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

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.

The complex relationship between authentic feelings and feelings as performance can be exemplified with the topos of the masquerade. At a masquerade, anything bad can happen. Pamela’s Mr. B. starts an affair there – although he claims it never really passes the limits of “ Platonick Nonsense” ( Pamela in her Exalted Condition 457) –, Harriet Byron is abducted from one, and even Henry Fielding’s Tom JonesFielding, Henry, who can find trouble anywhere, is entangled worse than ever when he follows Lady Bellaston home from a masquerade. “[F]oolish, irrational, and corrupt” (CastleCastle, Terry, Masquerade and Civilization 2), a masquerade in early eighteenth-century fiction constitutes a gathering of the weak and the wicked. The best which a virtuous person can hope for if she (rarely he) attends one inadvertently is to escape with a sense of disgust and boredom. Curiously, the frequent denunciation of masquerades as a diversion that can offer no real pleasure seems to fit ill with the danger they are assumed to pose to virtue. Harriet’s assurance that the masquerade which proved so nearly fatal to her never gave her pleasure (1:426) is psychologically plausible. However, such accounts raise the question as to what the attraction of masquerades is in the first place, and why they can exist at all so as to entice innocent people to their own ruin. More sympathetic accounts emphasise the unusual freedom a masked ball provides, especially for women:

It is delightful to me to be able to wander about in a crowd, making my observations, and conversing with whomsoever I please, without being liable to be stared at or remarked upon, and to speak to whom I please, and run away from them the moment I have discovered their stupidity. (Harriette Wilson, qtd. in CastleCastle, Terry, Masquerade and Civilization 44)

Pamela in her Exalted Condition illustrates this freedom (and the risks it entails) in more detail – not in the person of the heroine, but in that of the Countess Dowager who all but initiates the ensuing flirtation with Mr. B., a married man (366–8, 441–3).

The liberty to move and speak freely comes attended with dangers. Sir Charles’s somewhat awkward statement that “[m]asquerades […] are not creditable places for young ladies to be known to be insulted at them” ( Grandison 1:143) expresses them, in its carefully objective tone, rather more convincingly than the more hysterical accounts of rapes such as the one described in Eliza HaywoodHaywood, Eliza’s Female Spectator (24–9; vol. I, bk. I). Much more is at stake at the masquerade than the danger that libertines can commit crimes anonymously. The trope that everyone “‘wears a Habit which speaks him the Reverse of what he is’” comes closer to the threat that is constituted by the masquerade ( Universal Spectator , qtd. in CastleCastle, Terry, Masquerade and Civilization 5). If the quintessential costume represents “an inversion of one’s nature” (5), it simultaneously rejects and exposes the roles assumed by respectable people in everyday life. The uncertain relation between ‘truth’ and ‘deceit’, the imperceptible transition from ‘masquerade’ to hypocrisy to virtue, can be illustrated with another episode from Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (110–15; vol. III, bk. XIII). The virtuous Eudosia suffers the neglect and contempt of her husband Severus, whose disrespect for her goes so far that he introduces his mistress into the household, and “tho’ Eudosia kept her Place at the Head of the Table, yet nothing was served up to it but what was ordered by Laconia” (111). Instead of quarrelling with her husband, however, Eudosia makes a friend of Laconia until she can think of a plan to get rid of her. Finally, she feigns a dangerous illness and tricks Severus into reading her supposed last will – which is that he should marry his mistress. Severus is reclaimed by his wife’s generosity, and Laconia is sent away.

EudosiaHaywood, Eliza’s story is one of several illustrations of exemplary wives who manage to reclaim unworthy husbands through patience and virtue. However, in contrast to many other depictions of long-suffering wives, her behaviour is described as active scheming, rather than simple patience. Indeed, Haywood feels called on to stress this point for her readers:

Some Women will look on this tame enduring in EudosiaHaywood, Eliza as wholly unworthy of a Wife, and too great an Encouragement for other guilty Husbands to treat their Wives in the same Manner; but this Pattern of Prudence and Good-nature knew very well the Temper of the Person she had to deal with, and that nothing was to be gain’d by the Pursuit of any rough Measures. (111)

EudosiaHaywood, Eliza complies with the common advice to wives to return patience for abuse, but the equation ‘good wife = reclaimed husband’ is questioned through the imagined reader response. The familiar story of the virtuous wife, it is suggested, is liable to misreading; by implication, the example of goodness may well fail in reality as it sometimes does in fiction. Pamela, after all, attempts a similar strategy when she suspects her husband of adultery, but the situation initially gets only worse. Mr. B. senses that something is wrong and is almost estranged from her; the two are reconciled when Pamela finally admits to her suspicions (cf. DoodyDoody, Margaret Anne, A Natural Passion 92–6). If Eudosia is, nevertheless, justified in her behaviour, it is because she knows “very well the Temper of the Person she had to deal with”. She is not, that is, simply following the script every wife ought to follow. Rather than keeping to the code of conduct books, she follows her own “Schemes”, tailored to an individual husband (112).