Читать книгу One Great Family: Domestic Relationships in Samuel Richardson's Novels - Simone Höhn - Страница 11

If individual duty is conceptualised as a network of obligations rather than as a dualistic, hierarchical relationship between one who commands and one who obeys, interiority becomes of central importance. A simple hierarchical relationship may or may not include demands on the inner life of the subordinate (or even the dominant) partner; it may require only obedience or “cheerful obedience”. A network, however, always demands that the individual balances his or her diverse duties. Even the most obedient, admiring, humble subject must, according to AllestreeAllestree, Richard, check whether “active obedience” to his prince is in accordance with divine laws. Indeed, Pamela’s despicable Mrs. Jewkes illustrates the dangers of the system of duty without this kind of individual judgment: “Look-ye,” she tells an indignant Pamela, “[Mr. B.] is my Master, and if he bids me do a Thing that I can do, I think I ought to do it, and let him, who has Power, to command me, look to the Lawfulness of it” (110).

Unlike a hierarchy, a network thus invests the individual with more responsibility and with agency. This agency, in turn, may be open – admitting of debate with all parties concerned – or secret, taking place entirely within the individual consciousness. In its most extreme forms, moral duties like the obligation to love and honour may even demand that the individual hide his or her own thought processes, once completed, from themselves, remembering only their result. In The Whole Duty of Man, both extremes are present. On the one hand, it contains pages of advice on how to bring oneself to true repentance. For example, AllestreeAllestree, Richard advises us “sometimes to abridge our selves somewhat of our lawful pleasure” in order to practice the self-denial we need to resist temptations to sin (29; Sunday I). Similarly, he explains with what spirit we should approach the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and how to induce the proper mood in ourselves. For example, in order to feel contrition, we should not only come to a sense of fear of God’s punishment – instead,

the sorrow of a true Penitent must be joyned also with the love of God, and that will make us grieve for having offended him, though there were no punishment to fall upon our selves. The way then to stir up this sorrow in us, is first, To stir up our love of God, by repeating to our selves the many gracious acts of his mercy towards us […]. (78; Sunday III)

And “at the holy Table”, he advises us to “meditate on those bitter sufferings of Christ […] for the increasing thy Humility and Contrition: then in the second place think of them again, to stir up thy Faith” (90–1; Sunday III).

The aim of such carefully-managed thought processes is absolute control of one’s feelings: after all, it “is the peculiar property of God’s Laws, that they reach to the heart” (270–1; Sunday XIII). Thus, as children “we”

must not upon any pretence of infirmity in [our parents] despise or contemn them, either in outward behaviour, or so much as inwardly in our hearts. If indeed they have infirmities it must be our business to cover and conceal them […] and that in such a manner too, as even themselves might not behold it. We are as much as may be to keep our selves from looking on those nakednesses of our Parents, which may tempt us to think irreverently of them. (297; Sunday XIV)

This leaves little space for the managing of interiority to take place. Ultimately, implicit obedience must come from the heart, and mere outward respect is not enough. Interior thought-processes are necessary for the discharge of one’s duty. However, these same processes, if not managed properly, turn only too easily into the seeds of rebellion against the system of duty.

Many critics have discussed interiority with regard to Richardson’s novels. Often, these discussions centre on the characters’ hidden motivations. Thus, Pamela notoriously delays her departure from her predatory master (cf. KeymerKeymer, Tom, Richardson’s Clarissa 20). Clarissa, although the heroine of a much more sophisticated novel perhaps informed by the Pamela controversy, has similarly been detected to be a less than transparent character. In this regard, Samuel JohnsonJohnson, Samuel, correspondent of Richardson’s remark that “there is always something which she prefers to truth” is probably the most often-cited contemporary example (Johnsoniana 72).1 John DussingerDussinger, John A., who opens his essay “Truth and storytelling in Clarissa” with Johnson’s quotation, sums up the reasons as follows: “Clarissa’s sincerity as storyteller, we have seen, is in doubt not only because she may have something to hide but, more significantly, because language inevitably leaves something out” (49). Indeed, as Keymer has shown, Clarissa’s thoughts remain inaccessible in the absence of an omniscient narrator, for her letters are, he argues, “more immediately concerned with influencing her readers than with representing the truth” (Richardson’s Clarissa 133). It seems that few critics can envisage a heroine who is both truthful and assertive. Thus, ScottScott, Sarah Paul GordonGordon, Scott Paul argues that Clarissa “protects her actions from the taint of self-interest by eliminating her will entirely, by denying that she has an interest to pursue” (Power 209). Wendy Ann LeeLee, Wendy Anne, meanwhile, is one of the few critics who credits the heroine both with active purpose and with truthfulness. She argues that Clarissa, in fact, aims at absolute objectivity. In her view, the coldness of which this heroine is accused as often as of hypocrisy is, in fact, the result of her aiming at Lockean “indifferency”, a detachment which allows her to judge with impartiality.

Each of these accounts elucidates important aspects of Clarissa. However, one aspect of the novel seems curiously absent from these discussions. Assembling evidence that “Clarissa’s narrative is misleading” (134), KeymerKeymer, Tom draws attention to several places where the heroine defends herself from Anna’s suspicion that she secretly loves Lovelace but hides this from her friend:

When she talks of keeping in mind as she writes ‘what it became a person of my sex and character to be and to do … where the imputed love is thought an undutiful, and therefore a criminal, passion’, or of her ‘desire of appearing … the person I ought to be; had I no other view in it, but to merit the continuance of your good opinion’ […], she inspires little confidence. Her letters seem determined not by ‘reality’ but by the self-image she prefers to project, and they are based on a model of daughterly exemplariness that is increasingly at odds with her actual state. (Richardson’s Clarissa 134–5)

As a denial of love, the claim cited above is indeed less than satisfactory. However, in the light of the system of duty, Clarissa’s reflection on “what it became a person of my sex and character to be and to do”, as well as her “desire of appearing” so, need to be reconsidered. KeymerKeymer, Tom is right that Clarissa’s highest priority is not “reality”, at least not in the sense of an uncensored expression of thoughts and emotions – just as JohnsonJohnson, Samuel, correspondent of Richardson is right that there is “always”, or at least often, “something which she prefers to truth”. So she must. There is at least one case where truth must be suppressed: children, according to AllestreeAllestree, Richard, must not perceive their parents’ faults. In order to be a good daughter, then, Clarissa needs to censor her thoughts, especially those most at odds with the system of duty – her love (if it is that) of a rake and her perception of her father’s faults. In the former case, she denies love but “[thinks] it but justice to put in a word for” Lovelace when others criticise him more than is his due (49). In the latter case, her last resort is to “lay down [her] pen” (65) before she succumbs to the urge of criticising him in a letter to Anna.

This is not to deny conscious manipulation on the heroine’s part; indeed, Clarissa herself is uncomfortably aware that she is “driven to have recourse to […] artifices” in her own defence (365). My focus here, however, is not to discover the ‘true’ Clarissa or to conclude that she cannot be ‘discovered’ by the reader. Instead, I am interested in the implications which the demands of the system of duty have with regard to characters’ interiority. Whether or not Clarissa “wrote [her] heart” (176) to Anna is, in this context, less relevant than what this heart ought to feel, and how such feelings can be controlled in cases where attractive rakes or despotic fathers provide temptations to lust, anger, and other sins.2

In general, the implication of Richardson’s novels is that improper impulses can best be restrained when the individual acknowledges the system of duty but is otherwise left to his or her free agency. Both Clarissa and Grandison thematise individual processes of self-control and their results.3 In both, methods of self-restraint range from the suppression of inner conflict to its open display. However, while the constraints put on the heroine in the former lead to tragedy, Grandison shows how individual agency – whether inner struggles are hidden (Sir Charles) or exposed (Harriet) – leads to a successful connection of individual and public good. As Clarissa expresses it when criticised by Anna for sacrificing her own convenience to that of her servants: “I have my choice: who can wish for more? […] You see what free-will enables one to do; while imposition would make a light burden heavy” (1470).

Yet the exertion of her free will is constantly threatened, and this threat is very much associated with gender division. Agency is, and apparently should be, affected by sex. Despite exposing Clarissa’s arrogant brother James, for example, and despite having Clarissa protest against her brother’s assumption of paternal power, Richardson never unequivocally states that a son’s duties are as strict as a daughter’s. MulsoMulso, Hester, correspondent of Richardson evidently felt the need to argue against gender differentiation in this case. Although she had to admit that Richardson was right in so far that a daughter’s rebellion is “more fatal in its consequences” than that of a son, she insisted that their duty was not inherently different (237). Following and improving on LockeLocke, John’s arguments in Two Treatises of Government, which she has earlier quoted at some length, she insists that in relationships between parents and children, sex makes no difference:

Now the laws of God and nature are the same with regard to all conditions and ranks of people. Therefore this is a proof that nature makes no such difference between sons and daughters; and I have never heard of any divine law which imposes on daughters any duty to parents which is not equally imposed on sons. It is moreover observable, that the duty is equal to both parents; so that the mother, though a female, has as much right to the obedience of her son as the father; and this shews, that the duty arises not from any natural superiority of the parents over the children, but from those benefits they have conferred on them. (238)

The gendering of agency appears not only in resistance to power, but also in its exercise. The clearest case is that of Clarissa’s parents, where the father rules by command and authority while the mother tries to influence through persuasion and example – a division which will be taken up again, with some variation, in the parents of Sir Charles Grandison. In the conflict over her marriage to Mr. Solmes, Mr. Harlowe’s command to Clarissa: “I will be obeyed, I tell you!—and cheerfully too!—or you are no child of mine!” briefly acknowledges her interiority (65). Yet this acknowledgment takes the form of a command for suppression. Either what is demanded is merely the persuasive display of cheerfulness, and Clarissa’s real feelings are irrelevant. Or, on the other hand, the “cheerful” obedience must be real, and what has to be repressed is the process of internal struggle which precedes it.4 For Clarissa, such self-command is not possible in the case of Mr. Solmes, and although she will struggle to command her feelings, she will not fake them.

In contrast to Mr. Harlowe’s demands for “cheerful” obedience, Mrs. Harlowe offers a mediation between Clarissa’s frankness and her father’s absoluteness. She fully acknowledges Clarissa’s interiority and permits its expression – provided this remains limited to a time and space which ensures it will have no further consequences: “she was willing […] to give a child whom she had so much reason to love […] liberty to say all that was in her heart to say, that her compliance might be the freer” (94). Dwelling on the “reason” she has to love Clarissa, Mrs. Harlowe conveys a covert threat; if her daughter’s rebellious feelings find their vent in public action as well as private speech, the mother’s love may well become ‘unreasonable’. What Mrs. Harlowe offers is not support against Solmes, but an ‘unreal’, extended space for her daughter to control her inner feelings; once this self-control is achieved, it will be written out of reality, replaced, as far as regards the rest of the family, with a discussion of wedding clothes and similar matters.5 The father, demanding absolute obedience, does not need to know what thoughts have preceded it.

For Clarissa, however, this is only a fake solution for her double-bind. If she can subdue her revulsion against Solmes, she ought to have done so before (cf. e.g. 135); if, on the other hand, she cannot, then her mother’s offer is useless. As the conflict progresses, her family’s repeated threats should she disobey, and their promises should she submit, emphasize another, hidden double-bind. Perfect dutifulness suppresses the struggles it may cost a child to attain it – and thus effectually hides the merit of that child.6 It is precisely Clarissa’s usually cheerful obedience which makes it possible for her family to claim that she had always followed her own inclination before. As DelanyDelany, Patrick, correspondent of Richardson notes, writing on the arranging of marriage, parents need to probe their children’s feelings carefully in order to ascertain whether they are really content to marry the person approved of by their parents (see 1.1). The Harlowes, of course, find it convenient to take for granted that what looks like compliance on Clarissa’s part is actually what Clarissa herself wishes. Thus, Mrs. Harlowe claims that the family “have hitherto rather complied with you than you with us” (95). Arabella makes the same point in a more accusatory manner: “We all, indeed, once thought your temper soft and amiable: but why was it?—You never was contradicted before: you had always your own way” (139–40). The merit of obedience can thus become apparent only after it has broken down into resistance – but this very resistance constitutes a breach of duty.

Both perfect obedience and rebellion, then, tend to make recognition of a child’s merit impossible. Grandison contains a similar double-bind. Relying on Clementina’s “characteristic duty” (3:314), her family try to pressure and cajole her into marrying the Count of Belvedere. When she flees to England in order to escape this marriage, the “least reparation the dear creature can make [them], the Bishop [her brother] says, is, chearfully to give her vows to” that same man (3:328). If Clementina is ‘good’, her obedience is a matter of course; if she is not ‘good’, then she must make up for this by more obedience. Eventually, the hero finds a solution for this double-bind; Clementina is granted the exertion of her free choice (cf. 3.6). However, for Clarissa, the conflict will ultimately be solved by taking on herself the sin of leaving her “father’s house”. By actually becoming and taking on the role of a sinful daughter (both of Mr. Harlowe and of God), her guilt as well as her merit become visible and meaningful. Clarissa becomes both Eve-like and Christ-like; a sinner as well as an innocent sufferer who takes on herself the guilt of others.

The contradictory demands for openness and cheerful submission are replayed in Clarissa’s relationship to Lovelace. Like Mr. Harlowe, Lovelace desires Clarissa’s submission,7 and like her mother, he desires that this should be an expression of her interiority: “The heart, Clary, is what I want”, Mrs. Harlowe insists (103). The demand is perhaps an echo of such passages as this one from The Whole Duty of Man: God “requires the heart, and not the lips only” of those who pray (126; Sunday V). Uttered by mere human beings, however, it takes on different connotations. Significantly, Mrs. Harlowe’s word “want”, unlike the term chosen by AllestreeAllestree, Richard, can be interpreted as both ‘desire’ and ‘lack’; both are equally true for the Harlowes and for Lovelace (cf. R. EricksonErickson, Robert A. 188, 205). Demanding the heart is, in effect, a demand for the whole being of a person: “The heart, physiologically as well as in the sense of mind, emotion, sincerity, courage, commitment, integrity, inner religious conviction, and above all—by the mid-eighteenth century—compassion, comes to stand for the essential core of humanity” (R. Erickson 186).

Despite these similarities between Lovelace and the Harlowes, however, there is a crucial difference. The demands of Clarissa’s family are ultimately reconcilable with social norms. If she could control herself so entirely as to marry Solmes and become a respectful wife, the Harlowes (at least the older generation) would be satisfied. This is not so with Lovelace, whose attitude to the system of duty, as we have seen above, is selfishly ambivalent if not hostile. The idea that Clarissa might be influenced by other motives than her feelings for him “mortifies [his] pride”: “this exalted creature, if I were to marry her, would not be governed in her behaviour to me by love, but by generosity merely, or by blind duty; and had rather live single, than be mine” (669). Lovelace counters this mortifying vision by an alternative of his own. His ideal Clarissa is not only “governed” by true love, but is even oblivious to everything except Lovelace’s desires:

I would have the woman whom I honour with my name, if ever I confer this honour upon any, forgo even her superior duties for me. I would have her look after me when I go out, as far as she can see me […]; and meet me at my return with rapture. I would be the subject of her dreams, as well as of her waking thoughts. I would have her look upon every moment lost, that is not passed with me: sing to me, read to me, play to me when I pleased; no joy so great as in obeying me. […] Be a Lady Easy to all my pleasures, and valuing those most, who most contributed to them; only sighing in private, that it was not herself at the time […]. (669–70)

And when his obsessive8 analysis and manipulation of Clarissa ends in her utter rejection of him and in her death, he demands, now literally, what he could not attain in her life: “her heart, to which I have such unquestionable pretensions […]. I will keep it in spirits” (1384). In their absolute demands on Clarissa, the Harlowes and Lovelace arrogate to themselves God’s place. Lovelace goes even further in this than the heroine’s family; while they see her duty as culminating in obedience to her family, Lovelace’s wishes in the above quote go directly against the system of duty. Their desire to keep Clarissa to themselves succeeds, indeed, in partly severing her bonds to other human beings. However, as, in David GrahamGraham, David, correspondent of Richardson’s words, she “steadily […] keep[s her] Eye on [God]” (cf. 1.2), this merely results in her turning from them and to God: “God will have no rivals in the hearts of those he sanctifies” (1338).

Like the Harlowes and Lovelace, Anna Howe desires Clarissa’s heart. In contrast to them, however, she neither expects to fill all Clarissa’s heart, nor does she arrogate to herself a right to control. Instead, knowledge of her friend’s feelings – due, as they both agree, to their friendship – will enable her to give the best possible advice. However, both Anna and Lovelace frequently find that the feelings they impute to Clarissa cannot be ascertained to be either real or not. What is at issue is not only the question of which feelings Clarissa may actually hide, but also what the quality of those feelings is. Clarissa’s “heart” is controllable and yet unmanageable, an open book and yet opaque. When Belford for the first time tries to persuade Lovelace to marry her, he notes Lovelace’s inconsistency in pleading both that Clarissa has been led into error by him, and so may be seduced by others, and that Clarissa does not love him enough: “are not the pretences thou makest for further trial most ungratefully, as well as contradictorily, founded upon the supposition of error in her, occasioned by her favour to thee?” For Belford, “there is no reason to doubt” that Clarissa is in love, although she has such “a command […] over herself, that such a penetrating self-flatterer as [Lovelace is] sometimes ready to doubt it” (502). However, although Belford’s is an accurate summary of Lovelace’s wavering, it also emphasizes difficulties of interpretation, for if self-control can hide love, how can love be ascertained?

To the extent that Lovelace’s wavering is caused by his difficulties of reading Clarissa – as opposed to his general unwillingness to marry – it has as much to do with a struggle with the system of duty as with his struggle with a specific woman. Lovelace feels uncomfortable with this system, which is based on individual roles rather than on the equal return of actions. Legally and financially independent, the system of duty would still press him into obligations which he shuns. As we have seen, he usually acknowledges duties based on status only to press it into his own service: his uncle is “undutiful” and therefore undeserving of respect; Anna breaks a maternal command, and therefore should be punished by him. His wilful misreading of the system shows to what extent the system of duty puts high demands even onto those most seemingly powerful. For although this code may criminalize opposition to a man like Lovelace, directly subordinate only to political authority, he is still bound by it to his duty, a state he finds intolerable: “Everything I do that is good is but as I ought!—Everything of a contrary nature is brought into the most glaring light against me!—Is this fair?” (420).

Mr. B., the rake who reforms and who marries the woman he has pursued, does think it fair. When Pamela suffers from anxiety before the wedding, he comforts her by reminding her that he “joyfully subscribe[s]” to every part of the marriage service (340). Because the duties of spouses are reciprocal, and because both he and Pamela want to fulfil their obligations to each other, everything will turn out well. Lovelace, in contrast, desires a position where he is under no obligations, so that all his good deeds are voluntary favours. In matters where he is just or generous – good manners, generosity to tenants or to “his Rosebud” – he tries to draw on a system of gift giving where, having the power to oblige others, he can then control them through their duty to reciprocate. However, according to the system of duty, these same acts are merely the fulfilled duties of justice and charity. As Clarissa stresses more than once (sometimes too severely, but in general justly), he has no right to be proud of doing merely what he should: “TRUE GENEROSITY is not confined to pecuniary instances: it is more than politeness: it is more than good faith: it is more than honour: it is more than justice: since all these are but duties, and what a worthy mind cannot dispense with” (594).

However, Lovelace does not ‘merely’ wilfully abuse the system of duty; rather, he seems genuinely puzzled by it. When he ponders Clarissa’s feelings for him or admires her virtue, he is disturbed by the ways in which her emotions may be due to her sense of moral duty rather than to his influence over her. Unlimited agency – not only inward, but outward – is paramount for Lovelace. Indeed, TaylorTaylor, E. Derek diagnoses “a ‘god-complex’” (Reason and Religion 120): to describe his actions, Lovelace uses the language of divine power, and like God, he combines omnipotence with the claim that he is not responsible for his creatures’ misdeeds (121). There seems to be an appropriateness to this combination of puzzlement and abuse of divinely instituted systems: both aspects of Lovelace’s thinking/self-representation reject the possibility of a power greater than himself, “whose Plot not even [he] can escape” (123). As Taylor argues persuasively, however, Lovelace is unable to genuinely reject the system which he perverts; “he is a believer who will not accept the logical ramifications of his belief, or, put another way, a believer who will not believe” (139). In his relations to God, this may put him beyond the reach of mercy. In his relations to Clarissa, it means that he can never attain his desires, or fully reach the “heart” he wants.

Lovelace desires Clarissa’s virtue, but that virtue, he thinks, will stand between him and her. Although she will make a good wife to him, he speculates, she “would not be governed in her behaviour to me by love, but […] by blind duty” (669).9 However, for Clarissa herself, the love achieved out of a sense of duty is almost indistinguishable from ‘spontaneous’ love; her affection for her father certainly feels natural enough to Lovelace to make him jealous (cf. 489).10 Thus, Lovelace’s puzzlement is to some extent a misreading: if Clarissa is going to love him at all, it will be the joint, and un-severable, result of both duty and attraction. As he himself observes, virtue in her is either “native” or rooted as deep as life:

Then her LOVE OF VIRTUE seems to be principle, native, or if not native, so deeply rooted that its fibres have struck into her heart, and, as she grew up, so blended and twisted themselves with the strings of life that I doubt there is no separating of the one, without cutting the others asunder.

What then can be done to make such a matchless creature as this get over the first tests, in order to put her to the grand proof, whether once overcome, she will not be always overcome? (657)

Seemingly unconscious of the implication of his own words, Lovelace ponders how he can distinguish Clarissa’s “love of virtue” from the rest of her heart. He acknowledges that they are inseparable, only to express all the more determination to disentangle the (as far as he is concerned) two driving forces of her actions, virtue and love for him. However, according to his own words, he is thus occupied in a task which he cannot achieve except by her death. Ironically, it is Lovelace – the one who flouts his pleasure in word-play and twists of meaning (cf. e.g. CastleCastle, Terry, Clarissa’s Ciphers 84) – who is far more preoccupied in penetrating the true core of Clarissa’s being than Clarissa is in fully understanding his.

Interestingly, Lovelace seems to achieve a deeper understanding, or at least acceptance, of the system of duty towards the end of the novel, when Clarissa is dying. After he has been persuaded to stay away from her, but still has hopes of her recovery, he imagines her marrying him and being a good wife out of duty (1234–5) – no longer impatiently, but eagerly. This belated acceptance of her moral values implies a hidden potential for reform on the villain’s part, and perhaps a parallel of the heroine’s own religious development. In one episode, Lovelace even shows a deeper understanding of Clarissa than his supposedly reforming friend Belford. Once he hears of Mr. Brand’s calumnious letter, he presses Belford to show it to Clarissa, predicting that it will comfort her to know that her family believe they have good reasons for their severity (1291). Belford at first fears that she will suffer from the slur on her reputation rather than be comforted, but he does as Lovelace requires him – and indeed, Clarissa finds more comfort than grief in this letter. These hopeful appearances, however, are put into question by Lovelace’s inability to transfer his veneration of Clarissa into a new conception of women – or, indeed, mankind – in general.

This is exemplified, among other things, in a strange scene of impersonation which takes place as Lovelace comes to London in order to force a visit to the dying heroine. He is staying at Mrs. Sinclair’s (for reasons of practicality which are not entirely convincing). To “pacify” Lovelace’s reproaches, the bawd offers to show him “a new face that would please [him]”, and Lovelace accepts with some curiosity – only to encounter Sally, who greets him with caresses and then impersonates Clarissa: “I’ll be virtuous for a quarter of an hour and mimic your Clarissa to the life” (1217). The entire scene is surprising, although hardly detailed enough to be shocking at this stage. There is a gratuitous quality to it. As a last bid by the prostitutes to win round Lovelace, it seems a hopeless scheme, and as mockery, too audacious for women who had been made to cry even by the less threatening Belford for their behaviour to Clarissa (1067). Nor is the scene detailed enough to move the reader in a similar way as Mowbray’s callous letter does after Clarissa’s death. For that, there is too little detail; Lovelace sums up Sally’s performance in a single sentence. Despite his curses for her insults to Clarissa, “the little devil was not to be balked; but fell a crying, sobbing, praying, begging, exclaiming, fainting, so that I never saw my lovely girl so well aped; and I was almost taken in; for I could have fancied I had her before me once more” (1217). This description can hardly persuade the reader who has gone through pages of the heroine’s moving “crying, sobbing, praying” that Sally’s performance is similar; it can neither highlight Clarissa’s authenticity through her enemies’ affectation, nor can it question it by showing the reader that exclaiming and fainting of the virtuous and the wicked are actually indistinguishable. What, if any, effect does this little scene have, then?11 And what does it mean to “ape” Clarissa?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word can mean imitation both in an absurd and in a good or neutral way; Lovelace seems to use the word in the latter sense (OED, “ape, v.”). Yet mere imitation of Clarissa’s general manners is not at stake here; indeed, at Colonel Ambrose’s ball and elsewhere, Lovelace had rejected as insipid and soulless the beauty and behaviour of other women, and throughout the novel, he had been eager to find explanations for virtuous women’s behaviour as different from Clarissa’s as possible. When he describes the women at Hampstead, for example, he interprets Miss Rawlins as curious rather than concerned for the heroine, and he speculates that Anna cautions Clarissa against him out of jealously rather than out of concern for her friend’s welfare (cf. 2.5). This despite repeated reports that Clarissa’s skill and virtue have a tangible influence on her environment – thus demonstrating both the force of virtue and women’s potential to recognise and imitate good things. Anna Howe mentions, for instance, that Clarissa’s example has made it habitual for women to do needlework while visiting (1471), and Brand reports that she “gave the fashion to the fashionable” (1190). While these are minor improvements, they still indicate that Clarissa has an impact both on the inside and the outside of her acquaintances.12 Yet when faced with a “little devil’s” personification of his “angel”, Lovelace shows peculiarly little resistance, and although he at first claims that he “could not bear such an insult upon the dear creature” (1217), he ends up fancying the absent “angel” embodied in the “devil” before him.

Revealingly, Lovelace continues his summary of Sally’s “aping” not with his own immediate reaction to it (we in fact never learn whether he continued cursing her or whether the performance really “pacified” him), but with pondering the nature of women:

Oh this sex! this artful sex! There’s no minding them. At first, indeed, their grief and their concern may be real: but give way to the hurricane, and it will soon die away in soft murmurs, trilling upon your ears like the notes of a well-tuned viol. And, by Sally, one sees that art will generally so well supply the place of nature, that you shall not easily know the difference. Miss Harlowe, indeed, is the only woman in the world, I believe, that can say, in the words of her favourite Job (for I can quote a text as well as she), But it is not so with me. (1217)

Instead of spurning Sally’s performance as meaningless mockery, then, Lovelace accepts it as authentic – if not of Clarissa’s, then at least of ‘woman’s’ nature.13 He thus implicitly subscribes to the prostitutes’ earlier claims that Clarissa’s virtue is essentially of the same quality as their own was, that it is a habit which can be broken once and for all. He acknowledges Clarissa’s special status only to separate her from other women. Despite his earlier claims that “the sex” in general are concerned in Clarissa’s trials, he still subscribes to the dichotomy of ‘woman’ and ‘angel’, and a woman who cannot be turned into a ‘devil’ must be an angel, rather than simply virtuous. What an indifferent or virtuous observer would have seen in Sally’s performance, then, does not matter – the point is that Lovelace still recognises ‘art’ as the essence of femininity. He has come to acknowledge Clarissa’s virtue, but this has not changed his essential view of the world: “Seeing Clarissa as angelic—a saint, not a woman—allows Lovelace to avoid altering his perception of women” (GwilliamGwilliam, Tassie 82). This becomes apparent in his reaction to her allegorical letter as well, where he enthusiastically states that he will agree to any conditions that are set him before he may unite with her (1233–4). Lovelace is perfectly serious, thinking mainly of Clarissa’s disputed estate and other worldly matters. Yet when it becomes clear that his repentance and reformation, rather than economic generosity, are demanded for a reunion in heaven, Lovelace does not even momentarily consider this condition – his repentance is confined to Clarissa herself, and to worldly punishments or rewards.