can be presented” (Van Doorn, Van Zooen & Wyatt, 2007, p. 144).

This recurrent idea suggests that one established branch of theory might be useful in critical attempts to analyze and understand the nature of personal blogging: criticism and theory concerned with autobiography. Several of the foundational issues raised in Georges Gusdorf’s (1980) seminal Conditions and Limits of Autobiography arise within blogs as well. Like autobiography, the personal blog is “a second reading of experience,” and it “adds to experience itself consciousness of it” (p. 38). The blog “realizes itself as a work in the present; it effects a true creation of self by the self” (p. 44). Most importantly, like the richest autobiographies, the personal blog can be driven by conscious aesthetic awareness, so that its “artistic function is . . . of greater importance than the historic and objective function” (p. 43).

If, as Fitzpatrick (2007) asserted, the self is always a “multiply constructed subjectivity” (p. 167), blogs offer a set of interactive elements—text, visual design, an immediately reactive audience, a range of technological affordances provided by the online environment—that advance and transform our sense of what autobiography can be. In a sense, the personal blog can be seen as a kind of “distributed autobiography,” one in which the composing self becomes part of “a collective and intersubjective authorship” (Fitzpatrick, 2007, p. 177). Even as one expresses a “self” grounded in one’s individual awareness and understanding, that self can be altered and changed by its interaction with the community responding to the blog, and it is not uncommon for the blogger to acknowledge publicly the role that audience can play in one’s self-development (Dennen, 2009, p. 28; Fitzpatrick, 2007, pp. 180-181).

The visual and technological possibilities available through the blog’s being situated in the online environment create a form of autobiography that both conflicts with and advances critical thinking. For example, Gusdorf (1980) would certainly see the fragmentary nature of blogging as a bar to its being considered meaningful as autobiography, but contemporary treatments see the blog as a distinctive embodiment of postmodern ideas of the self as “discontinuous, shifting, and polycentric” (Brockmeier, 2009, p. 69; Fitzpatrick, 2008, pp. 168, 183). The necessary “incompleteness” and “seriality” of the blog (Fitzpatrick, 2007, p. 170) would also trouble traditional autobiographical criticism, while contemporary writers see the blog as enacting a new kind of completeness, born out of the immediate interaction of the blogger and her audience (Fitzpatrick, 2007, p. 169). The blog also makes available to all writers, in their self-presentation, what was previously available only to the autobiographer who was a visual artist: rich visual means of expressing and individuating the self.

In the end, the blog—in its immediacy and its range of resources—allows one to enact what Gusdorf (1980), quoting the philosopher Lequier, suggests as the motto for all autobiography, “to created and in creating to be created” (p. 44).

Lovelace: Correspondence as the Carnival of the Self. Tony O’Keeffe.

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 18^th 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).

Continue reading →

Clarissa, Blogs, and the Illusion of Im(media)cy. Tony O’Keeffe

Other members of our class have already commented smartly on what we all gained—as readers and writers—in re-mediating Richardson’s Clarissa into a blog-like structure, working as readers and writers within the blog that was the class itself, reading and responding to important theoretical essays on the nature of blogs, and then bringing all of that creative and analytical work to bear during our weekly meetings. I’d like to comment more narrowly on the three kinds of immediacy we seem to have experienced in our actual reading of and involvement with the novel, in blogging about that experience, and in the in-person conversations enabled by the classroom situation.

That Clarissa was felt by all of us with a surprising immediacy is confirmed by the vivid emotional nature of many of our comments on the novel—and I imagine such strong reactions were a surprise to most of us, given the medium through which Richardson chooses to tell the novel’s story: letters. But Richardson’s genius in creating deep and nuanced voices for every correspondent involved in the story’s telling brought that story to life with startling vividness and reality. And so the story’s own inherent drama comes through very powerfully. But, as the title of my piece is meant to remind, everything in the novel is obviously mediated by the language of fiction (one we’re all experienced in engaging) and by a particular historical form (the epistolary novel, with which we’re far less experienced). Recognizing those means by which Richardson draws us in so powerfully is helpful in drawing the contrasts—rather than the connections—between novel and blog.