I believe this was the longest novel in the English language, 1462 pages of small text on larger pages in this version and nearly a million words. But a few people have produced some doozies since then, and it’s not the longest anymore. Still, it’s a whopper and I’ve put it off a few times.
The full title of the novel is: Clarissa. Or the history of a young lady: comprehending the most important concerns of private life. And particularly showing the distresses that may attend the misconduct both of parents and children, in relation to marriage.
The story is: Richard Lovelace comes to the Harlowe family to see a pretty older daughter, Arabella, who, it turns out, he isn’t the least interested in. But he IS interested in the prettier younger daughter. Arabella turns on Lovelace because he has a poor reputation as a womanizer, but absolutely turns on him when she finds she has been rejected in favor of the younger sister, Clarissa.
Clarissa, a virtuous young woman, is not interested in Lovelace. But when her brother James comes home, it turns out he knows Lovelace and hates him. James turns Lovelace out of the house and insults him. A few days later, James challenges Lovelace to a duel and is wounded, which brings the whole family’s hatred on Lovelace.
Lovelace is smitten with Clarissa, and in order to remove her as an object of desire, the family decides to marry off Clarissa to a wealthy boorish gentleman who was conceded a fair amount of money to the family if they will give him Clarissa. She resents being sold for money to a man she detests.
She refuses this proposal and the back and forth of arguments for both sides runs to over 300 pages.
The basic arguments are: Clarissa detests the man and can’t consent to live as a wife that must love him, the family insists on her obedience.
As her family won’t relent and insists she get married to a man she hates, she is tricked into going outside to see Lovelace, then half tricked/half abducted into fleeing with him. He deposits her in a ‘safe house’, populated by actresses paid by him to play their parts as noble ladies and convince her to confide in him. She mostly sees through this and more and more despises Lovelace. But she is also informed that her family has fully disowned her. She now recognizes she is ‘ruined’, and has no place left to turn.
While Clarissa’s best friend, Anna Howe, commiserates with her over Lovelace’s villainy, she counsels Clarissa to marry him and accept this as her punishment, since it is the best she can hope for at this point. But Clarissa, seeing more and more of Lovelace’s character while being confined by him, refuses his every attempt to persuade her to intimacy.
She eventually gets an opportunity and runs from her confinement, but is tracked down by Lovelace. He surrounds her with imposters of his family who all work to convince her to reconcile. She refuses still and is eventually carried back, drugged, and raped.
Lovelace finds though that this has not satisfied him in the least since she had not consented. He continues to keep her imprisoned at the whorehouse, and though she attempts to flee several times, the whores, under the hire of Lovelace, prevent her from escaping. Lovelace insists on subduing Clarissa into marriage, but it is evident that there is nothing left for him but a hollow ‘victory’. She clearly hates him and yet he just can’t seem to let it go. Lovelace has decided to imprison her and force physical compliance in the hopes of eventual willingness, even if only through being beaten down, and if that doesn’t work, vengeance upon her for denying him. In fact, as time goes on, and he finds himself unable to entreat her any longer, Lovelace threatens Clarissa that if she leave him no hope, he will become ‘desperate’. The whores beg Lovelace to leave Clarissa to them so that they can humiliate her and pacify her.
Lovelace then contrives a scene where he would be able to confront, then rape Clarissa, under the pretense of a bribery attempt, but she threatens to kill herself with a pen-knife and he backs down.
His uncle is dying, so Lovelace leaves for a few days with orders for the whores to keep her inside, but treat her well. Clarissa does, however, escape, and it is at this point that she is able to correspond with her friends and even Lovelace’s family and discovers the true scope of his deception.
But while her hiding place is unknown to Lovelace, the whores have her thrown into debtor’s prison on a false charge, thinking Lovelace would be happy about it. Clarissa grows increasingly weak and sick in her confinement and ultimately gives up and resigns herself to death, feeling that it must be an appropriate consequence of disobeying her father’s will.
As Clarissa draws closer to death, she appoints Belford to put all the letters into a book form as a testament to what really happened, and she appoints him executor of her will. Lovelace grows desperate and threatens to barge in on Clarissa even while she is dying and insist she marry him. Eventually he does go to where she was lodged. He bullies his way into the shop, threatens the owners, threatens the other guests who were lodging there, and then barges into the various rooms. But she has fled elsewhere in fear of his coming.
He insists that he ‘loves her’ and just wishes to talk to her. But his entire approach says that he has no intention of being denied, and if that is the case, then what would happen if he were to be refused? Given his past history, he would attempt to force her to do what he wants. He seems completely oblivious to this fact, convinced that since he ‘loves her’; e.g.; he must have her for himself, that his intentions must likewise be felt by her too. Again, the selfishness that believes because he feels it, she must too, and if she doesn’t, she must be forced until she does!
1350 pages into the book, Clarissa dies at peace. Her family has finally forgiven her as it the full weight of their own part in her demise dawns on them. During the funeral, the family is mostly repentant…. the brother still tries to dominate the proceedings, but by this time, the rest of the family have recognized what a dismal part he played in the entire affair, so he is largely ignored. The rest recognize they were wrong in their treatment of Clarissa.
Lovelace is alternatively despondent and defiant, but he is convinced to travel to the continent to avoid Clarissa’s cousin, a Colonel Morden, challenging him to a duel in order to seek vengeance.
Clarissa’s will is carried out by Belford.
At the end, Lovelace is challenged by Col. Morden to a duel, and is killed.
I don’t know if Richardson meant this, but I see a few of the characters as representations of traits. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading some things recently about symbolism. I don’t know that I would want to make the claim that the characters are symbolic, so I’m going with representational, rather than symbolic.
Clarissa is virtuous… so virtuous that she seems almost too perfect. But she is the representation of the virtuous woman. And by virtuous, Richardson means Christian virtues. She is living out the Christian faith in as pure a version as she can in this life. This doesn’t mean she isn’t portrayed with faults; she wrestles with difficult situations where injustice is thrown on her and others use common notions of virtue in order to shame or guilt her into compliance. These are genuinely thorny scenarios where one can argue over what ‘virtue’ would require. The main scenario is her proposed marriage to Solmes. Her family argues that it is virtue to submit to their will. Typically, this would be true. But we are also given glimpses that they are being unfairly harsh in demanding such a thing. The brother is motivated by greed, the sister by jealousy, and the father and uncles by an unyielding insistence on ‘obedience’ no matter what. Clarissa’s protestations are all met with deaf ears and they all expect that ultimate application of virtue in her life while refusing any investigation into their own motives for forcing her into an unhappy marriage for their own personal gain. For most of us as modern readers, she is perfectly justified in her refusal to submit. But to be honest, the Christian application in her particular case would probably require her to submit. Of course, an argument can be fairly made against each family member’s motive too, but they, having the power over her, felt they didn’t need to answer to her.
While Clarissa’s virtue is acknowledged by everyone, it really does mature and shine all the brighter as the book goes on. The more she suffers assault, the more she is refined.
Her friend Anna Howe, with whom she corresponds through most of the story, is the pragmatic woman.
She has a temper and is far saucier in her responses than Clarissa, but she is also a loyal friend of Clarissa’s, so she resents any slight of her friend. But throughout, she counsels a pragmatic course of marriage to Lovelace in order to make the best of a bad situation.
Lovelace represents selfishness. He ‘loves’ Clarissa, in a selfish way- which is to say he desires her and thinks about her. But his desire is to have her for himself at any cost. Indeed, he spends what must amount to a minor fortune in order to secret her away and pay a multitude of actors to try and fool her. He spends all his time thinking about her, and can only think of how he can have her. His running roughshod over her in order to have her ends up giving him no satisfaction, and his worldly ‘love’ is pure self-interest and ends in utter disregard for her. It is ultimately his pride, stubbornness, and as it becomes clear the longer his chase goes on, his complete disregard for women as a whole, and Clarissa, as the supreme example of womanhood, is the driving force of his action. Because Lovelace believes at his core that all women are obtainable through subterfuge once the right strings are pulled, he feels he must subdue her and ruin her. Lovelace says, “Conquer or die is the determination!” Clarissa stands as the falsifier of his belief as long as she refuses him.
The more steadfast Clarissa stands in the face of affronts, the greater her virtue shines. Conversely, the greater her virtue shows, the lower Lovelace sinks in his attempts to subvert it.
The picture is muddied because while we get insight into the level of Lovelace’s villainy, het gets away with it because he is exceedingly rich, good looking, and charming. People naturally want to believe he is good, because he looks good. Even when they get insight into the truth, they are ready to believe his lies because of his looks and charm.
In Lovelace’s letters to his friend Belford, he provides plenty of insight into his own mindset, by the flimsy justifications he attempts for his actions. The fact that HE believes his own logic is demonstration of his own depraved mindset.
I will say that in his depraved mind, he thinks he actually loves her; because he sees her as incomparably beautiful and morally perfect. But his desire to possess her and make her his to do his bidding isn’t love. It has no concern for her, only concern for what he thinks she might be able to do for himself.
At the end, Lovelace is in misery, unable to think of any other woman because he acknowledges Clarissa’s beauty, but at the same time unrepentant and cursing. Confronted with a virtue he couldn’t conquer, he knows he can’t find happiness, but can’t admit his errors in order to repent and so change. He finds himself imprisoned by his own cage.
Her brother and sister are motivated by greed and jealousy. Clarissa is adored by her family and their grandfather favors her by bestowing a large property on her, overlooking the natural hierarchy in the process and giving it to the youngest. The brother moves to get that property by marrying her off and making deals to enlarge his own interests. The sister is motivated by jealousy since she was rejected by Lovelace in favor of Clarissa. They each then use Clarissa’s virtue against her by demanding that she submit to injustice in the name of virtue.
Her family in general. Towards the end, we find the family has been generally thought very low for their treatment of their daughter, and they resent the fact that their own part doesn’t look better in the eyes of others. Her uncle writes that they can barely stand to look at each other because of what happened. They all apparently contrive to blame Clarissa for what happened, but they clearly aren’t happy with themselves. They are also clearly convinced that reports of deteriorating health and conditions are inventions to induce pity, which they reject.
John Belford is Lovelace’s fellow rake and his principal correspondent in the letters he writes expounding the story. Belford changes his stance after meeting Clarissa and adjures Lovelace to give her up. But Belford also has it in his power, through the letters detailing Lovelace’s crimes, to free Clarissa, yet he doesn’t. But as the story progresses, Belford is clearly a changed person for his interaction with Clarissa, and ends up becoming the executor of Clarissa’s will.
There are a host of people who have apparently been hired by Lovelace to pretend they are one person or another. These are apparently willing to do whatever they need to do to make a buck.
But one of the interesting things that occurs is that when confronted with Clarissa’s purity, almost all have severe twinges of conscience about the woman they are deceiving.
There are also other women Lovelace has contact with, but they lose their appeal in the contrast with Clarissa. Lovelace now recognizes them as beautiful nothings. They are merely skin-deep and have no real merit to them.
The length of the dialog is perhaps meant to be as exhausting and relentless as the forces of evil are in trying to beat down virtue.
One of the morals at work in the story is why such a paragon of virtue has so many enemies. Why would Lovelace be so committed to disgracing her? Why was her brother and sister so hateful? Why did her parents and family all unite against one so virtuous? The most basic answer is that her virtue constituted the strongest contrast to their baseness. In fact, several of the women in the story wonder why she doesn’t just accept the advances of Lovelace, since they consider that he is much better, at least on the outside, than most men, and since they themselves aren’t as virtuous, they can’t understand her insistence in holding out against such an overwhelming onslaught. Some of the women, particularly the whores, are incensed at her virtue since it makes them look all the worse. For this reason they complicit themselves in helping to bring her down.