Abstract
This chapter explores how Samuel Richardson’s novel elevates friendship ideals as a frame of narrative reception. Through the correspondence between Clarissa and Anna, Richardson pushes public and private faces of friendship to new extremes at the same time as he synthesizes contradictory ideas surrounding masculinity and femininity, secularity and religion, and classical and modern heroism in friendship. Exploring the diverse reactions of his readers, the chapter provides a new explanation of the controversy among Richardson’s readers, and shows that the rhetoric of friendship was a touchstone of authority in this early debate over one’s taste in fiction.
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Notes
- 1.
Sarah Fielding offers fictions of friendship that close with an emphasis on survival and hope and others that end more pessimistically. Her earliest life-affirming model of friendship is in her first publication, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), which appeared years before Richardson’s Clarissa (1749). I begin with Clarissa so as to establish a basis for understanding Fielding’s personal and aesthetic reasons for turning temporarily, and never consistently, toward endorsing a more tragic model of friendship in her Remarks on Clarissa (1749) and David Simple, Volume the Last (1753).
- 2.
David A. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 18. Brewer borrows the idea of the “social canon” from Franco Moretti’s “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000): 207–227. In this conception, the social canon reflects the loosely specified set of texts and characters kept alive by individual readers of popular literature, distinguished in this way from the academic canon.
- 3.
Brewer, Afterlife of Character, 79–81.
- 4.
Brewer, Afterlife of Character, 130–134.
- 5.
See Introduction, 1.
- 6.
See Thomas Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 199–214.
- 7.
For the debate between Warner and McKeon, primarily over the utility of genealogical versus dialectic methods, see Warner, “Realist Literary History: Michael McKeon’s New Origins of the English Novel.” Diacritics 19.1 (1989): 62–81; McKeon, “A Defense of Dialectical Method in Literary History.” Diacritics 19.1 (1989): 83–96; Warner, “Taking Dialectic with a Grain of Salt: A Reply to McKeon” Diacritics 20.1 (1990): 103–107. Despite this debate, McKeon’s Origins of the English Novel and Warner’s Licensing Entertainment both culminate in a genre-defining comparison between Richardson’s Pamela and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.
- 8.
Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 192–199.
- 9.
In Richardson’s “Clarissa” and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Tom Keymer discusses these symmetries and other formal patterns in the novel (46).
- 10.
Russell West, “To the Unknown Reader: Constructing Absent Readership in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Fielding, Sterne, and Richardson,” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 26.2 (2001): 105.
- 11.
On the formal implications of domestication in eighteenth-century romances and novels, see Michael McKeon, Secret History, 394, 639. McKeon takes Richardson’s Pamela as the primary example of formal domestication in the novel.
- 12.
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 986. Future in-text page references are to this edition.
- 13.
See Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship, 45. Todd reads this passage as a “treasonable fantasy” that symptomizes the tension between patriarchy and female friendship. I would add that this fantasy echoes and re-configures romance narrative conventions, foregrounding the relationship of novel forms to the social ideologies of family and friendship.
- 14.
Christina Marsden Gillis, The Paradox of Privacy: Epistolary Form in “Clarissa” (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984). Gillis notes Alan McKillop’s original observation of the paradoxical presentation of epistolary privacy in Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1936). Gillis also offers an excellent survey of interpretations that gravitate toward a view of epistolary writing as a solipsistic or idealized expression of authentic self (3–5). While I am analyzing the novel in light of Richardson’s view of epistolary writing as an ideal of communication, I mean to identify the contradictions that emerge from this conception.
- 15.
Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends, 268.
- 16.
Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature, 65.
- 17.
Lois Bueler recognizes Clarissa as a paragon of non-familial friendship in light of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, though she does not overtly situate these ethics in the modern context of epistolarity. Bueler, Clarissa’s Plots (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 120. Many critics, along with Tadmor and Todd, see a tension between the novel’s discourse of friendship and its avowed didactic purpose. Victor J. Lams finds a self-aggrandizement in Anna’s praise of and mourning for Clarissa that jars with Richardson’s moral agenda. Lams, Clarissa’s Narrators (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 144. Others claim that the novel privileges traditional patriarchal values over transgressive female solidarity. Ellen Gardiner argues that Richardson undercuts the judgments of both women to legitimate Belford as an editorial figure that allegorizes Richardson’s authorial identity. Gardiner, Regulating Readers: Gender and Literary Criticism in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 45. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook finds the novel’s image of friendship to be contained within “the more powerful narrative of eighteenth-century male literary authority.” See Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 112. Rachel K. Carnell examines the parallel between Clarissa and Anna’s debate over paternal authority and “treasonous” debates over political authority, while concluding that the novel’s transgressive message is contained by its reception as a conduct book about marriage. See Carnell, “Clarissa’s Treasonable Correspondence: Gender, Epistolary Politics, and the Public Sphere” in Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson, ed. David Blewett (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 133–134. Hina Nazar theorizes that reader dissatisfaction with the novel’s conclusion stems from the tacit dissonance between the worldly values attached to the women’s friendship and the ending’s emphasis on otherworldly rewards. See Nazar, “Judging Clarissa’s Heart,” English Literary History 79.1 (2012): 96.
- 18.
To Aaron Hill, October 29, 1746, printed in Selected Letters, 72.
- 19.
Richardson’s remarks introduce a further complication. Ostensibly, he means to suggest that, in epistolary fiction, to show the reader that Clarissa thinks herself in love, she must write it down. Yet, Richardson’s final emphasis occludes his own crucial but subtle parenthetical distinction—between not “owning” it and being “blind” to it. It is as if to say, whether Clarissa actively hides it or is blind to it herself, the friend knows—or, rather, for readers, Anna’s imputation overrides any potential play between Clarissa’s self-disclosure and concealment.
- 20.
Habermas, Structural Transformation, 46–47.
- 21.
Such proximities transgress the traditional regulation of distances negotiated by the implied decorum of domestic architecture. For a discussion of this analogy between architectural and epistolary spaces, see Gillis, The Paradox of Privacy, 17–75; Karen Lipsedge, “Representations of the Domestic Parlour in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, 1747–1748” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17.3 (2005): 391–423. For a discussion of character interiority and architectural privacy, see McKeon’s Secret History, 710–714.
- 22.
Conversely, Richardson sees scornful self-interest undermining the Harlowes’ ability to offer advice or consolation. In surveying Clarissa’s situation after running off with Lovelace, Arabella concludes a vitriolic letter with personal scorn, writing, “Everybody, in short, is ashamed of you: But none more than Arabella Harlowe” (510). In one of the novel’s dramatic tonal shifts, the next letter from Anna opens with consoling imperatives: “Be comforted; be not dejected; do not despond, my dearest and best beloved friend” (510). This disjunct anticipates Clarissa’s later remark on Anna’s sharp tone after a long silence between them, a consequence of Lovelace’s machinations: “For surely, thought I, this is my sister Arabella’s style” (995–996). A temporary consequence of Lovelace’s artifice, this tension is soon resolved, reaffirming the novel’s location of sympathy and understanding in epistolary friendship.
- 23.
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin. (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 189. The italics are mine.
- 24.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009), 28.
- 25.
Richardson, Clarissa. Or, the history of a young lady: comprehending the most important concerns of private life. In eight volumes. To Each of which is added a table of Contents. The third edition. In which many passages and some letters are restored from the original manuscripts. And to which is added, an ample collection of such of the Moral and Instructive sentiments. interspersed throughout the Work, as may be presumed to be of general Use and Service.… Vol. Volume 6. p. 187. London, M.DCC.LI. 1750–1751 [1751]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. Grinnell College. 30 August 2016 http://find.galegroup.com.grinnell.idm.oclc.org/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=grin67026&tabID=T001&docId=CW3310374229&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE. Gale Document Number: CW3310374229.
- 26.
Maurer, “Politics of Masculinity,” 87–110.
- 27.
Richardson essentially applies the eighteenth-century perception that mixed-sex conversation had advantages over same-sex conversation in epistolary writing. See Betty A. Schellenberg, The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740–1775. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 1–2, and Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762–1830 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10–12. While it may not be surprising to suggest that Richardson wants women to write letters that their fathers might read, it is worth stressing that he also implies privileged men like Lovelace and Belford should write as if their female friends and family were reading their letters. For Richardson, the internalization of a mixed-sex audience as a trope of conscience applies to both correspondences.
- 28.
Carol Houlihan Flynn observes that Clarissa and Lovelace are both at different points left without the support and the amicable counsel of their immediate families, putting greater pressure on their friendships. Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 255.
- 29.
Allusions to David and Jonathan were frequent in early modern remarks on ideal friendship. Jeremy Taylor comments at length on David and Jonathan in The Measure and Offices of Friendship (1662. Delmar, NY: Scholars Fascimiles & Reprints, 1984), 47–49. Richard Allestree cites David and Jonathan as an example of a friend’s rescue that transgresses parental approval in The Whole Duty of Man (London: John Baskett, 1724), 308.
- 30.
Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 5.
- 31.
Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 5.
- 32.
Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 12.
- 33.
Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature, 48–49.
- 34.
See G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 104–153; Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 27–53; E.J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce, and Luxury (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 95–131. In his chapter, “The Question of Effeminacy” Barker-Benfield discusses the response of various male writers to the reformation of male manners and the associations of feminization of culture with luxury and national decay. Parallel to my discussion of John Norris’s and Richardson’s reception of classical friendship models, Williams discusses Pope’s reception of Homeric masculinity as a translation of physical masculinity into mental toughness. Clery builds from Williams’s framework and offers a compelling reading of Clarissa as a narrative that defends effeminacy from associations with corrosive luxury.
- 35.
For a thorough study of John Norris’s influence on Richardson, see E. Derek Taylor’s Reason and Religion in Clarissa: Samuel Richardson and “the Famous Mr. Norris of Bemerton” (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009). Taylor does not examine this poem in respect to Clarissa’s plot.
- 36.
John Norris, A Collection of Miscellanies (1687; New York: Garland, 1978), 95.
- 37.
A concern raised in verse by Katherine Phillips, and in essays by Jeremy Taylor, Mary Astell, and John Norris. In letters exchanged with Norris, Astell solves the problem by suggesting that lovers of God are “like excited needles, […] that cleave not only to him their Magnet, but even to one another. See Mary Astell and John Norris. Letters Concerning the Love of God, 66–67. Norris’s poem and Clarissa’s remarks do not worry over the place of God in the spiritual reunion of friends.
- 38.
Deidre Lynch, Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 34. Lynch examines Locke’s tropes of printing as an example of the broader connection between print and mental life.
- 39.
Kvande, “Printed in a Book,” pp. 239–257. As Kvande writes, “letters fail to convey the intended self” because of their vulnerability as a physical medium (245). Kvande sees Richardson’s novel as a reflection of the cultural perception of women’s epistolary writing as an “authentic feminine outpouring” (243).
- 40.
McMurran, The Spread of Novels, 123–124.
- 41.
Adam Budd, “Why Clarissa Must Die: Richardson’s Tragedy and Editorial Heroism,” Eighteenth-Century Life 31.3 (2007): 1–28.
- 42.
Budd, “Why Clarissa Must Die,” 10.
- 43.
While Budd offers excellent reflections on this tension, his overall discussion of Belford underplays the extent to which even Belford is drawn into intense feelings for Clarissa and thereby conscripted within the novel’s overarching discourse of ideal friendship. I do not see Belford’s “distance” from Clarissa as a question of the emotional detachment requisite for moral action, but, rather, as a sign of the vicarious attachment between real persons and fictional characters.
- 44.
Richardson attempts to have it both ways, justifying Clarissa according to the moral utility of a resonant tragic pathos, and according to a Christian framework for comedy that would undercut our experience of any tragic pathos.
- 45.
While much of the fiction published in the 1740s prior to Clarissa involved a comic plot, Richardson’s moderate success seems to open the door for a number of tragic novels in the latter half of the century, including Sarah Fielding’s David Simple, Volume the Last (1753), Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph (1761), Frances Brooke’s History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763), and Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). Clarissa might also be said to anticipate the widespread acceptability of tragic endings in later Gothic novels, including Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800).
- 46.
As Brewer discusses, Richardson also complained of publications that expanded on Pamela’s story when they were not filtered through his own controlling authorship (Afterlife of Character, 143–144).
- 47.
Bradshaigh, writing under the pseudonym Belfour, to Richardson, undated letter (November–December 1748) printed in The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld (London: Printed for Richard Phillips, 1804), v.4, 215–216.
- 48.
Half a decade later, Bradshaigh is provoked by the possibility that Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison may also resolve tragically. She exclaims in a letter to the author: “Would I had never re’d Clarissa, wou’d I had never officiously (and to please my own ridiculous humour) wrote its author, would he had never wrote the long expected grandison, once my delight, now my Torment”. Bradshaigh to Richardson, 22 February 1754, Forster MSS, XI, f. 84r.
- 49.
Richardson to Bradshaigh, 15 December 1748, Forster MSS, XI, f. 4r.
- 50.
Richardson to Bradshaigh, 15 December 1748, Forster MSS, XI, f. 3r.
- 51.
Carr to Collier, December 1748, Forster MSS, XV, 2, f. 10r.
- 52.
Highmore to Richardson, 2 January 1749, Forster MSS, XV, 2, f. 11r.
- 53.
Delany to Richardson, 25 January 1749, Forster MSS, XV, 2, f. 13r.
- 54.
Moore to Richardson, 23 December 1748, Forster MSS, XV, 2, f. 21r.
- 55.
See Thomas Keymer’s “Clarissa’s Death, Clarissa’s Sale, and the Text of the Second Edition,” Review of English Studies 45.179 (1994): 395. Expressions of friendship toward Clarissa linked with critiques of the plot might be placed in the context of general remarks on the verisimilitude of the novel. As Catherine Talbot wrote to Elizabeth Carter in 1747, “one can scarce persuade oneself that [Clarissa’s characters] are not real characters, and living people.” This quotation appears in T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 239.
- 56.
Diderot, “Eulogy of Richardson,” 393.
- 57.
As James Fowler has suggested, Diderot’s appropriation of Richardson as a friend works to translate the overtly Christian author’s accomplishments into a secular and classical idiom, one that involves the glory of a textual afterlife more than a union of souls in a Christian heaven, the image Richardson himself might have conjured. For an extended discussion of the ideological disparities between Richardson and Diderot that this rhetoric of friendship masks, see James Fowler, Richardson and the Philosophes (Oxford: Legenda, 2014), 147.
- 58.
Sarah Fielding, Remarks on Clarissa (1749. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1985), 46.
- 59.
Fielding, Remarks, 45.
- 60.
Chapone to Richardson, 20 March 1751, in Forster MSS, XII, 2, f. 21v.
- 61.
Edwards to Richardson, 8 February 1751, Forster, MSS, XII, 1, f. 15r.
- 62.
Cook, Epistolary Bodies, 112; Carnell, “Clarissa’s Treasonable Correspondence,” 133–134.
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Mangano, B. (2017). Tragedy in Print; or, Epistolary Friendship and Clarissa’s Divided Readership. In: Fictions of Friendship in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48695-6_3
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