Author Archives: dsjour01

Summary of Clarissa

Volume 1 (Letters 1-44)

As this epistolary novel opens, the Harlowe family is in turmoil.  Clarissa’s brother James has been wounded—lightly—in a duel with the notorious libertine Robert Lovelace.  Lovelace had been paying court to the Harlowes’ older daughter Arabella (a marriage grounded in mutual financial gain, rather than any real affection), but upon encountering the lovelier and more accomplished Clarissa, he refocuses his attentions. This has led to false rumors that “the younger sister has robbed the elder” (Clarissa is, at the start, indifferent to Lovelace and dubious about his reputation for immoralities), and provided James—who has nursed a violent hatred for Lovelace since their university days—an excuse to insult Lovelace persistently enough to provoke the duel.  In the novel’s first letter, Clarissa’s closest friend, Anna Howe, urges her to write out the full story of the events that have led to this violence and its aftermath; in doing so, she forwards one of the novels central ideas: “your account of all things . . . will be your justification.”

Before the duel, Clarissa had been corresponding with Lovelace about his experiences on the Grand Tour (which a ward of her uncle Hervey is about to undertake); within this correspondence, Lovelace had begun enclosing separate letters declaring his passion for her—letters she calmly ignores.  Now her father forbids all such correspondence, but her mother urges her to continue it, with a view to keeping the peace between the still highly offended Lovelace and her family.  James, a violent-tempered, greedy, and bitter young man, is the real power in the family.  He imputes to Clarissa a warmth for Lovelace, and uses this presumed affection to persuade his father and mother to marry her off to Roger Solmes, a rich but loutish local landowner –both to forestall any possible marriage with Lovelace, and to gain a very generous settlement for the family.

But Clarissa—heretofore the most obedient of daughters—has a violent antipathy toward Solmes, and vows never to wed him.  Her family—manipulated by James—has come to suspect that Clarissa rejects Solmes so decisively because she is predisposed to Lovelace (even though she promises she will remain single all her life if they cease to pursue marriage to Solmes).  They insist unwaveringly upon her submission to the marriage.  Her resistance remains unshakeable.  And in an effort to force her will, the family treats her more and more coldly—forbidding all correspondence, even with Anna; removing her life-long and affectionate maid, Hannah; and isolating and imprisoning her with increasing strictness within the Harlowe household.

Clarissa has—despite parental strictures—secretly continued to write and receive letters from Anna.  As she goes one evening to fetch such a letter from the family woodhouse, she is surprised by Lovelace himself, who declares his love for her and urges her to remove herself from her father’s house and throw herself upon the protection of him and his aristocratic family.  He assures her that their marriage would forward reconciliation between himself and her own family.  Because of such possibilities, and “reverence” with which he treats her, she reports to Anna that “he has a good deal raised himself in my opinion.”

In Volume I, we also first hear Lovelace’s voice and his assertion that because he was once jilted by a woman, he has vowed revenge to all women, including Clarissa, though he also owns that he loves her.

Volume II (Letters 45-92)

Early in volume I we learn that Clarissa has been bequeathed a small estate by her loving grandfather—an occurrence that provoked much jealousy from James and Arabella.  Anna Howe now advises her to take full claim of the estate and live independent of her parents’ and her siblings’ plans, noting that Colonel Morden—a close relative and one of Clarissa’ trustees, currently residing in Florence—would support such a decision.  Clarissa is loathe to take such a step, as it looks a challenge to paternal authority.

Confined ever more narrowly within her home, Clarissa has been appealing to her family through letters.  Lacking the moral right to force her to wed (as well as arguments with which to answer her own) they now refuse to read those letters.  They have even arranged to have her taken to her uncle Antony’s moated-estate, and to have her married there in the estate’s chapel.  She is able to delay this trip by allowing a private interview with Solmes, during which she rejects him absolutely.  Knowing himself backed by all in the Harlowe family, Solmes tells her he intends to continue pressing his courtship.

Lovelace, who has a spy in the Harlowe household (Joseph Leman), knows the details of both her ill treatment and her family’s plans, and importunes her ever more strongly to escape from her family and throw herself upon his protection.  Her cousin Dolly writes to alert her that she is to be married to Solmes—by force if necessary—in two days.  Clarissa has promised Lovelace that she will put herself under his aunt’s protection if she is certain she cannot escape marriage with Solmes, but writes to countermand the appointment which would be her final assent to escape.  But in the volume’s final letter, she writes Anna with the unexpected news:  “Clarissa Harlowe is gone off with a man!”

Volume III (Letters 93-154)

Clarissa explains to Anna that when she met Lovelace in her garden, there were sudden alarms from the house—threats of gunfire and violence, on the discovery that Lovelace was spiriting Clarissa away.  And so she flees with him.  But her first letters to Anna confess to feelings of “shame and grief.”  And to suspicion, in hindsight, that this might all have been an elaborate trick.  Lovelace’s letter to Leman reveals it to be so.  Clarissa continues to regret her hasty flight, and Lovelace continues to write to his equivalent of Anna Howe—John Belford—glorying in now having Clarissa in his power, and announcing his determination to submit her reputation for virtue to a series of “trials.”  If she passes such trials, he will marry her out of love and admiration; if she fails, he will console her with the offer of marriage.

Clarissa confronts Lovelace with her now-certainty that she has been tricked into running away with him; his seemingly sincere expressions of intended reform calm her fears, although his letters to Belford reveal that his reform is a ruse, and that he intends to humble her—as a Harlowe and as a woman.  He presses her with proposals of marriage (but never in a context that seems possible), and of relocation to London.  Anna herself argues that marriage is now the only way to redeem her reputation and secure a decent future.  And now comes a devastating blow for Clarissa—the news that her father has deeply cursed her, wishing her punishment in both this world and the next.

Volume IV (Letters 155-209)

Clarissa and Lovelace have moved to London, where she is housed—unknowingly—in a private brothel, run by Mrs. Sinclair.  Lovelace has arranged to live under the same roof, despite Clarissa’s protests, and has persuaded her to pass for his wife to make this arrangement look more permissible.  Lovelace—against her wishes—organizes an evening in which Clarissa will meet his libertine friends.  The most important outcome of this encounter is that Lovelace’s own primary confidante, John Belford, is immediately struck by her fine nature and becomes her advocate, to Lovelace, against his machinations.  Her cousin Morden writes from Italy to acquaint her as fully as possible with the nature of the typical libertine.  Ever more suspicious, Clarissa resolves to escape from Lovelace; he sends her a formal marriage proposal, as a reassurance of his honorable intentions, but she refuses to act upon it at the moment.

Lovelace has now begun intercepting the correspondence between her and Anna, which sparks strong anger at them both for the ways in which they judge him, increasing his determination to possess Clarissa, even if “a little violence” is necessary.

Volume V (Letters 210-245)

Lovelace hires a criminal acquaintance to play the role of Captain Tomlinson, who falsely presents himself as a friend of her uncle John so that he can convince Clarissa that a reconciliation with her family is being arranged—especially if she consents to marry Lovelace.  This calms her fears and reconciles her to the possibility of that marriage.  But his next ruse—a midnight fire which allows him to see her nearly undressed and to fondle her under the pretense of calming her fears—renews all her suspicions.  Shortly thereafter Clarissa makes her first escape, to Hampstead.

Anna writes a crucial letter to inform Clarissa of the truth about Mrs. Sinclair’s lodging, and the false nature of Captain Tomlinson.  But Lovelace intercepts this letter, and forges a replacement.  He easily tracks her down to her Hampstead lodging and convinces Clarissa’s acquaintances there that he is a loving and ill-treated husband.  Lovelace promises that his important relatives—his aunt Lady Betty Lawrance and cousin Charlotte Montague—will visit London to wait upon her, and that he will obtain a marriage license as proof of his good intentions.  But Clarissa is waiting for a letter from Anna, with advice on how to proceed farther, and will not commit to any course of action until it has arrived.

Volume VI (Letters 246-318)

Lovelace intercepts Anna’s warning letter, and as Clarissa awaits it, he arranges for two whores from his past to pose as Lady Betty and Charlotte, and to visit Clarissa and urge her toward forgiveness of and marriage to Lovelace.  With their help, he tricks her into returning to Sinclair’s brothel, where, with the help of the brothel’s women, he drugs and rapes her.  During the week after the rape Clarissa alternates between stupefaction and a form of manic liveliness, during which she writes the ten papers that constitute her disordered “mad letters.”  They are followed by a wandering but sometimes coherent and accusatory letter to Lovelace, begging to be sent to a madhouse.

Lovelace receives word that his uncle, Lord M, has fallen ill and desires his attendance.  Reluctant to leave Clarissa alone—fearing how the whores might treat her in his absence, and fearing her attempt to escape—he uses the whores to terrify Clarissa into obedience, and to extract a promise that she will await his return.  But she appears before them all with new strength, and frightens them with her own threat to bring the law down upon them.  Lovelace does go to attend Lord M, and while there writes Clarissa four letters which she refuses to respond to.

For the second time, Clarissa escapes Sinclair’s clutches. Finding lodging in Covent Garden, she writes the true Lady Betty and her Uncle John’s housemaid, discovering the wide extent of Lovelace’s deceits.  She resumes her interrupted correspondence with Anna, unfolding to her the details of her treatment by Lovelace, his deceptions, and the culminating rape.  Anna urges her toward immediate prosecution of Lovelace and the inhabitants of Sinclair’s house, but she is reluctant to have her story become public, telling Anna, in the volume’s final letter, that she is “quite sick of life.”

Volume VII (Letters 319-402)

Clarissa now lodges with the Smiths, glove makers and sellers.  On a walk to church she is arrested, unbeknownst to Lovelace, on the false claim of owing one-hundred fifty pounds to Mrs. Sinclair for board and lodging—a plot furthered by Mrs. Sincclair to keep her prisoner in a bailiff’s house until Lovelace returns for her.  Alerted to Mrs. Sinclair’s actions, Lovelace urges an outraged Belford  to force Sinclair to withdraw the complaint and return Clarissa to the Smiths  This event badly damages Clarissa’s health, but  gradually gains her trust and befriends her, arranging for her care by a competent apothecary and doctor.

Anna and her mother inform the Harlowes of Clarissa’s ill health, but they are unmoved, and steadfastly reject  reconciliation.  Lovelace attends a ball at which he knows he will encounter Anna, and forces her into an interview to obtain the answer to one question: is there any possibility of his own reconciliation with Clarissa?  Anna is certain no such possibility exists.

Belford keeps Lovelace well-informed of the state of Clarissa’s health but, like her family, Lovelace discounts the seriousness of her case, even hoping that her symptoms are the result of pregnancy, and determined to visit her in person, against her wishes and Belford’s strong objections.  He tries a final letter of appeal to Clarissa, expressing regret and promising reform; a short reply from her asserts her implacable rejection of any further contact, though she does offer him her forgiveness.  And as her health weakens, she undertakes a new form of writing—religious meditations upon her state of body, mind, and soul.  The volume ends with one of them, grounded in the Book of Job.

Volume VIII (Letters 403-474)

Clarissa writes her father, seeking only the lifting of his curse and the gift of a final blessing.  Colonel Morden has finally returned to England. Before he can make his way to Covent Garden, Lovelace, in pursuit of Clarissa, makes two unsuccessful visits to the Smiths (Belford has warned her away), where his aggressiveness and intrusiveness terrorize the occupants.

Lovelace himself falls ill, and while recovering receives a letter from Clarissa announcing that she is setting out for her “father’s house,” assured of a “thorough reconciliation,” and that she hopes to see him there.  This letter is designed to keep Lovelace from her for a time, but is also a truthful Christian allegory about the state of her soul and her declining health.

Belford reports on the horrifying and fearful death of their libertine companion, Belton, (hoping again to example Lovelace into reform), and when returned to London reports that Clarissa continues to decline—her doctor gives her a fortnight to three weeks to live.  She has learned that Colonel Morden intends to visit Lovelace, and worries about the violence that might follow such a meeting.  Lovelace writes to Belford of the testy but finally promising meeting with Morden—they part “with great civility.”   Morden himself writes to Clarissa, hoping to condole her about the possibility of reconciliation, even as her coffin arrives at her lodging (shocking Belford and her current companions); it is ornamented and textualized by Clarissa herself.

Anna’s mother is ill, and so she is delayed in visiting Clarissa.  But she can inform her of Colonel Morden’s anger at all of the Harlowes.  As Clarissa weakens, her hand grows ever more unsteady in her letters to Anna.  Her doctor writes to her brother James, telling him that she cannot live a week; and she sends her adieu to Anna through the hand of Mrs. Lovick, being too week to write herself.  Colonel Morden arrives, to attend her on her deathbed.

Volume IX (Letters 475-537)

Morden informs the family that Clarissa will soon be dead, and soon after this letter Belford informs Lovelace that she has died.  In his next letter, he provides details of the actual death scene.

Useless letters now arrive from Mrs. Norton, from Arabella, from her uncle John; her family’s letters console her on her illness, but still blame her as well, vindicating their own judgment.  Clarissa has left behind a set of final letters, to family and friends, as Morden writes to notify her father of her final request: that she be allowed burial in the family vault.  Lovelace writes to Belford, at the start of his own “mad” week, wanting to have Clarissa’s body opened so that he can remove her heart and keep it with him as a sacred object.  (He later writes to Belford to tell him that he has no memory of writing such a letter.)

Morden reports to Belford the sad arrival of Clarissa’s hearse at the Harlowe household, and the laying out of her corpse within the house.  He writes as well of Anna’s viewing of Clarissa’s body, and of her tragic farewell to her dearest friend.  Her parents are incapable of either viewing the body or attending the funeral service.  Morden reads Clarissa’s will to the family, and even now encounters greedy objections from James and Arabella (prompting him to punish James in his own will).

Given Morden’s own violent emotions at Clarissa’s death, Belford writes to Lord M, asking that he urge Lovelace to go abroad as soon as possible.  Lovelace receives Clarissa’s posthumous letter to him—both her final brief against his behaviors and her sincere hope that he can reform and save his own soul.  Recovered from the madness of grief, Lovelace writes the earnestly reforming Belford, announcing his intention to go abroad.  But a dangerous complication is created by a letter to Lovelace from Joseph Leman, his one-time informer within the Harlowe family, telling him that Colonel Morden has been making threats of vengeance.

Now abroad, Lovelace writes to Morden to ask if he has been publicly threatening retribution—but also to express a strong desire to avoid the confrontation Clarissa wished to avert.  But Morden, clearly intent upon that confrontation, writes Lovelace to insist upon the duel.  In his next to last letter to Belford, Lovelace expresses the depth of his regret at his treatment of Clarissa, allowing himself this one time to call her—as she should have been—Clarissa Lovelace.  In his final letter to Belford, he expresses his intention—counting on his skill as sword duelist—to wound Morden enough to end the duel without killing him.

Four days later, Belford receives a letter from Lovelace’s second, F. J. de la Tour, telling him of Lovelace’s fatal wounding at Morden’s hand, and his painful dying.  His last words, addressed to Clarissa: LET THIS EXPIATE!

Narrative

In this section, we summarize our responses to blogs posts that deal specifically with narrative or the acts of narrating.  In particular her, we look at instances in Clarissa where the idea of “stories” or “narrative writing” or related terms appear and where the issue of narrative is itself foregrounded.

Narrative

Volume I.  Letter 1 set much in motion.  As Tony said, “It’s interesting how much Anna enables Richardson to frame in just a two-page letter: Clarissa’s nature and reputation, the immediate plunge into family disturbances, the violence between her brother and Lovelace, her brother’s unpleasant nature, the threats possible from Lovelace’s own temper, an excuse for Clarissa to write in as full detail as possible–and finally, a reminder of what the whole novel will be: ‘your account of all things . . . will be your justification.’”  Jessica noted Anna’s need to reassure Clarissa that her public character is unaffected by the recent events.  Steve pointed to “the circulation of Clarissa’s reputation. . . . More details make a better story. A better story makes for more repetitions, and more repetitions reinforce Clarissa’s good reputation,” and also suggested that this is a place “where the novel reminds us that identity can be as much about the stories people tell about you as it is about the stories you tell about yourself.”  This became an important issue for us as we began our reading.

Letter 2 offers Clarissa as a narrator, here one who promises to “recite facts only.”  Keri thought her failing to adhere to this promise was consistent with “the changing of her identity and the evolution of her thoughts,” and that these kinds of shifts, in turn, “reinforce the work’s epistolary nature that is episodic and constantly changing. “ Megan, however, wondered “can we really trust Clarissa as a factual writer?  While Clarissa’s claims are not necessarily false, Clarissa is, as Megan emphasized “clearly writing from a specific point of view. She only knows her side of the story and what she has witnessed and noticed.”  This inevitable consequence of the epistolary novel is something we returned to many times.

Towards the end of the volume, in our response to the Letter 42, we returned to the kinds of narratives Clarissa constructs.  Steve introduced Letter 42 with the observation that “kitty can scratch,“ referring to Clarissa’s angry and cutting portrayal of her sister Arabella.  Rachel agreed that this letter “shows Clarissa’s acts of supposed transparency in her letters, where they meet with her skewed perceptions of others,” and speculates that here she might “describe a past dislike of her sister to integrate better into her present dislike—in which case, Clarissa is bordering on what Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2007) saw as one of the distinguishing features of memoir (not of blogs): a kind of narrative unity or neatness, which presents the present in as much harmony with the past as possible.”
Continue reading →

Writing

In this section, we summarize our responses to blog posts which foreground writing,both its material condition and its affordances for constructing narratives of the self.

Letters 9-11 introduced a very specific back-and-forth between Clarissa and Anna about the ways they would write each other when they write about Clarissa’s feelings for Lovelace.   Keri, responding to Letter 9, found the “author-reader relationship quite interesting and the ways in which Clarissa works through her own thoughts and feelings about Lovelace through her writing.” This letter, Keri suggested also contains “a lot of moments where the writing seems more for Clarissa herself than to Miss Howe. Several places contain punctuation such as dashes or several exclamation marks, which, in context, suggest the immediacy of the letter-writing that mimics the style of personal diary or journal more than a letter to a friend. . . . Some thing as seemingly insignificant as the punctuation here shows that Clarissa is, in fact, working through her own emotions and feelings about these gentlemen while writing to Anna. In addition, the back-and-forth nature of Clarissa’s request demonstrates the immediacy with which Clarissa writes, and there are moments within this letter and in others where Clarissa goes for quite a while without directing the content to the reader at all.”

In Letter 10, we noted again how writers attempt to shape reader response.  As Meghan noted, Anna here imagines a “kind of hypothetical dialogue between Anna and Clarissa. Though they aren’t talking to each other in the same room, Anna and Clarissa can still take into account the other person’s hypothetical reaction and can then plan their writerly moves accordingly.”  Keri agreed, noting that “there are several moments in these letters where the writer, after introducing a specific topic, then tells the reader how to respond to it. It seems that these characters, like Richardson, constantly try to exercise control over the content of their writing. I don’t really know what to think about this notion of depriving reader agency yet, but I do think that it is interesting.”  Anna also suggests to Clarissa that she may feel a certain “throb” or “glow” when she thinks of Lovelace, an idea Clarissa very firmly denies in Letter 11 Nevertheless the terms persist through several letters.

Volume II includes Clarissa’s “Ode” (Letter 54).  Keri noted that the Ode might be Richardson showing “generic versatility,” but more, that it is an instance of Clarissa using writing both as an escape and as a way of thinking through the situation she’s been forced into.   It “helps her write her way into a new identity capable of handling difficult situations while maintaining her sanity and a relatively strong sense of self.” Continue reading →

Identity Through Anonymity: The Role of Audience in a Blogger’s Construction of Narrative

 
            Sarah Wu started her blog, “Fed Up With Lunch” in 2009.  Wu’s blog was originally part of a project that was meant to bring awareness to the issue of school lunch nutrition—a topic Wu felt strongly invested in not only because she was a mother, but because she was an educator herself.  In its early stages, the blog would document Wu’s experience eating the food her students were eating through daily posts where Wu would photograph her food, comment on its potential nutritional value and taste, as well as discuss issues of debate concerning the general topic of school lunches.  Up until when she “came out,” revealing her off-line identity of Sarah Wu, she was known on her blog as her chosen pseudonym, Mrs. Q.  From the beginning, Mrs. Q was open about her occupation as a speech and language pathologist in the public school system, but chose to remain under a pseudonym for fear of getting exposed to her school district and possibly fired for her blog’s crticisms.  Mrs. Q’s decision to use a pseudonym as a blogger (for the first two years of her blog’s existence) was central to constructing her blog and helping her discover her identity as a writer.  Her decision to remain anonymous was freeing in giving her the confidence she needed to take on such a controversial project, as well as to slowly (over the span of three years) explore and discover that she did have a place in a conversation usually reserved for those with higher “authority” (school administrators, those in government positions in charge of funding for school lunches, etc). 
            As Mrs. Q unfolds the narrative of her experiences, her interaction with her readers becomes key in helping her develop this kind of authority and confidence.  Since her readers did not initially know who she really was or what specific school she taught in, Mrs. Q. was every teacher and no teacher at once.  Her audience could therefore relate to her experiences and aid her in constructing her story because her perspective made general by her anonymity gave her posts a kind of universal appeal.  Her broad discussions of school nutrition that are still tied to specific (though, again, anonymous) examples from her day-to-day experience eating lunches allowed her audience to apply these issues to their own experiences, which they then shared with her and with each other via her blog’s comment sections.  In commenting, parents and students add to Mrs. Q’s thoughts and stories, and their voices become more and more central to the construction of her project as the blog progresses.  Mrs. Q invites guest bloggers to write about their own experience on her blog’s topic.  These guest blog posts seem to function as an extension of Mrs. Q’s own voice.  While she is not the one writing these posts, they still play a role in continuing the narrative she has started.  When Mrs. Q. writes, it is also often from the point of view of “we” instead of simply “I.”  For example, in the following passage from her blog post in March of 2010 concerning the amount of funding given to school lunches, Mrs. Q uses the pronoun “we”:
              Why can’t we give all children the best possible food we can find while they  
              are at school?  Why do they have to get the cheapest stuff? If their health and  
              wellness is truly a priority, then we need to pony up and find a way to feed 
              them as if they matter. Children are not ‘little adults.’  (Wu)
              Mrs. Q addresses her readers as part of the conversation instead of simply reading from the sidelines, an act they are comfortable doing as they also do not need to take the risk of putting their own jobs in education in jeopardy by the use of pseudonyms themselves (commentors very often share that they are teachers or administrators within the body of their posts).  Their comments lend support to Mrs. Q, sympathizing with her situation, echoing her experiences, and adding to the discussion in her post.  Mrs. Q often constructs her future blog posts based on the audience’s commentary, and even begins to respond to requests to reveal small personal details about herself, giving her the confidence she needs to reveal parts of her identity. 
            As Mrs. Q’s posting progresses, she is eventually able to reveal multiple identities instead of the one identity she initially establishes as Mrs. Q, the teacher.  Soon she is comfortable enough to reveal her role as a mother (bringing in side narratives about her son and how she monitors his nutrition and education), as well as her role as a wife (bringing in side narratives about her disagreements with her husband and how she balances her career and her extensive time spent blogging—a factor that increases with the increase in her blog’s popularity—with time spent on her relationship with her husband).  One year after her project starts, she shares with her audince that she is pregnant.  On August 9, 2012, she shares with her audience that she has resigned from her teaching position (for the reasons of commute time and wanting to spend more time with her family), and on October 8, 2013, she implies, in a post with an uncharacteristically confused and melancholy tone entitled “The Search for Meaningful Work, Post ‘Mrs. Q’”-Advice Please,” that she is feeling depressed and trusts her audience enough to ask what her next steps should be professionally.  A passage from this post can be read in the following:
            What to do with myself professionally now?  That is the question that only I can 
            resolve, but I have not been successful in my search for an answer.  Of course, I 
            am working as I have been trained:  a school-based speech pathologist.  I love my  
            job, the kids, and schools.  
            But there is something missing and I’m trying to figure out what that is.  I expect  
            this to take some time to sort through, maybe years.
            I’m throwing this out to you, my readers.  You have seen me through all these  
            years.  What now?  Hypothetically, if you were me, what would you do next 
            professionally? (Wu)
            Blogging has made Mrs. Q unsatisfied with only seeing herself as a mother and a teacher.  These two roles are no longer enough for her, and with the conclusion of her project, she feels like she is meant to do more than what she was doing before she started writing.  This realization regarding who she is and what else she might be capable of may not have happened had she not started a blog.  Writing provided her with a sense of purpose, a sense of authority, and the feeling that she was contributing to a conversation being debated internationally.  Also, in writing such a post, she asks her audience to help her continue her narrative for her.  Her audience functions as a way for her to find a new way to fulfill her professional goals and aspirations.
            Though Mrs. Q. benefited from the advantages of staying anonymous during the beginning stages of her blog due to factors like universal appeal, the limitations of anonymity start to reveal themselves as Mrs. Q’s most recent posts show her reflecting upon her past decisions.  Mrs. Q’s blog becomes what Jens Brockmeier would call a “circular narrative” as she rethinks her decision to remain anonymous, associating it with a sense of shame (because she had to hide it from her colleagues and superiors) and “toxic emotions” in her post, “The Search for Meaningful Work, Post ‘Mrs. Q’-Advice Please”:
            While some considered me as “famous” because of this blog, I feel more 
            “notorious.” I have not been able to shake that feeling of shame that came along 
            with doing the whole thing anonymously. It was like a big scary secret for 18 
            months and even though I felt a ton of relief when I came out, I am left with 
            some toxic emotions even now. Secrets aren’t healthy for people. I probably 
            need therapy.  (Wu)
            In this post, she reflects upon her identity as a writer at the outset of her project, regretting her anonymity, a position she is now ashamed of as it presents her past self as someone who was too afraid to inform her colleagues of her project, hiding alone in her office while she eats her lunch and documents her experiences.  She acknowledges that her audience calls her “famous,” now that she has had so much media attention (radio interviews, television appearances, online interviews, publishing a book on her experiences), but she disagrees, instead calling herself “notorious.”  Mrs. Q’s audience steps in, however, to reassure her, inspiring her to start a new blog elsewhere, focusing on her identity outside of her original project.  Though Mrs. Q struggles (as can be seen in her attitude in the previous passage), she is still confronting what makes her unsatisfied in her life, working through these issues in her writing.  One might argue that she may not have come to this realization had she never tried blogging (simply writing, for example, wouldn’t have given her the kinds of audience interaction that was so pivotal to her in developing confidence and authority both as a writer and as a public spokesperson for school nutrition).  She then embraces and seeks the advice of her audience, who in turn, inspire her to start another blogging community. 

Writing

We saw issues of writing, and how they are related to issues of identity in the very specific back-and-forth between Clarissa and Anna in Letters  9-11.  Keri, responding to Letter9, wrote she found the “author-reader relationship quite interesting and the ways in which Clarissa works through her own thoughts and feelings about Lovelace through her writing.” This letter, Keri suggested also contains “a lot of moments where the writing seems more for Clarissa herself than to Miss Howe. Several places contain punctuation such as dashes or several exclamation marks, which, in context, suggest the immediacy of the letter-writing that mimics the style of personal diary or journal more than a letter to a friend. . . . Some thing as seemingly insignificant as the punctuation here shows that Clarissa is, in fact, working through her own emotions and feelings about these gentlemen while writing to Anna. In addition, the back-and-forth nature of Clarissa’s request demonstrates the immediacy with which Clarissa writes, and there are moments within this letter and in others where Clarissa goes for quite a while without directing the content to the reader at all.” 

Volume IIincludes Clarissa’s “Ode” (Letter 54).  Keri noted that the Ode might be Richardson showing “generic versatility,” but more, that it is an instance of Clarissa using writing both as an escape and as a way of thinking through the situation she’s been forced into.   It “helps her write her way into a new identity capable of handling difficult situations while maintaining her sanity and a relatively strong sense of self.”

Jessica wondered about error in Letters 59 and 60, specifically “what do we make of this silence on the distracting punctuation and spelling in Solmes’s letter?” In “a culture steeped in letter writing,” she continues, Richardson’s use of error in the letter to characterize Solmes raises questions about connections between writing and character.  Rachel wondered if Clarissa’s silence wasn’t due to a sense of delicacy – would it be bad manners to point such a thing out?  And so Clarissa’s lack of response becomes a way for Richardson to use the letter to characterize her, as well; Debra pointed out the contrast Richardson draws here between Solmes as “buffon” and Clarissa as mannered.

Narrative

It is difficult, in some ways, to separate narrative from identity, as one of our prevailing assumptions is that a person narrates a self.  However, there are times when the idea of “stories” or “narrative writing” or other terms come up, where the issue of narrative is itself foregrounded.  

For example, as early as Letter 1, Steve pointed to “the circulation of Clarissa’s reputation. . . . More details make a better story. A better story makes for more repetitions, and more repetitions reinforce Clarissa’s good reputation,” and also suggested that this is a place “where the novel reminds us that identity can be as much about the stories people tell about you as it is about the stories you tell about yourself.” 

I’m not sure whether this properly belongs in “Narrative” or “Identity” – or how useful it is to separate those two things out.  But here’s what I have for this section for my week.

Citing an article by John A. Dussinger, Rachel noted that “there are, in practice, three different Clarissas: the proud feminist, the religious martyr, and the ‘sentimental heroine.’ This forces the reader to constantly renegotiate who Clarissa is in one particular letter vs. another—and forces us to think about, too, how this makes Clarissa human, how we too contain multiple, shifting selves, and how we are all always perceiving ourselves.”  But, as Rachel also observed, Clarissa sees herself, and wants others to see her, as “sincere.”  We discussed at length in class how/whether Clarissa could form a coherent self-narrative in the face of all the forces in the novel that ask her to be not only feminist/martyr, but also dutiful/disobedient.

Blogs and the Sense of an Ending. Debra Journet.

In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode (2000) argued that we experience time as extended from a beginning through middle towards an end. Moreover, it is this “sense of an ending” that makes temporal reality meaningful, transforming what would otherwise be mere sequence into a meaningful and coherent narrative. (See also Ricoeur, 1981.)

The ending towards which one moves, however, is always fictional; it is we who impose organization on what would otherwise be sheer chronicity (Kermode, 2000). (This insight is beautifully embodied in Julian Barnes’s [2012] novel, The Sense of An Ending.) Kermode’s (2000) primary examples of fictions that offer the allure of beginning, middle, and end are apocalyptic thinking and novels. However, he illustrated the idea most keenly in a tiny example:

Let us use a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it says: and we agree it says tick-tock. By this fiction, we humanize it, make it talk our language. Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock is our word for an end. We say they differ. What enables them to be different is a special kind of middle. We can perceive a duration only when it is organized. . . . The fact that we call the second of the two related soundstock is evidence that we use fictions to enable the end to confer organization and form on the temporal structure (p. 44-45).

It is this lack of an “ending”—the lack of a “tock,” as it were—that, according to Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2007), differentiates blogs from other kinds of life-stories, such as autobiographies or memoirs. Blogs, according to Fitzpatrick (2007) evade the “pressure toward coherence, toward rationality, toward teleology” that characterizes memoirs (or autobiographies or novels) (p. 181).

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False clues and what is true about them (L90)

When I first read my cousin’s letter, I was half inclined to resume my former intention; especially as my countermanding letter was not taken away; and as my heart ached at the thoughts of the conflict I must expect to have with him on my refusal. For see him for a few moments I doubt I must, lest he should take some rash resolutions; especially as he has reason to expect I will see him. But here your words, that all punctilio is at an end the moment I am out of my father’s house, added to the still more cogent considerations of duty and reputation, determined me once more against the rash step. And it will be very hard (although no seasonable fainting, or wished-for fit, should stand my friend) if I cannot gain one month, or fortnight, or week. And I have still more hopes that I shall prevail for some delay, from my cousin’s intimation that the good Dr. Lewen refuses to give his assistance to their projects, if they have not my consent, and thinks me cruelly used: since, without taking notice that I am apprized of this, I can plead a scruple of conscience, and insist upon having that worthy divine’s opinion upon it: in which, enforced as I shall enforce it, my mother will surely second me: my aunt Hervey, and Mrs. Norton, will support her: the suspension must follow: and I can but get away afterwards.
But, if they will compel me: if they will give me no time: if nobody will be moved: if it be resolved that the ceremony should be read over my constrained hand—why then—Alas! What then!—I can but—But what? O my dear! this Solmes shall never have my vows I am resolved! and I will say nothing but no, as long as I shall be able to speak. And who will presume to look upon such an act of violence as a marriage?—It is impossible, surely, that a father and mother can see such a dreadful compulsion offered to their child—but if mine should withdraw, and leave the task to my brother and sister, they will have no mercy.
I am grieved to be driven to have recourse to the following artifices.
I have given them a clue, by the feather of a pen sticking out, where they will find such of my hidden stories, as I intend they shall find. Continue reading →