Simone Höhn - One Great Family - Domestic Relationships in Samuel Richardson's Novels

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.