Читать книгу One Great Family: Domestic Relationships in Samuel Richardson's Novels - Simone Höhn - Страница 13

In the face of the difficulty in deciding between the essence and the semblance of virtue, many characters in Richardson’s novels try to read the evidence of the body to guess at the mind. The body, however, takes on a double role. On the one hand, it can confirm the sincerity of the mind – as in the tears frequently shed by Lovelace and his associates, who feel some compunction even while trying to trick Clarissa. Interestingly, the heroine is generally correct in recognising the tears as involuntary and thus authentic expressions of the inner life of those she deals with, but she is frequently mistaken in the exact cause and amount of the ‘affectedness’ of those weeping. In these situations, the body is under the sway of the mind, it is its visible manifestation. However, this opens the possibility of the body turning traitor, betraying parts of the mind which reason would have remain hidden – Lovelace acts out this aspect when he describes to Belford his ‘murder’ of his embodied conscience, which has so frequently ‘betrayed’ him into tears while confronting Clarissa (848). Moreover, if body and mind are connected, the former can turn traitor in another sense, by infesting the soul with the taint of physical desire.

The idea that the body can attest to the reality of emotion can be found in writers very far from Richardson’s outlook. Bernard MandevilleMandeville, Bernard, for example, notoriously argues in his Fable of the Bees that women’s blushing is a public reaction, which will not occur when they are alone: “[L]et them talk as much Bawdy as they please in the Room next to the same Virtuous Young Woman, where she is sure that she is undiscover’d, and she will hear, if not hearken to it, without blushing at all, because then she looks upon herself as no Party concern’d” (65).1 Blushing is thus not a sign of wounded modesty, but of shame, caused by a fear that the woman’s innermost immodest thoughts have been guessed at. Mandeville’s description of the young woman highlights the treacherousness of physical reaction: the blush, bodily proof of real emotion, can be misread. Moreover, as in a conjuror’s trick, it signifies both ‘virtue’ and ‘hypocrisy’. The blush is the public symbol of modesty, but because it vanishes in private, it cannot be ‘real’. Mandeville can deny the reality of virgin modesty because he connects it with a sign – the blush – which he already ‘knows’ to be treacherous.

Paradoxically, the body can testify to hypocrisy only because its reactions are also connected to real mental processes. In a passage almost immediately following, MandevilleMandeville, Bernard argues thus on pride and shame:

That these two Passions, in which the Seeds of most Virtues are contained, are Realities in our Frame, and not imaginary Qualities, is demonstrable from the plain and different Effects, that in spite of our Reason are produced in us as soon as we are affected with either.

When a Man is overwhelm’d with Shame, he observes a sinking of the Spirits; the Heart feels cold and condensed, and the Blood flies from it to the Circumference of the Body; the Face glows, the Neck and Part of the Breast partake of the Fire: He is heavy as Lead; the Head is hung down, and the Eyes through a Mist of Confusion are fix’d on the Ground: No Injuries can move him; he is weary of his Being, and heartily wishes he could make himself invisible: But when, gratifying his Vanity, he exults in his Pride, he discovers quite contrary Symptoms; His Spirits swell and fan the Arterial Blood; a more than ordinary Warmth strengthens and dilates the Heart; the Extremities are cool; he feels light to himself, and imagines he could tread on Air; his Head is held up, his Eyes roll’d about with Sprightliness; he rejoices at his Being, is prone to Anger, and would be glad that all the World could take notice of him. (67–7)

Following his statements concerning the blush of modesty, MandevilleMandeville, Bernard’s description of the visible effects of shame and pride gains an ambiguous quality. The man overcome with shame “observes” his bodily symptoms; the man feeling pride, however, “discovers” them, a word which can mean both to ‘find out’ and to ‘display’ (OED, “discover, v.” 5 & 6). Mandeville’s drift in this passage is to demonstrate that shame and fear are real because each man can feel their effect in his very body, in contrast to virgin modesty, which vanishes when a woman is alone.2 However, like the virgin’s blush, the man’s symptoms of pride are displayed, that is, observable, to others than himself, and thus vulnerable to the same kind of public (mis-)reading.3

Lovelace’s probing of Clarissa’s mind via her body is subject to the same paradox. If the ‘public’ testimony of the body is untrustworthy (the virgin blushes when, and because, she is seen), he must penetrate to a deeper level. In one sense, Lovelace can never reach this ‘private’ body, for while he is with Clarissa, he also constitutes her audience (perhaps another reason why he is shaken with Sally’s “aping” of Clarissa – she reminds him of his position as spectator). Indeed, as Tassie GwilliamGwilliam, Tassie has observed, he bases his boasted knowledge of women not only on his direct experience of them, but also on his experience of himself (59). Like a woman – like the virgin who blushes in public but not in private – he was once “bashful”. Paradoxically, however, this self-knowledge does not help him with Clarissa. If she is like him – like the other women he thinks he understands – then she is not the paragon he took her for, but if she is unlike him, then the ‘essence’ of her being may well be beyond his comprehension.

Furthermore, like MandevilleMandeville, Bernard, Lovelace has defined the set-up of his testing of Clarissa in such a way that he can never prove the existence of that virtue he appears to be looking for. Having associated ‘love’ with ‘conquerability’ and ‘virtue’ with ‘coldness’, Lovelace has made it impossible for Clarissa to prove herself both truly virtuous and capable of love – though she must do both to satisfy him. If she responds with the least show of desire, then her virtue must be fake, mere masquerade – identical with the hypocrisy which, he thinks, all his previous victims have displayed. If she does not respond, however, the essence or ‘heart’ of her being (cf. 1.3) must indeed, as Mowbray suggests, “be either iron or marble” (1382), rather than part of a living body. Clarissa’s death, which obviates all difference between public display and private motive/emotion, may be the only definite answer to this dilemma. It is only then, too, that her body might be opened – something which she expressly forbids in her will (1413) but which Lovelace desires. In his temporary madness, he demands Clarissa’s heart as a physical token that his “charmer’s” essence is neither cold marble nor living desire. A final irony of Lovelace’s attitude is that this search after an ‘essence’ – either ‘cold’ or ‘desiring’ – locates Clarissa’s virtue in the body itself rather than in her mind’s control of her impulses. Searching for the ‘truth’ of sexual desire, he becomes oblivious to the truth of her virtuous intentions.

Lovelace is not alone in his troubled attitude to the relationship between body and mind. Not long after he has tricked Clarissa into living at Mrs. Sinclair’s brothel, he invites his four friends, Belford, Belton, Mowbray and Tourville, to see her. The following day, Belford writes a letter to urge Lovelace to marry Clarissa: “I write to tell you that we are all of one opinion with regard to her; which is, that there is not of her age a finer lady in the world, as to her understanding” (555). His commendation of Clarissa’s intelligence is followed by “poorer praise” of her beauty. At the centre of the letter comes a strangely disturbing passage which, judging from later letters by Mowbray, is far from anything he could have written:

You may think what I am going to write too flighty; but, by my faith, I have conceived such a profound reverence for her sense and judgement that, far from thinking the man excusable who should treat her basely, I am ready to regret that such an angel of a lady should even marry. She is, in my eye, all mind: and were she to meet with a man all mind likewise, why should the charming qualities she is mistress of, be endangered? Why should such an angel be plunged so low as into the vulgar offices of domestic life? Were she mine, I should hardly wish to see her a mother unless there were a kind of moral certainty that minds like hers could be propagated. For why, in short, should not the work of bodies be left to mere bodies? (555)

Belford’s flight of fancy is indeed strange. In the very letter designed to urge his friend to marriage, he regrets that “such an angel of a lady should even marry”. In this paragraph, Clarissa’s body seems strangely divided from her mind.4 At the same time, it is Belford’s “eye” that perceives her “mind”; confusingly, Belford mixes up the terms belonging to the body and mind respectively even while trying to keep separate Clarissa’s body and mind. For Belford, the metaphor of the “angel” materialises into a ‘literal’ truth: like the spirits she resembles, Clarissa has no body, or at most one that seems foreign to her essential quality. Insofar as it exists at all, it exists as a threat: the mother’s body that reproduces mankind can kill her in childbed. In his first (extant) letter to Lovelace, he had urged him to marry to continue the family line; according to Belford’s original argument, “the vulgar offices of domestic life” are precisely what Clarissa is needed for (cf. 501–2). This new letter suddenly problematizes this. The body is attached to “vulgar offices” and connected to the uncertainty of life; it cannot be trusted to reproduce its possessor’s qualities. In Belford’s vision, the maternal body is powerless and endangered, a striking contrast to the harmonious and harmony-inducing mother’s body presented in Grandison’s breast-feeding scene (cf. 3.1), or to the repeated claim in Grandison that all women who can find a good husband should become wives and mothers, since “a woman out of wedlock is half useless to the end of her being” (1:25).

The paragraph stands in strange contrast, as well, to the preceding passage, where Belford praises Clarissa’s “so awful, and yet so sweet, […] aspect”, her “piercing, yet gentle eye” and her “sweet smile darting through the cloud that overspread her fair face; demonstrating that she had more apprehensions and grief at her heart than she cared to express!” (555). In the passage just quoted, Clarissa’s body is infused with her mind, so that the latter can indeed be read by Belford’s “eye”. Her facial expression conceals and expresses simultaneously; even the convoluted grammar of the sentence, which makes it unclear whether it is the “smile” or the “cloud” that demonstrates the “grief at her heart”, mirrors Clarissa’s inner conflict. The passage implies a connection between body and mind that is directly refuted in the very next paragraph.

What, then, makes Clarissa’s body so threatening that Belford has to deny it? One explanation that springs to mind is the topos of the dichotomy between angel and whore. Indeed, Lovelace equals ‘woman’ with ‘conquerable’, and thus with the women he has already conquered. The reader learns that some of these have died in childbed, while others have become prostitutes, like the “little devil” Sally Martin. In these cases, the body has indeed proved murderous or tainting. Belford seems to be trying to distance Clarissa as far as possible from these other women whom Lovelace has seduced: “[I]n the article thou seekest to subdue her for, a mere sensualist of her sex […] would make a sensualist a thousand times happier than she either will or can” (556). Physical pleasure is best provided by “mere bodies”; Clarissa, “all mind”, is hardly worth pursuit on that count.5 Belford’s formulations suggest that he is, for the moment, more absorbed in his own impression of Clarissa than focussed on persuading Lovelace. Indeed, he imagines Clarissa as “his own” rather than his friend’s (or, indeed, her own): an object which can be possessed but, simultaneously, desecrated through use. It is as if there exists no space for a woman above “mere body”. Belford’s language points to the tragic conclusion of the book; Clarissa indeed never has children.

If Belford tries to establish an incommensurable gap between Clarissa’s body and mind,6 Lovelace tries to bridge it – although the only way to achieve this seems to be to lower the ‘angel’ into a ‘mere’ woman. The two rakes, different as they are in their intentions as to Clarissa, seem yet very much in agreement as to the relationship between body and mind. Both, for example, “construe pregnancy as an acknowledgment of the body, even as an acknowledgment of desire” (GwilliamGwilliam, Tassie 83). One fears this acknowledgment as degrading, the other welcomes it as providing his chance for dominion – although that dominion will also destroy some of Clarissa’s worth as a conquest. Lovelace’s expectation that physical possession will equal possession of the mind connects him to the rakes of amatory fiction of the early eighteenth century. In Delarivier ManleyManley, Delarivier’s New Atalantis, for example, Charlot, initially virtuous, gives in to her love for her guardian after he rapes her:

Her first emotions [when she sees him] were all joy but in a minute she recollected her self, thinking he was not come there for nothing. […] Whilst yet her surprise made her doubtful of his designs, he took advantage of her confusion to accomplish ’em. Neither her prayers, tears, nor strugglings could prevent him, but in her arms he made himself a full amends for all those pains he had suffered for her.

[…] ’Twas very long before he could appease her, but so artful, so amorous, so submissive was his address, so violent his assurances – he told her, that he must have died without the happiness – Charlot espoused his crime by sealing his forgiveness. He passed the whole night in her arms – pleased, transported, and out of himself – whilst the ravished maid was not at all behindhand in ecstasies and guilty transports. (39–40)

ManleyManley, Delarivier plays on the several meanings of “ravish”; Charlot has been raped, but the conquest of her body has also captivated her mind. Similarly, in Eliza HaywoodHaywood, Eliza’s The Masqueraders, part I, Philecta barely manages to resist her love for the rake Dorimenus – but once he subdues her body, in a passage that obscures the boundaries between aggressive seduction and rape, she succumbs to him entirely (41–3). In the second part, it is Dorimenus’s wife who, after attending a masquerade, succumbs to something in-between seduction and rape (ironically, it is her own husband who “ravishes” her; because they are both masked, neither recognises the other). In Haywood’s delicate phrasing, Dorimenus “satiated his utmost Wish,---but it was in such a manner, that the fair Nun [his wife’s masquerade habit] could neither accuse herself of a too easy granting, nor him of an absolute Force in taking” (17). Although she initially resists the advances of her masked admirer, she is ready to meet him again once he has gained possession of her body. “[O]nce subdued, always subdued” (675), as Lovelace says: this is the pattern of amorous fiction he intends to repeat (cf. also DoodyDoody, Margaret Anne, A Natural Passion 137–50).7

His first attempt at rape is quite close to this script. In the fire scene, Clarissa is confused and frightened; she is also half undressed (in New Atalantis, as in FannyCleland, John Hill, prolonged seduction or rape scenes tend to take place after at least one of the characters has just bathed and is not fully dressed). Nevertheless, she keeps enough self-control to persuade Lovelace to leave her; as soon as he is out of the room, she locks and bars the door. It is shortly before this aborted attempt at ‘seduction’ that Lovelace fantasizes about Clarissa nursing his twin children:

Let me perish, Belford, if I would not forgo the brightest diadem in the world for the pleasure of seeing a twin Lovelace at each charming breast, drawing from it his first sustenance; the pious task continued for one month, and no more!

I now, methinks, behold this most charming of women in this sweet office, pressing with her fine fingers the generous flood into the purple mouths of each eager hunter by turns: her conscious eye now dropped on one, now on the other, with a sigh of maternal tenderness; and then raised up to my delighted eye, full of wishes, for the sake of the pretty varlets, and for her own sake, that I would deign to legitimate; that I would condescend to put on the nuptial fetters. (706)

In Lovelace’s vision, he holds power over Clarissa’s reputation as well as her mind – a power which stems from his conquest of her body. The fantasy gains special significance if read in the light of Thomas LaqueurLaqueur, Thomas’s study Making Sex, where he shows that from antiquity into the eighteenth century, standard medical treatises assumed women could not conceive a child without orgasm (2–3).8 In this context, Clarissa’s imagined conception of children testifies to her pleasure in sexual intercourse. The theme continues to appeal to Lovelace. As Clarissa is dying, he reads one of her “meditations” and, in a typically wilful misreading, claims that it expresses her dismay at being pregnant. If this is true, he thinks, it would “prove, in this charming frost-piece, the triumph of nature over principle […]: and then, for [her child’s] sake, I am confident she will live, and will legitimate it” (1147). The triumph will be two-fold. A child, Lovelace thinks, will force her to marry her rapist after all, but its very existence would also be a “triumph” of her natural sexual desires over her virtue. What Lovelace hopes for is more than simple ‘possession’; rather, he hopes to reach a level of Clarissa’s being that is all love for him, a kind of ‘essence’ that is not ‘angelic’ or ‘cold’, and thus not resistant.

There are other passages which gain new poignancy – and perhaps clarity – if read with LaqueurLaqueur, Thomas’s statement in mind. Among other things, it adds a motive for Clarissa’s brother to force her to marry Solmes. The proposed marriage settlements state that the Harlowes will inherit Solmes’s estate should Clarissa die without children (81). Clarissa traces this to her family’s greed, calling it a “chimerical” hope – but, depending on what kind of medical knowledge James may have, this hope would be cynical rather than chimerical (62). Later in the novel, Clarissa’s uncle asks her if she has “any reason to think [her]self with child by this villain?” (1192). Given the Harlowes’ general suspicions both of Lovelace and Clarissa, it is unlikely that he is merely asking her if she is still a virgin. Clarissa, in any case, declines a direct answer. Instead, she asserts that “a little, a very little time, will better answer [this cruel question] than I can: for I am not either a hardened or shameless creature: if I were, I should not have been so solicitous to obtain the favour [of forgiveness and a last blessing] I sued for” (1193). Time, of course, does not bring evidence of Clarissa’s pregnancy.9 Nevertheless, it is her dying body which finally answers the implicit accusations of her uncle’s letter. Lovelace has dreamed of Clarissa’s body testifying against her. After the rape, he regrets having drugged her, both because he at first fears that it has caused lasting insanity and because it empties the sexual act of the meaning he wishes to attach to it. As Clarissa is not fully conscious, the rape is neither a test of her love nor a true act of conquering; his charm or virility have very little to do with consummation. When body and mind cannot react, they cannot yield.

But Clarissa’s body does, in fact, testify, and with a vengeance. Various reasons for her death have been suggested, including explicit or implicit statements that she commits suicide (e.g. BronfenBronfen, Elisabeth 150 and CastleCastle, Terry, Clarissa’s Ciphers 126). Margaret DoodyDoody, Margaret Anne counters the claim that she starves herself with the possibility that Clarissa dies from a “galloping consumption”, before pointing out that the medical cause of her death is irrelevant (A Natural Passion 171). Terry EagletonEagleton, Terry has an alternative explanation: “Clinically speaking, Clarissa dies of depression” (90). This interpretation is perhaps as near the mark as the other, or nearer, in locating the heroine’s death in her psyche. When Pamela is threatened with rape, she falls into a deathlike swoon; Clarissa is really raped, so she dies. The body, both times, directs attention to and confirms the truthfulness of the mind.10 Juliet McMasterMcMaster, Juliet states that Lovelace’s “control over [Clarissa’s] body still leaves him powerless over her mind” (Reading the Body 21); I would argue that even his control over the body – extending to his drugging and raping her – is comparatively superficial. He had hoped to control her mind through her body, but ultimately, it is her mind which brings even her body out of his reach.

The body, then, can figure as an extension of, not just as a contrast to, the mind. Where they are under good regulation, they merge into one. Thus, in one of his letters, Richardson describes the development of love in terms of body and mind: “Bodies may be sundered in Youth, may be torne from each other, and other Bodies may supply the Loss: For the Loves of Youth have more in them of Body, than of Mind, let Lovers fancy what they will. But in Age a Seperation [sic] may be called a Seperation of Souls” (Sabor, Correspondence 40; 15 Dec. 1748, to Lady BradshaighBradshaigh, Lady, correspondent of Richardson). While this statement clearly subscribes to a difference in value between body and soul, it describes “body” rather as an inevitability than as an evil, as a human frailty which may turn to good rather than as something which has to be eschewed altogether. Thus, while the love of body must be subordinate to the love of mind – as Mr. B. finally comes to value Pamela’s mind above her beauty –, Richardson’s characters nevertheless express it openly – for example, in the caresses shared between Pamela and Mr. B. even before he marries her.

Body becomes problematic mainly in Clarissa, and there, mainly for the two rakes Lovelace and Belford and for the dying heroine. However, for the latter, her “clinging body” (cf. 1265) seems a nuisance rather than an evil, an obstacle to be overcome as she leaves the material, imperfect world for heaven. For Lovelace and Belford, in contrast, the body is problematic already in this life: for them, it stands in almost binary opposition to the soul. Thus, Lovelace can envisage only Clarissa the frail woman (body) or the unconquerable angel (mind); neither of them, however, can he marry. Similarly, Belford’s admiration of Clarissa culminates in repeated statements that she is too much soul to be married. Indeed, both rakes – the one who will reform and the one who will not – seem to require a saint rather than a woman. John MullanMullan, John has claimed that “Richardson mythologizes femininity—and, like many male writers before and since, he isolates virginity as its essential representation” (67). This is an accurate description of the rakes’ initial attitudes, but it hardly accounts for Clarissa’s courageous confrontation of Lovelace after the rape (noted, for example, in Sarah Fielding’s Remarks on ClarissaFielding, Sarah, correspondent of Richardson 33–4), or for the celebration of bodily pleasures in Pamela and Grandison (cf. DoodyDoody, Margaret Anne, A Natural Passion, and 3.1). Ironically, the rakes’ insistence that Clarissa is an angel rather than a woman signalises their own lack of a well-regulated mind; they need Clarissa to be saintly so that she can connect them to the divine.

Clarissa’s relationship to God is direct and unmediated, although she relies on the guidance and example of admired friends to strengthen her faith. Lovelace, in contrast, “can see heaven only through [Clarissa]” (DoodyDoody, Margaret Anne, A Natural Passion 181). Similarly, Belford relies on “the divine SOCRATES, and the divine CLARISSA” (884) to prove the existence of a rewarding heaven, and envisages her as a saving angel who carries him to heaven (1275).11 This idea complements Lovelace’s dream, where Clarissa, in a scene reminiscent of Catholic images of Mary and of Christ rising from the tomb, is exalted into heaven, while he falls into the abyss (1218; cf. also Doody, A Natural Passion 235–8). Indeed, Lovelace (and his family) builds all his hopes of salvation on Clarissa’s direct agency: she must forgive him as a precondition for God’s forgiveness, she must guide and reward him – and yet all this without any shadow of ‘womanly’ weakness. His continued distrust of female virtue highlights that, as he admires Clarissa more and more, he does so as a saint rather than as a human being.

Clarissa’s religious journey – her steady preparation for death, in which she throws off not only her “clinging” body but even “weans” herself from the people she loves – might seem to confirm the rakes’ belief that body and soul co-exist at best in an uneasy truce. Yet the heroine’s holy death, where she relinquishes everything in this world that has been dear to her, is succeeded by an affirmation of these same worldly concerns. Clarissa’s will, for example, re-affirms all her earlier responsibilities and joys – including duty to her family, friends and servants, but also the disposition of her clothes, jewellery, and musical instruments. The renunciation of the dying, clearly, is not to be imitated by the survivors. Similarly, Clarissa’s almost single-minded preparation for death is contrasted by Anna’s outline of Clarissa’s daily and weekly schedule while living, where “closet-duties” (which seem to include prayers, her toilet, and her correspondence) take up only three hours of each day, albeit the first three. Renunciation of her body, and of the world as a whole, then, is not a general necessity but the result of Lovelace’s efforts to distinguish between body and soul.

This chapter seems to have led us a far way from the system of duty – appropriately, perhaps, because Lovelace’s testing of Clarissa is, likewise, incompatible with it. AllestreeAllestree, Richard assumes that human beings are by their nature fallible, but must strive to be as free from faults as possible; seducing another to sin is one of the gravest crimes. Lovelace, in contrast, sets up temptations to Clarissa in order to prove her in-fallible – or to make her “[his] upon [his] own terms” (886). For most of the novel, moreover, it seems that he can locate true virtue only in some kind of ‘essence’ of the soul. This is why Clarissa’s behaviour, however ‘cold’ and virtuous, cannot convince him of her sincerity. It is as if Allestree’s father-king tried to torment his subjects in order to discover the point at which they will turn from obedience to rebellion – a test which can only end in the ruin of at least one of the parties involved.

Lovelace’s probing of Clarissa’s soul is, of course, doomed in another way as well, since he needs her to desire him even more strongly than he needs her to be virtuous. However, because he has defined desire as the opposite of virtue, he can never accept her as a woman who embodies both.12 Indeed, at one point, Belford warns him that he should not test Clarissa for too long because no woman can hold out against all temptations: “if I preferred a lady as I know thou dost this to all the women in the world, I should dread to make further trial, knowing what we know of the sex, for fear of succeeding” (501). Belford, like Lovelace, is proved wrong in this point. However, his caution is true in another sense. Passion and virtue can coexist in a woman, but only if this possibility is accepted by the men around her. Lovelace, who will not accept the system of duty, thereby produces the need for a binary opposition between body and mind. In contrast, the good men of Grandison (and the reforming Mr. B.) – who acknowledge and celebrate the union of desiring/desirable body and virtuous mind – enable and enjoy its existence.