Styles of Meaning and Meanings of Style in Richardson's Clarissa [1 ed.] 9780773567849, 9780773518490

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Styles of Meaning and Meanings of Style in Richardson's Clarissa

Gordon Fulton provides a fascinating new study of styles in Samuel Richardson's masterpiece, Clarissa, connecting the style the characters deploy in their speech and letters with their positions in society. Fulton argues that the novel is a critical examination of the relationship between language and power and an expression of Richardson's own understanding of social interaction as a struggle for personal preeminence and sexual dominance. Using socially and culturally engaged discourse stylistics, Fulton explores ideologies of social formation, gender, and sexuality in the novel. The first part of the study, "Styles of Meaning," discusses Richardson's use of the genres of sententiousness (moral sentiments and proverbs) to engage questions of ideology. Fulton shows how Richardson draws on the socially significant difference between proverbs and maxims to develop contrasting styles in which his characters establish and defend personal identities in relation to family and friends. The second part, "Meanings of Style," explores ways in which meanings created through linguistic choices in the critical domains of gender and sexuality both sustain and sometimes betray characters struggling either to control or to resist being controlled by others. A contribution to both critical discussion of eighteenth-century fiction and to discourse stylistics committed to relating literary texts to their social and cultural contexts, this study introduces a mode of literary stylistic analysis with exciting possibilities for cultural studies. GORDON D. FULTON is assistant professor of English, University of Victoria.

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tyles of Meaning and eanings of Style in Richardson 's Clarissa GORDON D. FULTON

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1999 ISBN 07735-1849-5 Legal deposit second quarter 1999 Bibliothèque nationale du Quebec Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funds have also been received from the University of Victoria. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Fulton, Gordon D. Styles of meaning and meanings of style in Richardson's Clarissa Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1849-5

1. Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761. Clarissa. 2. Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761 - Literary style. 1. Title. PR3664.C43F84 1999 823'.6 C99-900467-0 Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractéra inc., Quebec City

Contents

Acknowledgments vii A Note on the Text xi 1 Introduction: A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa 3 PART ONE

STYLES OF MEANING

2 Proverbs and the Language of Control 33 3 The Moral Sentiment as a Dialogic Style of Meaning 52 PART TWO

M E A N I N G S OF STYLE

4 Surprised by Style: Lovelace, Clarissa, and Language for Love 83 5 Why Look at Clarissa? Physical Description and Richardson's Revision of Libertine Style 112 6 Sentimental Libertinism: Richardson's Reform of Libertine Desire 140 Notes 175 Bibliography 229 Index 245

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Acknowledgments

A line in William Blake's Jerusalem, "Those alone are his friends who admire his minutest powers," and Denis Diderot's statement that he had often taken up Clarissa intending to see how it had been done only to find himself later caught up in uncritical admiration suggest both a motive for stylistic study and an inherent danger in stylistic study of Clarissa: the desire to understand Richardson's achievement in detail can lead to many hours of absorbed, note-free reading as one becomes testimony to that achievement rather than a detached student of it. The image of literary text read in company has been especially important in the reception of Richardson's novels; this study grows out of an interest in Richardson inspired and nourished by teachers and fellow students in numerous settings over a period of many years. Dorothy Parker and Peter Hughes introduced me to Pamela and Clarissa in courses at Victoria College; it was my good fortune to read and discuss Richardson with Susan Robinson and Isobel Grundy at Queen Mary College, and at Westfield College John Chalker was a tolerant and insightful supervisor of the University of London doctoral dissertation from which this study directly derives. Steve Connor and Angus Ross were generous and helpfully critical examiners of that thesis, and in the course of producing this study from it I have benefited from discussing some of its central ideas with, and having chapters read by, Jim Benson, Isobel Grundy, Becky Halvorson, Margot Louis, Judith Mitchell, Richard Pickard, Betty Schellenberg, David Shepherd, and Willie Van Peer. I have also taken advantage of suggestions made by anonymous reviewers for the

viii Acknowledgments Canadian Federation of the Humanities Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme. Amber Perry gave encouragement when I did not know I needed it, Alice Ages when I knew I did. Ian Archibald gave much-needed and timely help with computers. For help with proofreading and scholarly format I am grateful to Cathleen Carosella, and for help with word processing and printing to Colleen Donnelly, Lisa Power, and Diana Rutherford. The sympathetic support of Philip Cercone from McGill-Queen's University Press has been crucial for the publication of this book. It is the better for Judy Williams's editing, and Joan McGilvray has seen it through to publication. References indicate something of my considerable debt to other students of Richardson: three whose work has been especially influential are Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Margaret Anne Doody, whose books did so much to release the reading of Richardson from old prejudices and make the critical study of his novels a respectable activity, and William Beatty Warner, whose book taught me a lot about Clarissa even when I thought I mostly disagreed with it. Earlier versions of chapters 2 and 5 have been published as "Proverbs and the Language of Control in Clarissa," Lumen 14 (1995): 7996 and as "Why Look at Clarissa?" Eighteenth Century Life 20 (1996): 21-32. Work on the thesis and on this book has been carried out in the following libraries, to whose staffs I am indebted for many kindnesses: the Caroline Skeel Library, Westfield College; the University of London Library; the British Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Cambridge University Library; the Morell Library, University of York; the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; the Richardson Library, University of Saskatchewan; the Robarts Library, University of Toronto; the Scott Library, York University; the Frost Library, Glendon College; and the McPherson Library, University of Victoria. I am grateful to the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum for permission to quote from an unpublished letter by John Charming in the Forster Collection. I am also grateful for financial support from the following sources. Work on the theory of register drawn upon in revision of this study was carried out with the aid of a Research Time Stipend from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Grants from the University of Victoria have assisted work on Richardson's unpublished correspondence and supported publication of this book. Studies of eighteenth-century literature informed by linguistic and semiotic theory do not just happen, especially when other, often unsympathetic theories pass through notoriety to wide acceptance. The community of systemic linguistics and social semiotics has been

ix Acknowledgments

the most significant institutional context for my work. Linguists in the English Department at Glendon College, Toronto, in particular Jim Benson and Bill Greaves, generously welcomed me to systemicfunctional linguistics and literary stylistics. Members of the Applied Linguistics Research Working Group at Glendon and participants in International Systemic Congresses have given encouragement and a powerful sense that to study language is to engage in a humane and socially significant activity. I am grateful to fellow members of the Poetics and Linguistics Association for much stimulating and convivial discussion - and for reminding me that not all stylistics is done with systemic lingusitics. One person has been more important than all others. This study is dedicated to Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. She introduced me to stylistics, linguistics, and Glendon; she has given the same clear-minded, critical reading of this study at every stage; and her own scholarly courage and independence of mind have been a constant source of inspiration. It is customary for an acknowledgment to say in this place that words cannot express what the dedicatee has contributed, but that would not be true here, for Kathryn's description of the role of "the voice of honest indignation" in Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman states both a central purpose of literary studies and her own most essential contribution to this one: "to paint a vision ... of where the road now leads and juxtapose it with a vision of where it might."

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A Note on the Text

The question of which version of a text should be studied is not raised often enough in literary stylistics; it is one a study of Clarissa cannot avoid. The goal of understanding language as a social process which guides this study's approach to style implies that attention should also be paid to textual critical issues in the choice of a text for analysis. After circulating in manuscript among Richardson's friends between (by at least) 1744 and 1747, while Richardson substantially revised the text at least three times in a context of active commentary on and debate about it, Clarissa was first published in three instalments in 1747 and 1748. A second edition, with revisions to the first four volumes of the original seven, appeared in 1749. As Tom Keymer has argued, Richardson put unsold copies of the three-volume final instalment of the first edition together with a new printing of the (revised) first four volumes.1 Richardson published a third (duodecimo) and a fourth (quarto) edition simultaneously in 1751, both with the same text and including extensive revisions. Along with an enlargement of type size in the later volumes so that the size of print would be uniform throughout, these revisions expanded the number of volumes to eight in the third edition, to seven in the fourth. There was also a definitive elaboration of the editorial apparatus, which had grown in extent and importance in each edition. A fifth edition published in 1759 included no significant textual changes (although there were some changes in the apparatus) from the third and fourth. When he died, Richardson left copies of each of his novels marked with changes

xii A Note on the Text he wished to be made in editions published after his death, although as none of these has survived it is impossible to know what influence, if any, they have had on later editions of Clarissa.2 The textual history of Clarissa was first raised as a critical problem by Mark Kinkead-Weekes, who argued in an essay published in 1959 that the revision completed in the third edition and presented by Richardson as "restoration" of material from an original manuscript was in fact undertaken largely to counter what Richardson considered misreading of the first edition. To Kinkead-Weekes, the table of contents, the expansion of the notes and cross-references (some of which appear in the first edition), and the increase in italicization were all strategies to counter inattentive reading, which the early reception of the first edition convinced Richardson was widespread. Using words such as "simplify" and "distort" to describe the revisions, and "cruder" to describe the result, Kinkead-Weekes argues that "the didactic moralist has interfered heavily with the dramatic artist"3 in the third edition, and suggests that the first edition should be studied, both because it is closer to Richardson's original intentions, and because it is artistically superior. Subsequent studies have qualified some of Kinkead-Weekes's comments and some have argued for the opposite choice of text. T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel pointed out in their 1968 study of the evidence for Richardson's work on Clarissa before publication that some of the material said to be restored in 1751 had demonstrably circulated before 1747 and so not all of the added passages can be considered newly written; Shirley Van Marter published the results of detailed study of the revisions in a series of articles in the 19705; and Florian Stuber, in an article on the problem of "original intentions" and in his introduction to a facsimile reprint of the third edition, marshalled evidence from the entire history of manuscript circulation and publication to argue that no "original intentions" can be recovered, that everything before 1751 should be regarded as "examples of a work in progress." According to Stuber, "All one can be sure of is where Richardson felt the job was finished, and that was in the third edition of 1751. The third edition, therefore, should be the copy-text for an authoritative edition of Clarissa."4 For a text representing Richardson's sense of Clarissa as a completed book, as a fully achieved aesthetic object, the third edition is the correct choice, and the facsimile republication of this edition is an essential aid to future work. However, as Lois Chaber has pointed out in a review of this edition, despite Richardson's bullets in the margin indicating many passages which have been revised, he did not

xiii A Note on the Text

mark typographically all of the places in which he had made "restorations" of a line or more.5 There is no indication, moreover, of what has been omitted where revision consists of a cut. A significant example of such a cut is a passage that was removed from Clarissa's account of Lovelace's first marriage proposal - "I could not, all at once, act as if I thought that all punctilio was at an end. I was unwilling to suppose it was so soon" (Penguin edition, 423) - in which italics acknowledge Anna's earlier warning, with its unintended pun, "Punctilio is out of doors the moment you are out of your father's house" (355). Readers of the third edition encounter in strongly insistent typography the fact that they are reading a heavily revised text pointing explicitly to many of its most significantly revised passages, but they cannot recover, much less read from it, a text of the first edition. The third edition is not a parallel-text edition, and without studies based on the first edition, there is a danger that a crucial (and distinct) stage in Richardson's relation to his readers, and some of its differences from the third edition, will be overlooked.6 It is also worth remembering that not even such careful studies as the invaluable essays of Van Marter can fully capture the meaning of "revision": no summary of revisions can substitute for the experience of reading all textual details in the texts in which they circulated. It is one thing to know that Clarissa's comparison of Lovelace to Proteus in a letter from Mrs Sorlings's farm was added in the third edition, and to decide whether this inclusion was intended to forestall the possibility that variation in her representations of him might be construed as marking changes in her attitude toward him; it is quite another to know that Belford's later comparison of Lovelace to Proteus was present in the first edition (1243), and to interpret the significance of its being revised (without a change in its wording) into a second occurrence of this allusion. The meaning of textual features lies not simply in their appearance or non-appearance, but in their relation to all other features with which they appear. As will be pointed out in the introductory chapter, it is never through a single linguistic feature that meaning is made, but through patterns of features as those are contextualized by readers. The Penguin presentation of the first edition has been chosen for this study, not in the belief that it represents in any sense a "better" text than the third, but because publication of the first edition was such an important stage in Richardson's relation to his readers. Since Clarissa was persistently (and, through to 1751, extensively) revised in response to and in anticipation of its perceived or desired effect on an audience, the first edition represents an important stage in an

xiv A Note on the Text

extended process of situated writing. As Doody and Stuber acknowledge, "the Penguin does present us with a Clarissa Richardson's contemporaries read."7 One of the attractions of the first edition is that it cannot now be read without awareness of the third, and that any study of it cannot forget the intensely social and intersubjective process of commentary and revision in which it was written and subsequently revised. The choice of which text to read is also important for constructing a sense of the writer of the work. A Richardson engaged in struggles of interpretation but still willing to leave readers a large scope to exercise judgment, not yet using the editorial function to "double as a quasi-authorial narrator, guiding the reader's response to particular cruxes by means of new explanatory footnotes, endorsing passages in the letters themselves by typographical emphasis, and advancing in an abstract of fifty closely printed pages what seems to be presented as a definitive summary of the work"8 - this is the author to be constructed through this study of Clarissa. Richardson's revision of that relation of styles and ideologies through which he engaged readers continued beyond 1748. This study comments on the text at one important stage in its history, but it by no means implies that other studies should make the same choice of text. Neither exclusion of the third edition nor exclusive reliance on it can be justified. Where comparison with the third edition is relevant to my argument, I will quote the AMS Clarissa. References to both the Penguin and the AMS texts will be included in the text within parentheses; AMS references will include a volume and a page number separated by a colon.

Styles of Meaning and Meanings of Style in Richardson's Clarissa

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1 Introduction: A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa

S T Y L E IN

CLARISSA

What should be studied as "style" in Clarissa? According to an anonymous "Lover of Virtue" writing in 1754, nothing: "Generally speaking, an odd affected expression is observable through the whole, particularly in the epistles of Bob Lovelace."1 All Richardson's novels, this critic believes, will accelerate a decline in the English language underway for some time, since there is great danger that Richardson's neologisms might be adopted in conversation, imitated by other writers, and in time recorded in a dictionary.2 By "style" this critic means the sum of choices made in using language; he believes it should be regulated according to the current usage of polite (socially prestigious) speakers, and he believes Richardson's style is degenerate because it so often fails to meet this accepted standard for polite literature. But the style of Clarissa is dangerous precisely because it might be contagious, because others might find in it useful directions in which to modify their own language habits, even if only (at first) out of affectation. The possibility that so worries the "Lover of Virtue" inspires my own interest in style as a writer's attempt to make a difference in the lives of readers by influencing their understanding and use of language. Another dimension of "style" in Clarissa which Richardson's contemporaries would warn us against studying is the linguistic behaviour of characters from the upper ranks of society. By Lord Chesterfield's lights, "Whenever he goes Ultra crepidam, into high life

4 Introduction

[in Sir Charles Grandison], he grossly mistakes the modes";3 and according to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "He has no Idea of the manners of high Life. His old Lord M. talks in the style of a Country Justice, and his virtuous young Ladies romp like Wenches round a May pole. Such Libertys as pass between Mr. Lovelace and his cousins, are not to be excus'd by the Relation."4 According to such wellqualified judges, the language in Clarissa is unreliable evidence for social class variation in eighteenth-century English, nor would it have impressed well-informed readers as plausible literary imitation of the language actually used in the highest social circles it represents. At the same time as he criticizes Richardson, however, Lord Chesterfield does admit that, "to do him justice, he never mistakes nature, and he has surely great knowledge and skill both in painting and in interesting the heart. He has even coined some expressions for those little secret movements that are admirable." And Lord Chesterfield confesses to what the "Lover of Virtue" dreaded, a great temptation to imitate Richardson's style, ending his letter for fear that, if he continues, he "shall fall insensibly into his small talk, without his merit."5 When Lady Mary blames Harriet Byron for following "the Maxim of Clarissa, of declaring all she thinks to all the people she sees, without refflecting that in this Mortal state of Imperfection Figleaves are as necessary for our Minds as our Bodies, and tis as indecent to shew all we think, as all we have,"6 she testifies to Richardson's skill at representing a woman thinking, regardless of her social status. Elsewhere, admitting that she despises his works yet sobs over them, Lady Mary demonstrates by her own example that Richardson could move even readers critical of him to tears.7 Richardson moved no contemporary more powerfully than he did Denis Diderot, who in his "Eloge" of 1762 went so far in his praise as to claim that the stylistic individuality of each character is a distinguishing feature of Richardson's style as a novelist: ce qui confond d'etonnement, c'est que chacun a ses idees, ses expressions, son ton; et que ces idees, ces expressions, ce ton varient selon les circonstances, les interets, les passions, comme on voit sur un meme visage les physionomies diverses des passions se succeder. Un homme qui a du gout ne prendra point une lettre de Mme Norton pour la lettre d'une des tantes de Clarisse, la lettre d'une tante pour celle d'une autre tante ou de Mme Howe, ni un billet de Mme Howe pour un billet de Mme Harlove; quoiqu'il arrive que ces personnages soient dans la meme position, dans les memes sentiments, relativement au meme objet. Dans ce livre immortel, comme dans la nature au printemps, on ne trouve point deux feuilles qui soient d'un meme vert. Quelle immense variete de nuances! S'il est difficile a celui qui

5 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa lit de les saisir, combien n'a-t-il pas ete difficile a 1'auteur de les trouver et de les peindre!8

There is good reason for Diderot's enthusiastic appreciation, and it has suggested to many modern readers of Richardson that a study of style in Clarissa should explicate the means by which Richardson achieves this remarkable individuality and interpret its most striking effects. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, for instance, in a suggestive exploration of how Richardson's language realizes the distinctive qualities of various characters in a masterful interplay of styles and values, proposes this as the direction for a more extensive study9 Richardson himself has given further reason for this approach, writing of his method of composition, Here I sit down to form characters. One I intend all goodness; All goodness he is. Another I intend to be all gravity; All gravity he is. Another Lady G ish; All Lady G ish is she. I am all the while absorbed in the character. It is not fair to say - I, identically, am any-where, while I keep within the character.10

Later in the same year, Richardson explained that it was difficult for readers "always" to "enter into the Views of the Writer" through a text written in this "Species of Writing ... that may be called New; ... every one putting him and herself into the Character they read, and judging of it by their own Sensations."11 And beyond this reciprocity of writer and reader successively identifying with the characters they write and read, readers who debate the crucial issues raised by the novels in his company, Richardson claims, open themselves to him, "some of them, through Windows that at other times have been close shut up."12 Throughout this commentary runs a theme of style revealing human nature in all its variety. Readers may now be much less certain that what they read represents "nature," but studies of style can help us to understand how ideas of human nature have been constructed in fiction and what social purposes they have served. Given the centrality of individual, characteristic styles to Richardson's sense of what his novels could achieve and how they achieved it, it might seem strange that this study does not take stylistic individualism as its primary object. The comments of Richardson and his contemporaries do allow for another approach, however. In writing about the appropriateness of style to situation, Diderot touches on another important theme, the view that, individually distinctive though his characters' speech and writing may be, style in Richardson

6 Introduction

is also a matter of characters' use of linguistic resources that they share with others, of how they write from specific, culturally defined positions to correspondents with whom they build and sustain relationships. It is primarily as users of socially situated and culturally significant language that Richardson's characters come to know and to define themselves; in this writing and speaking they enact the social practices and codes of value in which members of their culture could articulate themselves as individuals distinct but never completely separate from others. Richardson's evocation of this relation to language, however accurate (or inaccurate) his representation of the verbal details of some social settings, is crucial for readers' sense that they encounter distinct individuals, and it is what I take his contemporaries to have responded to when they praised him for insight into and power to move "the heart." If this "heart" is thought of not as existing before language but as constituted in it, then a study of style in Clarissa can discuss "the heart" through asking how it is that in using language characters constitute selves in relation to others and how they situate those selves (again, through their use of language) in relation to the dominant codes of value, the conjunctions of knowledge and power, the ideologies of sex and gender which inform their society and which are at risk in the "critical situations" (Clarissa, 35) Richardson explored in all of his novels. Such a study can demonstrate something of the immensity of nuance praised by Diderot; it can suggest ways in which Richardson attempted to influence readers by altering their sense of how language embodied values in the literature they read, and beyond their reading of literature, in their lives. Richardson struggled (with mixed success) to increase his readers' awareness, even change their understanding of themselves, as meaning-making creatures living in language. A stylistic study of Clarissa can help us understand what that involved. LITERARY

STYLISTICS

The self does not come to "language" as to some separate entity bearing "something to express"; language is a socially situated process of meaning making in which "self" is one of the realities formed and reformed through interaction with others. The goal of studying literary style as an instance of social process in this sense may seem an impossible task for much of what has been practised as "stylistics," since doing so implies a radicalization of purpose for which the linguistic theories that have informed stylistics do not (some would say cannot) prepare it. Given the history of "stylistics" since its emergence as a recognizable subdiscipline within literary studies in the

7 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa

late 19505, a certain scepticism is only reasonable.13 Since that time various linguistic theories have been used in literary stylistics, interest in stylistics has waxed and waned as literary critics have alternately welcomed and rejected linguistics, and specialists in stylistics have themselves pursued a variety of objectives. As a result, it can be quite unclear what is meant by "stylistics" within the wider discipline of literary studies. A simple, inclusive definition of "literary stylistics" is "the use of linguistics in the study of literary texts." By a paradox surprising only to those unfamiliar with recent developments, relatively few stylistic studies now care for definitions of "style" or for the discovery and tabulation of distinctive features of individual writers' styles. This development has occurred since the mid-1970s, around the nearly simultaneous reception by English-speaking literary studies of "structuralist poetics" and of poststructuralist criticisms of structural linguistics. That double theoretical exposure produced a consensus (that "structuralism" had been eclipsed by "poststructuralism") which drastically changed what the word "linguistics" could mean within literary studies. The turn away from "style" has also happened independently of some celebrated criticisms made of stylistics in the 1970S,14 and it has had the important consequence of freeing stylistics to make wider application of work in linguistics, philosophy of language, and (what might have seemed unlikely to its detractors in the 19705) critical theory. To study style is to study meaning, and most current work in stylistics does this through a two-part process, textual analysis informed by linguistic description followed by interpretation of the patterns identified in the analysis. Few critical terms are so variously interpreted as "interpretation," so it is important to make clear that in stylistics interpretation does not consist in determining and declaring "the meaning" of a text - one, unified, and unchanging over time. Nor is meaning thought to reside "in" the text and to be revealed only by the objective, scientific methods of linguistic description. If either of these were true, stylistics would deserve the terrible things people used to say about it. It should be possible for two scholars using the same linguistic theory to agree on the description of a text - or to differ in principled ways - but the grammatical and lexical systems of the language they describe are only meaning potential until some selection of them is made in a text and put to work to achieve some purpose in an exchange between participants in a discourse. Meaning is not contained in a pattern of textual features; it is made in the process by which readers contextualize a text as discourse. When a stylistic study moves from formal analysis to interpretation

8 Introduction

of a literary text, it interprets the significance of textual features by suggesting what role the patterning of formal features analysed plays in the text's reception by readers who construe it variously according to what they consider to be relevant contexts, including textual traditions, some unique to their experience and others shared with groups of people similarly trained in educational settings. Under the influence of critical theory and work in the related field of critical discourse analysis, stylistics has become dissatisfied with studies which describe patterns in grammar and lexis but pay scant attention to the kinds of contextual issues raised by feminist, Marxist, historicist, and (even!) poststructuralist critics. Stylistics remains committed to linguistic analysis, but its interpretive goals have strikingly converged with those in other areas of literary studies.15 SYSTEMIC-FUNCTIONAL STYLISTICS

The systemic-functional linguistic theory which informs this study has been an important part of the history just sketched. Since the early 19605, when it was known as scale-and-category grammar, it has been used repeatedly in analysis of literary texts, although the full potential of its application to literature is only beginning to be explored and its achievements in stylistics deserve to be better known than they are/6 Systemic stylistic studies have focused on texts, rather than on the individual styles of writers, and they have never theorized style as a writer's deliberate selection of rhetorically effective linguistic form for independently chosen content.17 In common with other varieties of functional stylistics, they hold that all differences in linguistic form realize (in the sense of "express" or "manifest") differences in meaning and so are potentially important; they consider the significance of style to be social as well as "literary," and consequently not to be discussed adequately through inventories of distinctive formal features. Style is a means to make meaning, and literature is a mode of meaning: through studying how language functions in a literary text, stylistics in the systemic-functional tradition aims to be fully interpretative, to understand how a text means what it does and why it is valued as it is, how its language relates to the context in which it was written and the ends for which it is read and circulated in its cultural context.18 What distinguishes functional stylistics from other linguistically informed work on literary texts is concern for meaning - the role language plays in culture and society - and for the relation of language in literary texts to relevant social and historical contexts. Michael Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan, and others have used systemic linguistic theory

9 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa

not just in studies of verbal art but in analyses of the relations between literature and society as well.19 In taking this perspective, systemicfunctional stylistics has been influenced by the Prague Linguistic Circle, especially Jan Mukaf ovsky and Felix Vodicka, who developed a semiotic theory of literature out of Russian Formalism so they could interpret literary texts in social as well as aesthetic terms.20 As was true of other traditions in stylistics, during the 19605, stylistic studies using scale-and-category grammar bore a family resemblance to new critical close reading. Increasingly influenced by a developing social semiotic theory, however, systemic-functional work on literature now shares many perspectives with other literary and cultural theories.21 THEORY OF FOREGROUNDING

One of the key analytical concerns in literary stylistics is for the patterning of lexical items and grammatical features described technically as foregrounding.22 As the name implies, for there to be foregrounding it is necessary for readers to perceive some features as prominent against a background of other, less prominent ones. (Roman Jakobson's use of a psychological term, Einstellung, in his famous definition of the poetic function as "The set (Einstellung) toward the message as such, focus on the message for its own sake," implicitly acknowledges the role of perception.)23 This prominence may be achieved through deviation from standard grammatical and lexical patterns of the language, but significant effects are also achieved - especially in prose texts - without this kind of deviation. By creating local expectations, norms specific to their texts, and by maintaining or deviating from these, writers make possible a range of effects. It has been pointed out in many studies of foregrounding that linguistic features can be prominent without necessarily being foregrounded. In this study that is taken to mean that only those features which are arguably important for readers' understanding of the text, only prominence (whether of a single instance or of a pattern) which can be shown to contribute to interpretation, will count as foregrounding.24 Although it derives historically from the Russian Formalist concept of ostranenie ("estrangement") which was for the Formalists the feature which made texts of verbal art autonomous, the concept of foregrounding is now important for relating texts of verbal art to their social setting. By calling attention to specific formal aspects of language and to the meanings regularly made through them, literary texts work to make readers aware of how language functions in daily life, raising to consciousness functions which are "automatic" in the

io Introduction

sense of not usually being noticed. Through the patterning of lexical and grammatical choices, Richardson not only represents situations and styles of his culture in the novel but also aims to sensitize readers to the meanings those styles are regularly used to make, urging them to pay attention to how those meanings are made in their lives.25 According to the two-stage pattern of stylistic study, formal analysis identifies foregrounding, and interpretation discusses how it is to be understood. What is held to count as foregrounding, and even more its significance for life beyond the literary text, are matters of argument, just as interpretation is in other areas of literary studies. As Terry Threadgold has insisted, foregrounding involves not just textual patterns but the analyst's own position with respect to the text as well: "As they stand ... our notions of foregrounding ... [serve] to maintain ... a view of the text as product, and of the reader as passive observer. If instead we perform the text as process, we have to ask foregrounded/-able for whom and why?"26 This problem is not addressed in the classic studies in systemic stylistics, which have conducted interpretation as the discussion of a text's theme, and so have resembled new-critical close readings. As Ruqaiya Hasan describes the process, foregrounded patterns in the text's grammar and lexis are read as a symbolic articulation of a more abstract meaning, the theme, which is both "theme" in the traditional literary critical sense - what the text means divested of its particular meanings - and in the sense of "a general hypothesis about some aspect of social man" whose identification produces "reflection about humanity."27 In such studies there is a requirement for complete textual analysis, so the literary texts studied have tended to be short texts or short selections from longer ones, and they have tended to be chosen from twentieth-century literature, precluding any great need for historical contextualization. The position of the reader-analyst was not felt to be problematic either, again because the texts read were produced in cultural situations close enough to the analyst's own that the ideologies engaged in the discussion of theme were considered accessible. It is rare for two interpretations, for irreconcilable themes, to be proposed in such studies, but when we do stylistic analysis of a text at a greater semantic distance from us (either in time or cultural space), or if we wish to understand strongly opposed interpretations of the same text, the interpretive procedure becomes more complicated. Terry Threadgold forces this issue in a study of a passage from Paradise Lost which has been given strongly incompatible readings within long-standing critical traditions. Her reflection on the reading

ii A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa

practices that produced these readings, and on her own, leads to an important qualification of the theory of foregrounding: It is very clear that a humanist, individualist, mimetic reading practice does not foreground the same patterns as a rhetorical, generic reading practice: and very clear to me, as a female twentieth century semiotician, that once I had begun to read the text in both these ways, and in several others, I could no longer see any of the patterns my systemic-functonal analysis produced as being fore- or back-grounded. They were rather a set of patterns, all of which in some consistent and contextually predictable way contributed to the semantics of the text, but remained a potential in search of a foregrounder until singled out for prominence in some particular ... reading of that potential.28

To describe these reading practices, Threadgold draws on categories of social semiotic theory, an indication of the direction in which discourse analysis of all kinds (and not just stylistics) undertaken with systemic linguistics is moving. As social semiotic theory is more widely used, it will answer the objections of other scholars in stylistics, who have thought that systemic stylistic studies have rested complacently on lexicogrammatical analysis and who themselves have interpreted their analyses with the help of other theories, speech act theory, pragmatics, and relevance theory having been favourites in the 19703, 19805, and 19905 respectively. Systemic stylistics has not used these other theories because systemic linguistics never separated semantics and pragmatics as formal linguistic theories did, and because the categories for relating text to context did the theoretical work of showing how meaning could be analysed at a series of levels, from the material (language substance) to the immaterial (the context of culture). These higher-level categories have not been much used in stylistics, largely because there have been few extended studies of long, historically and culturally distant texts. Now that the contextual categories have been developed into a theory of "language as a social semiotic," however, they enable systemic stylistics to argue interpretations that begin to be contextualizations, statements of how features of text relate to features of context - context understood at all levels of abstraction, in all its cultural and historical complexity. The following brief, schematic, and brutally condensed account can only point out the relations between the categories. When the categories are used (as they will be selectively, in combination with modes of contextual statement more familiar in literary studies, later in this study), they will be introduced more fully.

12 Introduction SOCIAL SEMIOTIC THEORY

Systemic-linguistic theory describes language at three interrelated levels. At the level of phonology or graphology it describes how a language organizes substance - sound, if the text is spoken, visible marks on a surface, if it is written - so that meaning can be made manifest (realized) and exchanged in the form of texts. At a second, more abstract level of lexicogrammar, it describes the grammatical and lexical forms which are realized at the level of phonology/ graphology. These forms themselves realize a third, yet more abstract level of language, semantics. To restate informally, meanings are expressed as wordings and wordings are expressed as soundings or markings. The range of meanings offered by a whole language is vast, but in practice limited selections tend to be made again and again. Social semiotic theory explains these limitations, suggesting why certain meanings are made and not others, by describing context. Like language, context is described at a series of interrelated levels of increasing abstraction from the material substance of the text. (Height is used as a metaphor for abstraction, so levels are said to be above or below one another.) Each level of context contributes to the final shape of a text by in some way constraining its range of meanings and the forms which express them. At a first level of abstraction above language, the context of situation, the category of register describes how the recurrent types of situation in which language is used systematically constrain the ranges of meanings available in specific situations. (Broadly speaking, these meanings vary according to the kinds of social activity carried on through a text, the kinds of social roles and personal relations, such as social status, which are enacted across it, and according to the medium, spoken or written, and the role which the text plays in the situation.) At a second level of abstraction, the context of culture, the category of genre describes "how things get done, when language is used to accomplish them."29 Genres are culturally recognized types of staged, purposeful social activity, and they may draw upon one or more than one register, depending on the staging and complexity of the activity. The category of genre accounts for the possible configurations of registers in a culture. At a third, most abstract level, the category of ideology describes the sets of assumptions about how the world is, the informal theories of "nature" that get expressed in genres, registers, and texts. Ideologies construct "reality" in certain ways (and not others); they position subjects differently (within genres and registers) according to culturally specific categories of (most important) class, race, gender, age, ability, and sexuality. Ideologies constrain access to

13 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa

both genres and registers, and they constrain the positions of subjects within them. One important dimension of ideology, described by the category of code, is a general orientation to meaning. Code involves an assumption about how much must be said explicitly and how much an interlocutor can be relied upon to understand if it is left implicit; the orientations it describes appear as patterns of selection within the meaningful resources of genre and register.30 To recapitulate: register constrains selections in lexicogrammar, genre constrains register, and ideology (which includes code) constrains genre and register. As John Frow has described these relations, "The codification of meanings appropriate to a situation [through registers] is ultimately a function of the ideological formation, and different social classes and sexual classes will encode [i.e. realize] the genres of discourse with different semantic potentials."31 Something needs to be said at this point about the metaphors of choice and constraint, which are used repeatedly in systemic linguistics and social semiotic theory. Systemic linguists often say that systemic-functional linguistics is a theory of language as choice, and the concept of choice is central to its account of how features at the levels of language - phonology, lexicogrammar, and semantics - are selected, combined, and realized in discourse. But the theory is more specifically a theory of language as semantic choice in social contexts, and when it describes how language functions in context, the social semiotic component of the theory insists that the meaningmaking resources of a language are not available equally to everyone, everywhere and always. So a systemic-functional grammar models choice, social semiotic theory models constraint. All speakers and writers draw upon (and have only limited individual scope for changing) the culturally significant meanings available to them as they are positioned in culturally ratified types of social situation and patterns of social action. Their access to those meanings may be focused by a meaning style which they take up by virtue of their socialization and place in social structure. Most significantly, they are positioned as speakers and writers, as hearers and readers, according to culturally specific ideologies of class, race, ethnicity, age, ability, gender, and sexuality. Language offers choices, but the range of choices, the meaning potential, available in specific situations may be strictly limited. It is always possible to work against the limits that is one of the ways the whole language system is changed - but users of language are never free to make meaning, either as speakers/writers or as hearers/readers, just as they might like. This study will combine different scholarly registers in an attempt to adapt the genre of extended literary critical study for a community

14 Introduction

of readers interested in stylistics and eighteenth-century literary studies. Individual chapters are structured as arguments about how Clarissa can be read as addressing issues of ideology - assumptions about community and individualism, about desire, sex, and gender - through close study and contextualization of language. They begin and end with reference to work in literary criticism and cultural studies. These phases of discussion are part of my contextualization of the analysis; the analysis itself (which, in the interest of a thorough consideration of critical issues, is selective) is situated according to the needs of the argument. To avoid complication, I will introduce linguistic and social semiotic categories only so far as necessary for the use I make of them. This means that some important differences internal to the communities using these theories will be mentioned only in notes or passed over in silence. My aim is to show how the techniques of linguistic analysis and their contextualization through social semiotic theory can build linguistically informed and historically sensitive studies of literary texts. In the interest of clarity, I will make the most use of register, the social semiotic category which theorizes context, the level next above language. Because what is meant by "register" is often roughly expressed by the word "style," the category should be accessible to non-linguists.32 Later in this chapter I will suggest how Richardson's characters articulate their experience of the phenomena which the theory of register describes. Depending upon context, the word "style" can substitute for each of the social semiotic categories, a possibility I have drawn upon in the discussion of the novel and in naming the double structure of the following chapters. The first section, "Styles of Meaning," contrasts two coding orientations, an implicit and an explicit style of meaning manifested (respectively) in the micro-genres of the proverb and the moral sentiment. Toward the end of the section, the category of genre is the focus, as Bakhtin's theory of novelistic discourse is used to discuss what kind of macro-genre the novel is in Richardson's hands. The second section, "Meanings of Style," uses "style" in the sense of "register." It discusses Richardson's exploration of, and attempt to revise, the meaning potential located in what he called "critical situations." The most abstract category, ideology, will appear most often in contextualizations which relate this discussion of Clarissa to other literary critical discussions and to relevant work in social history and cultural studies.33 The goal of a stylistic study should be what J.R. Firth described as the goal of linguistics, to make statements of meaning dispersed across a spectrum of levels. No meaning-making practice should be foreign to it.

15 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa THEORY OF REGISTER

Systemic-functional stylistics does not separate content and expression: language is seen as a shared, socially and culturally specific resource, a "meaning potential" which speakers and writers draw upon to interact with hearers and readers. The contexts in which they draw upon it limit both the kinds of meanings that can be made and the ways they are made. Both the kinds of context (the "contexts of situation") in which language is used and the meanings that can be made in them - the concepts and objects that can be represented, the roles that can be adopted and assigned to others, the patterns in which texts can be organized - are specific to the social system (the "context of culture") in which they occur. The context of culture itself is regarded semantically, as an ensemble of meanings, meanings activated, confirmed or contested, maintained or changed in the activity (including the language activity) of members of the culture. As Michael Gregory and Susanne Carroll have summarized it, Meaning realized in recurrent and typical situations can itself be seen as part of a larger system of meaning to which members of the community have access. This system of potential meaning is the culture itself. When we say that language is choice we suggest that language-in-use implies the selection of all possible meanings inherent in this extensive meaning system called culture. Only certain ranges of meaning will be relevant to a given situation and these meanings will be encoded in grammatical and lexical options.34

There are three important consequences of this view. First, meaning does not precede the use of language but is made through it; second, language users' access to linguistic resources is significantly conditioned by such factors as social class, gender, age, race, and ethnicity; third, all uses of the linguistic resources available for making meaning exert pressure on those resources and change them over time. To handle the relation between "recurrent and typical situations" and the "ranges of meaning" most likely to be made through language in them, systemic linguists have proposed the category of register to describe varieties of language in terms of the uses made of them. "Register" is a different language variety from "dialect," in that registers are "functional dialects," varieties distinguished according to use, while "dialects" are varieties distinguished according to users, who may be classed by geographical area or social group for the purposes of description. The theory of register accounts for how language varies according to the recurrent uses made of it, relating varieties of language to their

16 Introduction extra-linguistic contexts, the generic situations or "contexts of situation" in which people speak or write. "Situation" is understood not as whatever happens to occur around a text, but as a more abstract "semiotic structure ... a constellation of meanings deriving from the semiotic system that constitutes the culture." (It may be helpful to remember an analogous use of the term "register" to describe the range of a musical instrument or human singing voice: register theory describes the tuning of a language to realize a specific semantic range.) To show how they connect to the language (i.e. the register of language) used in them, situations are described along three dimensions, "in terms of certain general categories having relevance to the text":35 a field of discourse (the social activity carried on through the text, which includes subject matter or topic), a tenor of discourse (the relationship the text sustains between those participating in the activity), and a mode of discourse (the role language plays in the situation, including the influence of the channel of communication - spoken or written - and the rhetorical purpose on textual organization). The three situational variables of field, tenor, and mode together predict the language variety (the register) most likely to be used in the context they define, and thus the "particular selection of words and structures"36 which express (and put into circulation) the meanings typically at risk - and in them the ideologies renewed, resisted or revised - in that dimension of the wider cultural context. Much work with the theory of register has considered wide domains of language use, such as the language of press advertising, the language of religion, or the language of physical science,37 and A.R. Bex, in a valuable discussion of how the linguistic features of literary texts relate to the social functioning of literary genres, questions its usefulness in the study of literary texts: "It is ... difficult to assign registerial similarities at any level to such divergent novels as Tom Jones, Clarissa, or Tristram Shandy."38 This difficulty does not, however, state an inherent weakness in register theory so much as recognize just how "divergent" these three novels are. Because members of a culture infer situation from the patterning of language in texts and predict the development of texts from their knowledge of situation (knowledge they share with other members of the culture), it is by drawing on a variety of registers that novelists establish points of linguistic and social relevance and so set their work in recognizable relation to their readers' lives. In terms made current by M.M. Bakhtin (whose theory of novelistic discourse will be discussed toward the end of the third chapter), Richardson takes up and modifies linguistic possibilities in his social and cultural context to

17 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa

orchestrate an internal dialogism by which his novel engages the many varieties of discourse (the heteroglossia) surrounding it. This engagement guides the use that can be made of register theory, which should be regarded as furthering study of the intertextual relevance and resonance which have long been primary topics in literary history. In its contextualization of Richardson's representation of registers, this study will pay particular attention to relations between Clarissa and other literary texts. EXAMPLES OF FOREGROUNDING IN CLARISSA

In order to exemplify the theoretical categories which have been introduced, I will now cite brief examples from various parts of Clarissa, offering first some examples of foregrounding, then relating characters' own descriptions of language variety to register theory. Richardson's high degree of attention to language is evident in a wide range of kinds of foregrounding in Clarissa. Perhaps because of his professional involvement in printing, Richardson is especially resourceful in his use of typography to intimate qualities of voice, particularly intonational emphasis, all the while making readers aware that they are imagining voices through the medium of a written text. Lovelace specifies what degree of rhoticity ("r-fullness") is to be construed in his relatives addressing him as "sin" and what interpersonal value is to be given it (1030); parentheses present speeches overlapping, two characters speaking the same words (1029), or simultaneous speeches by three characters forming a paradigm in which each element is distinguished only by its term of address to Clarissa: You know not, madam; You know not, niece; You know not, Clary;

all in one breath. (316)

At the level of grammar, a personal pronoun can be fraught with sexual jealousy (in Lovelace's "THEM, and BOTH, and THEY! - how it goes against me to include this angel of a creature, and any man on earth but myself, in one word!" [842]), and emphasis on an intensifying adverb ("very") can work to highlight the complicated relations of similarity and difference between Anna Howe and her mother. In Anna's report of one of their conversations, a parenthetical question ("Did you think her wisdom so very modern?") nicely counters Anna's habitual, ironic attitude (expressed in an adjective, "sage," modifying

i8 Introduction

the familiar, even intimate "mamma") and suggests one cynical student of "love" recognizing another - to her surprise: [the married couple] are continually on the wing in pursuit of amusements out of themselves; and those, concluded my sage mamma (Did you think her wisdom so very modern?), will perhaps be the livelier to each, in which the other has no share. (246)

Lovelace's lexical deviations include compounds readily construable as sarcastic substitutions for other expressions ("Excellent young creature! - Excellent young creature! echoed the ladies, with their handkerchiefs at their eyes, attended with nose-music" [1029]) and nonce words straining at the limits of English word-formation processes, as in his "Oh return, return, my souYsfondledom" (1023), this one attempting, as do some metaphoric accounts of his "heart," to reduce the immaterial to the absurdly physical. Both foregrounding through deviation (deviation from norms of English or from expectations established within the text) and foregrounding through patterning will receive attention in this study. The difference between these and the effect of several other instances of foregrounding working to the same end may be illustrated with examples from Lovelace's letter of Monday, 12 June, where, after an ironic commentary on the language of the marriage licence (a foregrounding of frozen formulas developed brilliantly by Sterne in Tristram Shandy), he sketches a scheme for annual marriages. In his description of Clarissa's father as "old prerogative Harlowe" (873), Lovelace deviates from the patterns of English, using "prerogative" as a modifier, a role which is unusual for it outside such restricted formations as "prerogative-monger," thus emphasizing the man's obsession with his rights as husband and father.39 In the next sentence, Lovelace claims that under the scheme he proposes, Clarissa's mother "would never ... have renewed with such a gloomy tyrant" (873). Here "renewed" is used as a verb, but intransitively. With no entity being "renewed," a new process is added to English semantics of marriage. In both instances, italics suggesting spoken intonation lend another kind of prominence, indicating Richardson's own awareness of the grammatical and lexical foregrounding. Throughout the letter, language habitually used to speak of social and sexual relations is brought to attention, and the institution of marriage criticized, both through the language Lovelace chooses and by his structuring the discussion as a "project" (in Johnson's sense of "Scheme; design; contrivance"), a genre widespread in Richardson's culture but not often (outside such satiric contexts as part in of Gulliver's

19 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa Travels) used for so very strange (and immodest) a proposal. This generic incongruence is not a simple aspect of the scheme, however, for in his conclusion Lovelace parallels a recognized theme of the political opposition from the period in which the novel is set and thus places his own discourse in contact with many others of recognized public significance: "annual Parliaments, and annual marriages, [Lovelace's italics] are the projects next my heart" (874). This letter may develop the character of Lovelace, hinting obliquely at a desire to be free from an obsession which he knows is driving him to rape, but it is more important as a good example of Richardson using one of the outrageous aspects of Lovelace's personality - his penchant for irresponsible extremism - to state provocative points of view, to shock readers but also widen their sense of what some extremely familiar language might be used to say, and so reflect critically on the relations of domination maintained in what is usually said through it. Richardson's frequent coining of words, and his use of a number of words for which the Oxford English Dictionary records his novels as the first written instance, suggest that one purpose of his foregrounding through deviation was a concern to extend the range of meanings available to his characters.40 This kind of foregrounding deviation from what is standard or "correct" eighteenth-century English - is important, but lexical innovation is only the most obvious way in which Richardson attempts to change the meaning potential of English. In addition to using "new" words, his characters (women especially), as part of their concern for their credibility as writers, frequently monitor their writing and scrutinize the words of others, noticing and commenting when particular words imply a specific point of view or deliberate design, almost negotiating with their reader about whether an expression is appropriate or permitted: phrases such as "as I may say," "if I may say," and "that was his word" mark this activity. Even more important are the ways in which Richardson recreates and strategically deploys the registers of libertinism and moral decorum to propose new patterns of interaction. These manipulations constitute his most important attempt to intervene in his literary and social context, and any study of them should make clear that Richardson's much-disparaged "didacticism" is inseparable from his "creativity," a part of his profound insight into personality and personal relations, not just a wearisome adjunct to it. REGISTER-AWARENESS IN CLARISSA

Richardson's use of the word "dialect" in Clarissa both invites the systemic-functional theory of language variety and suggests how it

2O Introduction

might most usefully be applied to the novel. Anna, Clarissa, and Lovelace all refer to varieties of language as "dialects," Anna to characterize the language spoken by Lovelace's cronies at the Cocoa Tree coffee-house, Clarissa to describe the language she and Lovelace speak to each other in a serious conversation at Mrs Sorlings's farm (to be analysed in detail in chapter 4), and Lovelace to characterize expressions of (respectively) Rosebud, women in general, and Lord M. As Lovelace uses it, the word means roughly what systemic theory describes as social dialect, features which indicate the social station or (if features are claimed to be gender-specific) the gender of the speaker, but which are not strongly associated with (or characteristic of) a range of potential meanings correlating with contexts of situation. The meaning that the features contribute is an indication of group affiliation: Lovelace implies, for instance, that Rosebud's "at the little white house over the way" marks her as one of the rural poor (162); he claims that "tostications" is a "women's" word (818) and his heart goes "pit-a-pat\ to speak in the female dialect" (5: 119) (Lovelace's italics throughout). Lovelace also stigmatizes Lord M.'s vulgarism "dog" as ironically inappropriate for "peer-like dialect" (1025), although he himself uses the word in the first edition. Anna and Clarissa, by contrast, use "dialect" to mean roughly what is meant here by "register," and their uses of the word point to the two registers on which this study will concentrate.41 When she reports to Clarissa Hickman's allusion to "[Lovelace] push[ing] his good fortune [with the ladies] as far as it would go" in a converstion with Belton and Mowbray, Anna declares in an apostrophe, "thou seemest not to be a stranger to their dialect, as I suppose this is!" (213).42 This "dialect," in which, significantly, "not one single word in behalf of [Lovelace's] morals" (213) is said, will be referred to as the libertine register, a range of meanings made by men speaking or writing to other men with discussion of women and men's interaction with them as principal topics; I will argue that Richardson develops a libertine register in order to influence the language men use to speak of women and their expectations of sexual contact with them. The "dialect" in which Clarissa is so pleased to be able to speak to Lovelace (444) will be referred to as the register of moral decorum. It comprises a range of meanings that may be made by women or men speaking and writing to one another so as either to behave, or to discuss behaviour, with explicit reference to generally accepted principles stating what is at once moral and polite, including spiritual commitments, where they inform behaviour.43 Following the distinction between Lovelace's and the women's use of the word "dialect," this study will pay more attention to register than to social dialect.

21 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa CRITICISM OF CLARISSA CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY

AND

One of the significant stylistic facts about Clarissa is its great complexity, and this appears whether the text is studied as a single network (or as networks) integrating many verbal motifs, or as a work in which several styles are deployed and their assumptions tested.44 In many places there is a blending of voices; the "same" words bear different meanings according to who writes or speaks them, when, and to whom.45 This can give an impression of characters sharing more than they know, so that while many passages can be described as instances of "Clarissa's style" or "Lovelace's style" in a particular register, each of them occasionally (and significantly) uses expressions and draws on meanings associated primarily with the other. This stylistic "overlap" may serve to suggest "unconscious", inadvertent self-revelation, it may foreground stark opposition or startling coincidence, or it may point to contradictions in his own thinking or in his culture which Richardson was unable to resolve.46 There are limits to the degree to which characters can differ linguistically from one another, and their involvement in each other's language is a powerful, although not at all points intentional, part of Richardson's attempt to raise to readers' consciousness some of the assumptions operating through their habitual uses of language. When it attends to this kind of pattern, when it listens for this kind of contradiction, stylistic study of a literary text's relation to its context takes up one of the goals of critical discourse analysis, a critique of ideology. There are three dimensions to ideology critique in Clarissa and a reading of Clarissa. One is Richardson's exposure of ideologies for readers' critical consideration through his representation of the meanings and meaning-making practices of his society; another is Richardson's uses of language which enter into the practices of readers without their consciously attending to them; a third is our own recognition of these processes and reflection on what seem to be their limits. Ruqaiya Hasan has suggested that "ideologies live through the common everyday actions - both verbal and non-verbal - of a host of social actors who are far from thinking consciously about it. ... Looked at from this perspective, the most important attribute for the maintenance of ideology appears to be its socially constructed inevitability."47 Attempting to dispose readers to recognize commonsense assumptions of "how the world is" as they operate through the language of his text, Richardson works to dispel what he considers false ideas of the world simply by exposing their construction in the service of particular interests. There is another dimension of ideology,

22 Introduction

one which Hasan describes as the tendency of the language categories with which we construct the world to become background knowledge and so begin to inform our construction of meanings without our being aware of it.48 Readings of Clarissa can focus on this potential of language to generate "background" reality through study of foregrounding, especially of foregrounding by pattern, which can ask what meanings the patterns might realize and what they leave unrealized, but Richardson himself is much less likely to encourage readers to reflect on this potential than he is to use it to change readers' thinking through the language patterns he represents as appropriate to kinds of situation. In this, he exploits the dynamic nature of language, using the resources in a deliberate attempt to renew and change them. As Halliday describes this process, drawing on the work of Hjelmslev, individual texts and the linguistic system must be seen in close relation: At each level, the text instantiates the system; and this is ... a two-way process, since each instance disturbs the probabilities of the system and hence destroys and recreates it - almost identically, but not quite. One property of a highly valued text is its capacity to disturb the system beyond its simple quantitative function: the writer - or speaker - whom we call innovative is the one whose text causes perturbations greater than those associated with a single instance.49

No meaning gets expressed in language that has not been built up through language; therefore, the ideologies that we can study through stylistic analysis are ones which are nourished and transmitted through language. Ideologies are shared, passed on, and changed through language use, through literary texts as well as through other kinds of text. Stylistic conflict is Richardson's way of "perturbing the system," of exposing ideologies for readers' questioning and challenging readers to accept or reject them, but two considerations limit the extent to which one literary text can provoke conscious evaluation and effect change in the direction its author intends. One is that the characters' voices are formed from the language (and so from the codes of value) available in the social context; the other is that readers, never wholly constrained by a writer's deliberate intentions, may, construing a work within the assumptions it was written to contest, read largely according to assumptions the writer was hoping to challenge. Since many of the problems that beset Clarissa arise from the sustaining ideologies of Richardson's society, and since Richardson himself was committed to many of these ideologies and probably

23 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa

thought of himself as conserving while reforming, it is not surprising that there should be contradictions in the novel's didacticism and ambiguities in its meaning. When we identify these we expose the "inevitabilities" of Richardson's own practice and create points at which we can connect the text to his assumptions about the world as we can study them in other texts. Although it has not been thought of as primarily a stylistic question, this problem has been an important critical issue. William Beatty Warner, reformulating the claim that all readings of the novel enact an interpretive process which the novel has already dramatized and arguing that any "meaning" of the novel is the result of vigorous interpretive activity by readers, has raised influential (and unsettling) questions,50 which are complemented even as they have been challenged by studies drawing upon other perspectives in critical theory.51 Because these studies place particular emphasis on "language," their tendency to discuss problems of language within the assumptions of a poststructuralist critique of Saussure and in highly abstract metalanguage may seem to some scholars to have exhausted what might be said about the text's language from any "linguistic" perspective.52 More seriously, these studies have given some scholars the impression that to study the language of Clarissa is to remove the text from its historical context, and thus that work published since the early 19805 explicating the novel's deep and intricate connections to that context is breaking new ground, or restoring the critical discussion to its rightful historicist mind.53 As Charlotte Sussman has put it with respect to Richardson's representations of women, "critics concerned with the transhistorical intricacies of language embrace Clarissa, while critics hoping to construct a history of socioeconomic changes in relation to literature turn to Pamela."54 This study rejects this dichotomy. It discusses contrasting styles of generalization, ideologies of love, erotic description, and sentimental libertinism in order to suggest how, through its language, Richardson involves his text in history. The "intricacies of language" are historical, and as it relates text to context through stylistic discussion, this study is intended as a contribution to the renewed historicism which has so powerfully reshaped expectations in literary history.55 Two examples will suggest how stylistic analysis can relate language in Clarissa to its context and reflect on problems of ideology. One of Richardson's aims in the novel was to recommend strategies to women for dispelling a false (and in his view dangerous) delicacy informing too many women's sense of themselves. In her discussion

24 Introduction

of linguistic constraints in Harlowe Place that mark the decline of Clarissa's influence in the Harlowe family, Terry Castle quotes conversations in which Clarissa "is broken in upon, 'interrupted/ even before she can speak," and suggests that "What looks like unbelievable deference in Clarissa may simply reflect her internalization of certain 'feminine' speech patterns, and point again to her lack of power within the patriarchal family unit and her society as a whole."56 Janet Aikins calls this assessment "ahistorical," arguing that "the findings of modern linguists about actual male and female speech patterns" are not relevant to "analysis of a fictional character ... a creation of Richardson's mind."57 Neither discusses conversations in which Clarissa is not submissive, but as part of Richardson's repudiation of false delicacy, Clarissa can (with Lovelace particularly) seize turns to speak and cut others off when it seems necessary. Castle is right to refer to the findings of "modern linguists," for the conversations in Clarissa nearly always involve a struggle to dominate, and a novelist who spent his life observing women is unlikely not to have noticed that such matters as allocation and control of turns to speak are in many situations (and despite the conventions of polite conversation) skewed along lines of gender.58 Clarissa's ability to adopt unexpectedly assertive and "masculine" speech patterns may result from a male author writing for a female character and giving her "masculine" means of self-assertion, but if they increased, ever so slightly, the possibility of women doing this in "real life," they are one of the many aspects of Clarissa working subtly to undermine the patriarchial order that Richardson thought he was reinforcing even as he criticized its excesses. My first example is Lovelace's account of a scene in which he and Clarissa drink tea in the brothel, interact through the register of moral decorum, and seek to discover the limits of their situation, how far they can go. Clarissa assesses her power of independent action in these lodgings, under the false status (of unacknowledged marriage) that Lovelace has forced upon her; Lovelace tests the women's claim that Clarissa assumes the role of goddess deliberately to intimidate him with power that his own foolishness allows her. The conversation is thus a struggle for control conducted along two dimensions, and despite a variety of features which emphasize Lovelace's weakness, Clarissa's mastery is not the whole story. Lovelace represents their exchanges of word and gesture greatly to his own disadvantage, interspersing them with accounts of his thinking and his likely appearance which might be read as temporary retreats from the skirmish:

25 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa Going abroad, madam? I am, sir. I looked cursed silly, I am sure - You will breakfast first, I hope, madam, in a very humble strain: yet with an hundred tenter-hooks in my heart. ... I was perfectly disconcerted. ... Who's modest now, thought I! Who's insolent now! - How a tyrant of a woman confounds a bashful man! - She was my Miss Howe, I thought; and I the spiritless Hickman. (644-5)

After the first exchange, in which he restricts himself to sparring in minimal, polite forms of address, Lovelace is at a loss to know what to say further. In his own mind, he switches their moral attributes so that (as so often when he assesses women in the novel) "modest" means "powerless," and he generalizes to the same effect: any woman able to "confound" a man must be "a tyrant." More remarkably, he thinks of the situation in terms of roles defined elsewhere in the novel, "Miss Howe" and "the spiritless Hickman." Richardson's self-referential use of his own character as a standard further foregrounds Lovelace's act of assessment and his desperate attempt to reinterpret the decorums Clarissa enforces into their translational equivalents ("tyrant" and "confounds") in his libertine register. As Lovelace continues his account, the imperial lexis of libertine language which he applies to her actions interprets Clarissa's not encouraging him to speak as a determined refusal to allow him any opportunity, while ellipsis focuses attention on the objects, the actors, and their actions: At last, I will begin, thought I. She a dish - I a dish. Sip, her eyes her own, she; like an haughty and imperious sovereign, conscious of dignity, every look a favour. Sip, like her vassal, I; lips and hands trembling, and not knowing that I sipped or tasted. I was - I was - I sipped - drawing in my breath and the liquor together, though I scalded my mouth with it - I was in hopes, madam -. (645)

Deliberate agrammaticality foregrounds "sip" by isolating it. There is no mark of concord indicating that it is a verb (it makes no sense as an imperative), nor does it have an article indicating that it is a noun, and this contributes to a staccato quality in the account which confirms Clarissa's loftily superior attitude by presenting her actions as brusque and dismissive. By including his thought (quoting it and reporting it) in the account, Lovelace paints a comic picture of himself

26 Introduction

as confined largely to his own thoughts and sensations, approaching Clarissa humbly and incoherently, in just the powerless position he likes women to approach him. A particularly significant point of the account is the contrast in their mental states - Clarissa "conscious of dignity" (an important aspect of Richardson's advice to women), Lovelace "not knowing." Dorcas enters and Clarissa prevents Lovelace from going further by addressing her exclusively, denying him any part in the conversation, as if refusing to admit that he is present. This seizure and exercise of power within the limited range of activity she can influence dramatizes Clarissa's "sovereignty" and confirms his suppositions: Dorcas came in just then - Dorcas, said she, is a chair gone for? Damned impertinence, thought I, putting me out of my speech! And I was forced to wait for the servant's answer to the insolent mistress's question. William is gone for one, madam. This cost me a minute's silence before I could begin again - And then it was with my hopes, and my hopes, and my hopes, that I should have been early admitted to What weather is it, Dorcas? said she, as regardless of me, as if I had not been present. A little lowering, madam - The sun is gone in - It was very fine half an hour ago. (645)

Lovelace's frustration in the scene is made more vivid by Richardson's deft exploitation of the several degrees of prominence that may be given speech and thought in narrative.59 Lovelace's first speech is in a maximally free form (free direct speech), but it is cut off, in the scene by Clarissa, in his account by a narrating clause. In the rest of the passage, Dorcas's speeches are presented as free direct speech, Clarissa's speeches as direct speech and Lovelace's second speech (which is also interrupted) as indirect speech, although the final dependent clause ("that I should have been early admitted to -"), since it quotes his actual words, may seem by the point of interruption to be in a more prominent option, free indirect speech. The relatively greater freedom in the women's speech means it is less under the control of the narrator, whose helplessness in the scene seems thus confirmed by his account. What is presented complete from Lovelace is his thought, but this was not part of the exchange in the scene and so could not influence the development of the conversation. In the first exchange of the scene, Lovelace's question "Going abroad, madam?" implied "Do you dare?" and Clarissa accepted the challenge by her affirming "I do." The skirmish continues

27 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa

through choice of topic: Clarissa's speeches relate to going abroad, while Lovelace's attempts to speak are requests for permission. Lovelace's only means to enter the conversation coherently is to abandon politeness, taking the extreme option of cursing Dorcas and reinforcing his demand of Clarissa with an oath: "Confound the weather, the sunshine, and the wench! ... You must not go, madam! - by my soul, you must not" (645). Lovelace loses the ensuing debate on the justness of Clarissa's treatment of him, admitting defeat in a reflection worded as a free direct presentation of his thought in the scene, or of what he thinks as he writes the account for Belford, "Devilish severe! And as indelicate as severe, to put a modest man upon hunting backward after his own merits" (646). (The attempt to control interpretation of Clarissa's actions by arbitrarily applying moral lexis and tempering it with his own vulgar "devilish" presumably indicates Lovelace's wilfulness, but the perverse mastery of Clarissa's idiom in such passages does show he can use the lexis when addressing other characters than her, maintaining for some readers the notion that in the right circumstances he could have been reformed. What Lovelace does not expect - or what his use of the word shows him recognizing without realizing that he does - is that a "modest" man will be, like "modest" women, powerless.) When he physically prevents her from leaving the room and throws himself at her feet, Clarissa reproaches him in high terms of her own: Begone, Mr Lovelace, said she, with a rejecting motion, her fan in her hand; for your own sake leave me! - My soul is above thee, man! With both her hands pushing me from her! - Urge me not to tell thee how sincerely I think my soul above thee! (646)6°

Clarissa will not use the power of love to her own ends, but here she adopts enough of the haughty mistress to command Lovelace to leave her and threaten him with her version of "disdain," a frank assessment of his unworthiness. Lovelace responds in the highest strain of his courtly style (one he often uses in attempts to mix the meanings of his libertine register and the register of moral decorum), calling her an angel and adopting several features of religious language - imperatives beseeching forgiveness and pity of a higher, morally perfect power, and a rhetorical question exclaiming on the greatness of that power: Let me worship an angel, said I, and no woman. Forgive me, dearest creature! - Creature if you be, forgive me! - Forgive my inadvertencies! Forgive my inequalities! - Pity my infirmity! - Who is equal to my Clarissa? (646)

28 Introduction

When he utterly fails to compel Clarissa in polite conversation within the register of moral decorum, Lovelace's only resources for addressing her are the extremes of vowing and adoration she despises and distrusts. Clarissa's exercise of what limited power she has in the situation exposes the limitations of Lovelace's, but she cannot by it alone overcome the massive power of the stereotyped language for representing women which Lovelace can deploy, through physical force if he so decides, to contain her. Clarissa can establish similar discursive authority in Harlowe Place, the setting where, famously, she reports hearing "compassionating accents" which are "female accents" drowned by other voices (309). Despite this drowning, Clarissa regularly wins pitched verbal battles with her family, whether in conversations or exchanges of letters, as she does the conversation between herself, James, Antony, and Solmes which follows this report. There is no better example of Clarissa's ability to give as good as she gets in Harlowe Place than her report of a politely vicious conversation with Arabella begun behind the back of their Aunt Hervey and then finished in front of her. In the course of taunting Clarissa by discussing the preparation she has been told to make for a wedding with Solmes, Arabella alludes spitefully to what she assumes is the style of Lovelace's appeals to Clarissa: Well then, as it will be a solemn wedding, what think you of black velvet, child? - Silent still, Clary! - Black velvet, so fair as you are, with those charming eyes, gleaming through a wintry cloud, like an April sun! - Does not Lovelace tell you they are charming eyes! (204)

Clarissa suffers this treatment - her report foregrounds Arabella's control by not including a report of her keeping silent independently of Arabella's uninterrupted (and free direct) speech stating it - but not gladly. When Arabella (in a comment directed to their Aunt Hervey) says that Clarissa "seems, by her silence, to approve of my judgement" (204), Clarissa interrupts to return the sarcasm in a virtuoso demonstration of her talent for polite insult. In Clarissa's presentation of the rest of the exchange, a finely calculated alternation between direct speech and narrative report of speech acts heightens the comedy. Arabella has projected onto Clarissa one of Lovelace's typical terms of praise as courting lover; Clarissa strikes back by citing the painful experience from which Arabella draws her abusive language, pointedly distinguishing "I" and "you" subtly to recall "some people['s] supposition] that the younger sister ... has stolen a lover from the elder" (40):

29 A Stylistic Approach to Clarissa Oh Bella! said I, that Mr Lovelace had not taken you at your word! [and pressed his offer of marriage a second time] - You had before now been exercising your judgement on your own account: and I had been happy, as well as you\ - Was it my fault, I pray you, that it was not so? - Oh how she raved! To be so ready to give, Bella, and so loath to take, is not very fair in you. The poor Bella descended to call names. ... (204)

Arabella may taunt through citation of meanings from the libertine register ("agreeable blush/' "fine complexion/' "charming eyes"), but when she collocates "approve" and "judgement" she strays into a register in which Clarissa is more fluent, onto territory Clarissa well knows how to defend. Clarissa's statement is presented in free direct speech (with no quoting clause) and Bella's response is reported as something said, with no indication of the actual words (a filtering of her speech through Clarissa's sense of verbal decorum). These techniques stage the scene for Anna's appreciation and demonstrate the very great power Clarissa can achieve through speech in Harlowe Place, in this instance by disdaining to use her adversary's "own blunt weapons" (204) (as she tells Arabella) against her, instead speaking so as to wield decorum and sisterly obligation as her weapons. Clarissa's verbal skill is a reason why the family so fears direct contact with her as potentially disrupting its scheme of material and social aggrandizement, why it directs so much vindictive passion at her. But Clarissa cannot triumph through it, because the family has language to explain why she behaves this way - she is an "undutiful" and "perverse" daughter - and they can use it to contain and control her within their own assumptions. The result for readers of the novel is not so simple as Clarissa (in Michael McKeon's formulation) losing material control but being compensated with discursive power without positive material consequences.61 Before the events which provoke the letter writing that makes the novel, we learn, Clarissa had directed the household management for her mother, occupying a position of authority but with only limited independence, and she has been made independent by her grandfather's bequest of property. The course of the novel demonstrates that Clarissa can maintain any autonomy or authority within a patriarchal family only at enormous personal cost. She will not give what the family demands for her to continue to exercise influence, and her repeated assertions of independence from Lovelace fix her (as "proud beauty" or "tyrant") within his limited capacity to recognize women's power, an ideology by which, ultimately, he justifies the rape. But the discursive power

30 Introduction

through which Clarissa asserts personal integrity is not only a compensation. Clarissa speaks powerfully so as to model for women the possibility of resistance: that her family and Lovelace deploy the containing language they do illustrates both how difficult it is to imagine that such resistance will succeed and how deeply the material realm can be threatened by discourse. Through this struggle in language Richardson invites us to appreciate what powerful resources stereotyped ways of thinking about women can be, how deeply implicated in each other are the material and ideological aspects of Clarissa's life. Analysis of this language should direct attention neither to a transhistorical realm of language (whatever that might be) nor to a transcendent realm of religious compensation, but suggest instead how through his representation Richardson attempts to influence the contests for power going on through language in every reader's life. The following chapters will suggest how this is done.

PART ONE

Styles of Meaning

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2 Proverbs and the Language of Control

In asking what problems of ideology Richardson addresses in Clarissa and undertaking a stylistic study to interpret his engagement with them, we explore the means he used to create distinct styles for characters and the sometimes contradictory achievements of this work. But as we relate important patterns in the novel's language to significant aspects of its social context, we pose the questions and propose answers in somewhat different terms from those Richardson himself would have understood. For Richardson, a novel's ideological work was twofold. By encouraging readers to critique existing ideologies, it worked to expose the assumptions, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, which were guiding action, especially the ideologies of desire (perhaps thought of by his readers simply as "love") lurking in and perpetuated through the language used in the "critical situations" of courtship in which men and women negotiated their way to marriage - or seduction. He also thought that, in addition to criticizing the meanings typically made in these social processes, novels had a significant role to play in helping young readers to decide (or in teaching them) how they ought to think and act in such situations. Later chapters of this study will discuss Richardson's exploration of specific patterns of meaning in the registers of libertinism and moral decorum, suggesting what constraints and contradictions energize and limit his attempts to reform readers' knowledge of critical situations. First, however, this chapter and the next one will discuss generalization, a choice repeatedly made within the mode of discourse in nil registers as a favourite way to foreground important issues and

34 Styles of Meaning

raise ideologies to readers' conscious attention. I will discuss two contrasting genres of generalization, the proverb and the moral sentiment, arguing that when analysed as styles of meaning they suggest how Richardson's text raises fundamental questions of individuality and community. The discussion of these styles of meaning will establish (and reflect upon) a broad context for the more specific analyses of the final three chapters. Mode of discourse has to do with "the function of the text in the event, including therefore both the channel taken by the language spoken or written, extempore or prepared - and its genre or rhetorical mode, as narrative, didactic, persuasive, 'phatic communion' and so on."1 Writers generalize by shifting from a narrative report of action or a description of setting to a more abstract reflection on the meaning of action, thus identifying (and foregounding) the general principles or truths that specific actions exemplify. (This shift to reflection on action also shifts the relation between writer and reader, as the propositions exchanged challenge readers to agree or disagree with the interpretation offered and to accept or reject its implications for the relationship.) Generalizations are expressed in clauses and sentences which not only refer to the specific characters and situations of the novel, but also apply to the world beyond it; they propose an account of how things are, everywhere and always. As Jim Martin describes the function, "Generalizing texts [and parts of texts] neutralize tense, deixis and person [the grammatical systems for limiting a text to a specific time and place] in order to construct social processes as potentials underlying and cutting across particular manifestations."2 Verbs expressing processes are in simple present, nominal groups expressing participants make "generic or generalised reference" to "any," or "all," or "a kind of" entity.3 Both proverbs and moral sentiments appear across registers, although with the significant difference that in proverbs the field of discourse (expression of subject matter) does not show nearly the degree of sensitivity to situational variation that appears in moral sentiments, which tune their field of discourse much more closely to the activity going on in the situations on which they reflect. Ironically, the character in Clarissa with the most easily recognized personal style is the one who speaks as little as possible in his own words. As often as he can, Lord M. speaks with the collective voice of a traditional genre of generalization, the proverb, and in short statements modelled on it. He is no philosopher, but in his belief that the proverb expresses and deploys with striking force "the wisdom of nations," he agrees with his more profound contemporaries, those

35 Proverbs and the Language of Control

eighteenth-century philosophers who argued for the collective development and socially formative power of language.4 Critical comment on this "comic prattler of omnipurpose platitudes"5 has exhausted itself on his "proverbialism" and concomitantly limited intellectual capacity, following the lead of Richardson's list of "Principal Characters," where (in the first edition) Lord M. alone is characterized by speech habit, as "a nobleman of middle genius and a great proverbialist" (37). This disdainful treatment of Lord M. continues (knowingly or not) a negative attitude to proverbs current at the time of the novel's publication. For many of Richardson's contemporaries, especially those who considered themselves part of the polite world, proverbs had become a marker of social dialect, a stylistic habit revealing two social features of a speaker, rusticity and vulgarity. But Lord M. is not the only character to use proverbs. Richardson marks a surprising affinity between Lovelace and his uncle through them, and the proverb is a significant interactive strategy in the novel, as well as an aspect of individual style. Along with related verbal strategies used in the hope of controlling others, it can be analysed with the social semiotic category of code, the orientation to select a wider or narrower range of the meaning potential available in registers. As Lord M. uses the proverb, it exemplifies what Basil Bernstein, who first proposed the category, calls "restricted code," a style of meaning constructing and expressing group solidarity rather than personal individuality.6 This chapter will study the proverb and related verbal strategies in Clarissa, demonstrating what the theory of code can contribute to a historically sensitive literary stylistics. It will be especially clear in this discussion that "style" must be read not as a property of individual selves, the inevitable expression of their distinctiveness, but as part of a negotiation through which self is constructed in politically charged contexts, where stylistic choice makes (and marks) personal affiliation. Never merely a marker of personal idiosyncrasy, the proverb no less than the pronoun expresses solidarity and exercises power. Richardson's characters use proverbs just when, according to James Obelkevich (who mentions Lord M.'s comment on this), the educated classes had abandoned proverbs and banned them from polite literature and conversation.7 Even allowing for the relaxed standards of politeness permitted in a familiar letter, Lord M. seems deliberately to flout the conversational rule that Richard Steele lays down for young Dick Lizard in Guardian 24: "Nothing, however, is more insupportable to Men of Sense, than an empty formal Man who speaks in Proverbs, and decides all Controversies with a Short sentence. This piece of Stupidity is the more insufferable, as it puts on

36 Styles of Meaning the Air of Wisdom."8 Where Steele opposes "sense" and "formality," Lord Chesterfield opposes "fashion" and "vulgarity" when he cautions Stanhope that "Vulgarism in language is ... [a] distinguishing characteristic of bad company and a bad education. A man of fashion avoids nothing with more care than that. Proverbial expressions and trite sayings are the flowers of the rhetoric of a vulgar man. Would he say that men differ in their tastes; he both supports and adorns that opinion, by the good old saying, as he respectfully calls it, that what is one man's meat is another man's poison ... A man of fashion never has recourse to proverbs and vulgar aphorisms."9 In the introduction to Swift's Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, Simon Wagstaff's mock-serious dismissal of proverbs directs his readers to "learn by all Means to distinguish between Proverbs, and those polite Speeches which beautify Conversation: For, as to the former, I utterly reject them out of all ingenious discourse."10 The Collection that follows presents conversations stitched together almost entirely out of proverbs and other vulgarisms, so Swift slyly includes in Wagstaff's introduction just the kind of specious justification his speakers would be likely to approve: I acknowledge indeed, that there may possibly be found in this Treatise a few Sayings among so great a Number of Smart Turns of Wit and Humour as I have produced, which have a proverbial Air. However, I hope it will be considered, that even these were not originally Proverbs, but the genuine Productions of superior Wits, to embellish and support Conversation; from whence, with great Impropriety ... they have most injuriously been transferred into proverbial Maxims; and therefore, ought in Justice to be resumed out of vulgar Hands, to adorn the Drawing-Rooms of Princes, both Male and Female, the Levees of great Ministers, as well as the Toylet and Tea-Table of the Ladies.11 English attitudes to proverbs were not always so disparaging, however, especially in writing addressed to middle-class readers, and several comments praising them imply that as markers of group affiliation in Clarissa they may bear more complex interpretation. When English writers are less anxious about the social status of their speakers and the values they represent, or when the user of proverbs does not pretend to good breeding or polite wit, they often take a more positive view. John Hughes praises Sir Roger L'Estrange as "a perfect Master of all the Idioms and Proverbial Expressions which are peculiar to our Tongue; these he often applies happily enough, tho' sometimes not without Affectation."12 Joseph Addison, writing

37 Proverbs and the Language of Control as Isaac Bickerstaff in the "From my own Apartment" section of Tatler 96, advises "men of real merit" to avoid singularity in appearance and behaviour with the flourish "For, as we old Men delight in Proverbs, I cannot forbear bringing out one on this Occasion, That good Wine needs no Bush."13 When Steele introduces into Spectator 509 a letter from a correspondent urging honest trading, he makes allowances for the writer's background as follows: "My present Correspondent, I believe, was never in Print before; but what he says well deserves a general Attention, tho' delivered in his own homely Maxims, and a Kind of Proverbial Simplicity; which Sort of Learning has raised more Estates, than ever were, or will be, from Attention to Virgil, Horace, Tully, Seneca, Plutarch, or any of the rest."14 This mixture of positive and negative attitudes (some writers express both) suggests that whether proverbs were likely to be praised or proscribed depended on context, on whether they were considered in the mode of anxious self-scrutiny enjoined on those who aspired to shine in polite company or in the mode of defensive self-assertion in which someone refers to an unfashionable habit he does not intend to change, especially if he presumes a sympathetic audience. The discussion of proverbs sustains opposed attitudes to them, so writers can use this style of meaning for characterization, but cannot predict exactly how readers will respond. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu declared that "old Lord M. talks in the style of a country justice," Samuel Richardson might have agreed, although with quite a different attitude toward his doing it. The best reason for criticizing Lord M.'s proverbs and considering him just a "middle genius" in moral perception is that while his proverbs are relevant to the issues at stake in the novel, their language is too general to connect closely to other characters' understanding of them. Depending almost exclusively on proverbs for his moral language, Lord M. linguistically isolates himself, unwittingly constructing a limited understanding of the central issues and events that prevents his views from being taken seriously. Several of the proverbs in his letter to Belford might stand as mottoes to events in the novel - "when a thing is done advice comes too late" (606), "delays are dangerous" (607), "a handful of good life is better than a whole bushel of learning" (607) - although they understate the novel's tragic seriousness, and key words like "delays," "advice," and "learning" simplify considerably the complex problems to which they refer. Other proverbs are so inadequate as to seem shallow, if not complacent: "what everyone says, must be true" (606) and "a word to the wise is enough" (607) are inappropriate expectations in a novel where reference

38 Styles of Meaning to "report" and the opinion of the "world" provokes self-justification in writing which reveals how damaging "report" can be, and where wisdom is most often lacking or impotent. This letter was expanded considerably by the third edition, and Lord M/s sententiousness increased proportionally. Several of the additions call into question Lord M/s own behaviour and the grounds on which he thinks proverbs will make his letter more persuasive. Although he has heeded the advice of some of his proverbs, Lord M. is himself now demonstrating that "Young mens frolicks, old men feel" (4: 121), a point that leads to his moral authority being compromised significantly when, just before the trial scene in which he addresses Lovelace in high indignation, he laughs at Lovelace's accounts of his (Lovelace's) rakish exploits and recollection that he once considered seducing his cousins.15 The scene is related only by Lovelace, but his description of his uncle and the ironic reflection that follows seem justified: "The old peer has been a sinner in his day, and suffers for it now: a sneaking sinner, sliding rather than rushing into vices, for fear of his reputation: or, rather, for fear of detection and positive proof; for these sort of fellows, Jack, have no real regard for reputation" (1023). Proverbs have not kept Lord M. from his pleasures, or from appreciating the illicit pleasures of others; the "sneaking" and "sliding" have been done under cover of moral language allowing wide scope for self-indulgence. Proverbs are less frequent in Lord M/s letter to Lovelace (which was revised little by the third edition), but this comparative selfrestraint is lost on his nephew, who considers the letter a "farrago of nonsense" so full of "pop-guns" that he cannot show it to Clarissa "without exposing the head of our family for a fool" (663). Lovelace is likely to consider as irrelevant, or at best remote, those proverbs which apply to him personally. He aims to disprove the wisdom of "It is a long lane that has no turning" (664) and "all your wild oats will be sown [on marriage]" (665) (a superficial view the Harlowes have also taken [200]); he does not believe that "No man is always a fool, every man sometimes" (664), while "The more noble anyone is, the more humble" (664) must remind him of Clarissa. He intends to "Let your actions praise you" (665) - in ways Lord M. is far from intending and two other proverbs later prove more apposite to him than he imagines. "Worth is best known by want" (664), which Lord M. applies to his own experience, becomes relevant to Lovelace's, actually understating the fervour with which Lovelace comes to believe (as he does in his last words) that Clarissa is his only hope for salvation; his persistent disregard of Belford's admonitions and his eventual fate confirm the "great wisdom" of Lord M/s "God send me a friend

39 Proverbs and the Language of Control

that may tell me of my faults: if not, an enemy, and he will" (664). Clarissa, of course, would have responded sympathetically to Lord M.'s letter, making the applications needed for the proverbs to persuade. Lovelace's best reason for not showing it to her is that it would underscore the hopelessness of her situation, in which she must depend on an implacable man to "forgive and forget" her family's actions, a man she has so far been unable to move "by strong arguments and gentle words" (664). As a mode of interaction, proverbs depend for their relevance, application, and authority less on inherent formal qualities than on a large measure of agreement between addresser and addressee. Because the language of Lord M.'s proverbs is general - Lord M. assumes it applies in all times and all places, regardless of the specific values of situation that produce variation in register - and because Lovelace participates in its application, proverbs cannot strike him forcibly as an unexpectedly apposite analysis of events, nor can they persuade him to grant Lord M. decisive moral authority. What authority they bear derives only from the respect paid to proverbs as a whole within the shared cultural context, and Lovelace, when it serves his sense of singularity, chooses to share no attitudes with anyone. As the comments already surveyed suggest, the proverb's authority has been cut loose from its traditional moorings; the meaning of the genre as a whole has been destabilized in the sense that one cannot know in advance what attitude individuals will take to it. If Lord M. is foolish for anything, it is for not understanding this, for hoping to achieve agreement with Lovelace through a genre that presupposes it. He fails to persuade Lovelace not because he is personally shallow and hypocritical, but because his moral language cannot achieve his persuasive ends in any context where he uses it. Community is put seriously in question throughout Clarissa, so that language which in other contexts might signal (or even invoke) solidarity often strives unsuccessfully to establish it. Resources for building and sustaining community are foregrounded, and when exposed to critical scrutiny they appear surprisingly inadequate. In this crisis of collective understanding, neither family nor society shares assumptions and sense of common purpose such that "a word to the wise" can be "enough." Depending for their moral suasion on how the characters addressed connect them to the situation they would influence, proverbs exemplify "restricted code," the social semiotic category Bernstein developed (along with its counterpart, elaborated code) "to formulate the regulative principles which ... underlie implicit and explicit forms of communication."16 As mentioned in the introduction

4O Styles of Meaning

to this chapter, code is an orientation to orders of meaning, a meaning style which skews expectations within registers, controlling the range of meanings which will be considered relevant in particular situations. Bernstein and others have developed the category of code as one part of a sociological theory to account for the transmission of culture and the reproduction of social structure. It is unusual among sociological theories for the importance it places on language (hence its classification as "sociolinguistic"), and although the most extensive research so far conducted with it has investigated socially differentiated patterns of educational achievement and of interaction between mothers and their children, theorizing the school and the family as sites of social reproduction, Bernstein has insisted that in itself a restricted code is not a sign of linguistic or cognitive deficiency: "A restricted code contains a vast potential of meanings. It is a form of speech which symbolizes a communally based culture. It carries its own aesthetic."17 The theory also posits significant relations between code and social class, and Bernstein points out that (contrary to widespread misconception) "Restricted codes are not necessarily linked to social class. They are used by all members of society at some time. The major function of this code is to define and reinforce the form of the social relationship by restricting the verbal signalling of individual experience."18 The rest of this chapter will explore these aspects of restricted code. In Clarissa, coding orientation does not establish distinctions of social status in such a way that styles of meaning in the novel can directly represent the social structure of Richardson's society. As a written text, a novel cannot include the kind of speech in which restricted code flourishes and in which it has been most studied. Terry Threadgold points out, in a stylistic comparison of Chaucer's House of Fame and Pope's imitation of it, that "both the Chaucer and the Pope texts represent 'elaborated' codes"; nevertheless, she argues on the basis of the different semiotic styles of the two texts that "what appears to be realised in Pope's early eighteenth century text is precisely the emergence of [the] middle-class 'explicit' style."19 As Clarissa is a text of the mid-eighteenth century, it is hardly surprising that- elaborated coding orientations predominate in it. But restricted coding orientation does appear, and it symbolizes family allegiance, or (sometimes) ties together groups formed according to shared assumptions not always expressed in explicit accounts of beliefs. Manifestations of coding orientation express "code" in the nontechnical sense of shared ideology or codes of values, and they strive to control behaviour and establish (or maintain) relative status. For

41 Proverbs and the Language of Control

analysis of the Harlowes, one further pair of categories from Bernstein's sociology is relevant: the two types of control exercised over children, positional and personal, which often (although not always) coincide with restricted and elaborated code. For the purposes of this discussion, positional appeals attempt to control an individual through her desire to maintain or improve her status within a group, typically the family, and personal appeals attempt to control an individual through her feelings and principles.20 The focus will be on the deliberately narrowed ranges of lexical and grammatical features which realize restricted code in the novel, usually in situations where language is used to regulate behaviour, and it is the relative degree of restriction or elaboration that is important, not the simple presence or absence of canonical markers of one or the other. As Bernstein has reiterated, codes are dispositions in the use of language, not varieties of language, and it is as indices of codal orientation that restricting or elaborating features of language enact solidarity and effect control. It was as an arbitrarily applied strategy of control that proverbs became repugnant to Lovelace, who claims that whenever he requested anything of Lord M. as a boy his uncle responded according to whichever proverb first came to mind. This, Lovelace says, gave him such a distaste for the "wisdom of nations" (663) that he agreed with his tutor to read the Bible only on condition that he be allowed to omit the book of Proverbs, but when, after discussing Lord M.'s letter to Belford, Lovelace invites Belford to share his dismissive attitude through a proverbial turn of phrase himself - "Well, but let us leave old saws to old men" (611) - Richardson signals an unacknowledged affinity, a return of the verbally repressed. Elsewhere, in spite of his sneers at Lord M.'s "wisdom of nations" and his supposition that Lord M. has not written because he is "Hunting after more wisdom of nations" (691), Lovelace several times cites proverbs and attributes them to Lord M. without stigmatizing them.21 Lovelace also uses proverbs himself, and in one remarkable passage in a letter from Hampstead, he even reverses his opinion of the genre: I will now give thee the substance of the dialogue that passed between the two women and the lady. Wonder not that a perverse wife makes a listening husband. The event, however, as thou wilt find, justified the old observation, that listeners seldom hear good of themselves. Conscious of their own demerits (if I may guess by myself: There's ingenuity, Jack!), and fearful of censure, they seldom find

42 Styles of Meaning themselves disappointed. There is something of sense, after all, in these proverbs, in these phrases, in this wisdom of nations. (790)

Forced by circumstances into an activity beneath the character of a gentleman, Lovelace explains his action by a generalization that blames Clarissa for his behaviour in the false terms in which he has presented their relationship to the people at Hampstead. He finds the "wisdom of nations" acceptable here for several reasons. At Hampstead, he relies upon the stereotypes of long-suffering "husband" and "perverse wife" to motivate the women there to help him, controlling the situation through the generic assumptions with which he persuades others to read it. The reflections on women and on human nature which the women inspire are, unfortunately for Clarissa, only too well justified by events. Satisfied with how well his plot is working, Lovelace relaxes from his fanatical insistence on originality, on making a way for himself off the beaten road: so Richardson suggests that Lovelace is not so radically different from others as he thinks. But before he applies it to himself, Lovelace cleverly interprets this proverb through the register of moral decorum associated with Clarissa (this shows up in his lexis: "conscious," "demerits," "ingenuity," "censure"), thus connecting the "old observation" more closely with the language of the novel than Lord M. ever does his proverbs. This ingenuous application makes a point for Richardson (about the psychology of "listeners"), yet it is also, for Lovelace, mere verbal play undertaken as an end in itself. The claim "There's ingenuity ..." (790) occurs as a parenthesis within a parenthesis, and the development of the passage (suggesting the rapid movement of a writer monitoring and commenting on his writing) is toward a final generalization on proverbs. This development enacts such a high degree of self-reflexivity in the process of writing, clauses commenting on previous ones, that Lovelace seems more interested in reflecting on proverbs than in what the reflection admits about himself. As so often, he is confident that the man in control of the situtation is the only participant in it not himself controlled by this language. Elsewhere, in the presence of his assembled family, Lovelace demonstrates a shrewd understanding of how the family's highly valued persuasive genre and its restrictive coding of experience can serve his purposes. Attempting to disarm the charges Clarissa has made in a letter to his aunt, Lady Betty Lawrence, he uses two proverbs to translate tactically from Clarissa's moral language into the more general moral language of Lord M., hoping that this will persuade the family to his own estimate of what Clarissa describes: "The lady says,

43 Proverbs and the Language of Control

'She has been dishonoured ... by means that would shock humanity to be made acquainted with them.' She is a very innocent lady, and may not be a judge of the means she hints at. Over-niceness may be under-niceness: have you not such a proverb, my lord? - tantamount to, One extreme produces anotherl - Such a lady as this may possibly think her case more extraordinary than it is"(i032). The different degrees of certainty expressed in these two "proverbs" (tentativeness expressed through the modal verb "may be" in the first, certainty expressed by there being no modal verb in the second) favour his appeal: the proposition with the closest lexical relation to Clarissa, which represents her experience more fully, admits of doubt; the more general proposition admits of none. Lovelace's final claim is modalized as well ("Such a lady as this may possibly think ... ") because he is making Clarissa responsible for the assessment of "her case" as "more extraordinary than it is," and such an outrageous assertion, like the claim that she "may not be a judge of the means she hints at," must be made tentatively to the family if at all. Modality, expressing a speaker's opinion of the likelihood or "usuality" of what is asserted, is one part of the grammatical resource for handling interpersonal relations in English.22 Another part of that resource, mood selection - the shift from declarative to interrogative - is also important in this passage, and the effect is consistent with the shifts in modality: Lord M. is being encouraged to agree with Lovelace's assessment. The interpersonal metafunction is foregrounded in this passage because in the immediate situation Lovelace is attempting to influence attitudes, to win the others to his side; its repeated foregrounding across the whole novel serves a variety of purposes and can be interpreted here as directing readers' attention to the important questions of how they think of Clarissa and how they assign responsibility for actions.23 The "proverb" on "over-niceness" is more closely related than most to the language of the rest of the novel, but it is yet another instance of Lovelace's self-interested reading of situations and behaviour, his persistent attempt to disturb and displace assumptions. If the family accepts it, he will have defined the issue under debate as overdelicacy in Clarissa and thus enabled himself to manage the debate within assumptions they are less able to question than they can others. Lovelace's account of the family's reaction to these claims goes into considerable comic detail, and to judge from this account it is as if his tactic has made words irrelevant and reduced the situation to a contest of expressive gestures, in which there is no reference beyond immediate situation and feelings. This contest Lovelace can believe he wins either because he evokes assent - his "humorous

44 Styles of Meaning

undaunted" manner, he says, forces smiles from his cousins (1032) or because in his account he assigns to the reactions meanings which favour his position. It is significant that the criticism which does affect him is made by Lady Sarah, the centre of moral authority in the scene, who contests his claims not by reacting with emotional expressions of disdain or disgust, but by scrutinizing his language as carefully as Clarissa would herself. She refutes his insinuations with a restatement of Clarissa's public character, an elaborated focus on her personality and values (which he cannot deny), and forces him to reconcile his actions with that (1033). This criticism can command Lovelace's attention and compel him to admit that his actions have been wrong where proverbs cannot. Nonetheless, for all his imperviousness to it, for all the selfconscious irony in his calculated attempt to sway others through a form of language they trust, his uncle's proverbialism has affected Lovelace deeply. This is nowhere more apparent than in the maxims of his "rake's code," the literary quotation "Every woman is at heart a rake," "importunity and opportunity, no woman can resist," and "once subdued, always subdued." Allowing no distinctions, these propositions bond rakes one to another in shared allegiance to the terms in which they master women. Lovelace thinks to distinguish himself by testing these on Clarissa, all the while imagining that he himself is not bound by them, but the logic of the implicit and communal, which Lovelace believes he can deploy or suspend at his pleasure, is absolute: Lovelace stakes his claim to personal significance and glory in "rakish annals" on his proving propositions which, if true, render his entire libertine persona utterly commonplace. Lovelace's attitude to the physical body exemplifies this delusion: although central to his trial of Clarissa, physical possession is anathema to his sense of self and no part of his proposed pleasure, for as James Grantham Turner has shown, libertines who interpret physicality within a materialist philosophy of involuntary impulse sooner or later discover that the selves they believe transcend common morality are subsumed as small functions within a supervening pattern of action and reaction. They discover themselves, as Lovelace does, "a machine at last, and no free agent" (848).24 The quasi-proverbial form of the maxims in the rake's code is a stylistic clue to this paradox, predicting not a unique Lovelace, but the levelling of pursuer and prey without distinction into the wide range of their application. Lovelace can subvert the language used to control him, but he does not realize until he is within its grasp the full logic of the restricting rake's code he uses as an instrument of dominance himself. It is a mark of Clarissa's sharper intelligence and an aspect

45 Proverbs and the Language of Control

of her final triumph that she uses a similar strategy fully aware of what it will cost. The Harlowes' language for controlling Clarissa is more explicitly relevant to the rest of the novel than are Lord M/s proverbs, but it is equally futile in enforcing their collective will. All their tactics to force their assumptions onto her situation provoke Clarissa to question and reject the selfishness she sees to be motivating them. While the family's language does not shift so consistently into a restricted code as Lord M/s does in his passion for proverbs, the family operates both a positional and a personal strategy of control, and the contrast between more restricted and more elaborated language is important for its attempts to influence the "rebel," its "hardened child" (191). The family's positional appeal is a simple demand that Clarissa as daughter dutifully obey her father. The prejudices and hypocrisies which constitute the Harlowe moral code are fully evident in this appeal, and at its harshest it is expressed by Mr Harlowe himself in speech restricted at its most strident almost exclusively to terms of family relationship arranged in the grammatical forms of brief exclamations, elliptical interruptions of others, imperatives, and declarations of his will. His speeches in the scenes where Clarissa is instructed before her visit to Anna and is left alone with him shortly after her return offer several examples of these features. In the first scene, Mr Harlowe sits in judgment on a verbal contest playing before him, interjecting twice with "Son James!" (57, 58) and with "No more! - No more, of either side. ... You are not to receive the visits of that Lovelace, though - Nor are you, son James, to reflect upon your sister. She is a worthy child" (57). Alone with Clarissa, he is even more vehement, hardly allowing her to finish a sentence, himself uttering in places only a few complete grammatical sentences over the course of several exclamations: "No protestations, girl! - No words - I will not be prated to! - I will be obeyed! - I have no child - I will have no child, but an obedient one. ... No expostulations! No but's, girl! - No qualifyings! - I will be obeyed, I tell you! - and cheerfully too! - or you are no child of mine! -" (64-5). The implicit style of meaning does not fail to communicate here - Clarissa can be counted upon to retrieve the relevant meanings from context and understand this speech in all its violence - but she will not submit tamely to be abused by the relationship these speeches symbolize and wield as a weapon against her.25 There is a good example of how proverbs and moral sentiments contrast as realizations of restricted and elaborated code on the one hand and as interactive strategies on the other in Clarissa's response

46 Styles of Meaning

(in a letter to her Uncle John discussed more fully in the next chapter) to a proverb the family has cited, "Marry first and love will come after" (149): "A thousand things may happen to make that state but barely tolerable, where it is entered into with mutual affection: what must it then be, where the husband can have no confidence in the love of his wife, but has reason rather to question it from the preference he himself believes she would have given to somebody else, had she been at her own option?" (149). This is the first of a series of interrogatives asking pointedly through general terms ("husband," "wife," and "somebody else") keyed to the Harlowes' construction of Clarissa's situation just what she can reasonably expect, should she accept the proverb's "shocking assertion" (149). The proverb's mental process "love" is translated into the more elaborated "mutual affection," then restated (as "the love of his wife") but within a concatenation of mental processes and relational processes expressing mental acts ("have ... confidence," "has reason," "preference ... given," and "believes") in which it ("love") is the only mental process not possible. It is not even so much the focus on the emotional climate of a marriage entered reluctantly that challenges the Harlowes' collective capacity for sympathy (Clarissa's declaration at the end of this moral sentiment that "fear only" [149] could control her behaviour does not bother them) as it is her entertaining a hypothetical situation ("where ...," "where ...," "had she been ... ") and complex conditions ("can have no confidence ... but has reason ... ") needing hypotactic relations between clauses for their expression. The family is accustomed to Clarissa's arts of language; its other strategy of control, a personal appeal through the values that define her as a distinct person, attempts to control Clarissa through her own principles presented in a parodic version of her own style of generalization. In her Uncle Antony's letter responding to her appeal to him, realizations of restricted code (such as his reiterated "Mind that") are threaded through more elaborated formulations: And so a noted whoremonger is to be chosen before a man who is a moneylover! Let me tell you, niece, this little becomes so nice a one as you have been always reckoned. Who, think you, does most injustice, a prodigal man or a saving man? - The one saves his own money; the other spends other people's: but your favourite is a sinner in grain, and upon record. ... What names will perverseness call things by - A prudent man, who intends to be just to everybody, is a covetous man! - while a vile, profligate rake is christened with the appellation of a gallant man, and a polite man, I'll warrant you! (154)

47 Proverbs and the Language of Control

Central to this passage are questions of definition carried out through a restricted stock of adjectives usually deployed as single modifiers in nominal groups expressing stable categories no rightthinking daughter loyal to family values can confuse. In the letter which provokes this response, Clarissa uses elaborating tactics (such as conditional dependent clauses - "But, sir, if I am prepossessed, what has Mr. Solmes to hope for?" [151]) to entertain as hypotheses some parts of the family's case against her and then provokingly to point out flaws or absurdities in it. Taking this particular hypothesis as a fact and thinking that his appeal to her reputation will automatically produce the response he desires, Antony invites Clarissa to judge of a general case (one of her favourite activities), reconsider the two men, and choose again ("Who, think you ... ?"). Since she can only agree that "a saving man ... saves his own money" and "a prodigal man ... spends other people's," Antony assumes that the matter admits of no doubt. He knows that Clarissa can refuse to apply his terms to Solmes and Lovelace, so although his own argument depends on selective characterization - in effect, on giving the two men false identities - he attempts to forestall this refusal by rebuking Clarissa's "perverseness" in making false identifications of the two men herself: "A prudent man ... is a covetous man," "a vile, profligate rake is ... a gallant man, and a polite man." It is not definitions of Solmes and Lovelace that are ultimately important, however, and Clarissa can destroy the basis for this appeal by rejecting the family's definition of her. She will sacrifice her reputation readily when she understands that preserving it will compromise her power to choose according to her judgment and her principles. Antony's argument draws upon a rigidly ordered paradigm of epithets that, once fastened to people as personal attributes, does his thinking for him in propositions whose model form might be a single, large tautology. To reject this style of meaning is as easy - and as hard - as changing epithets, which, if it would help her in Harlowe Place, Clarissa would do as readily as she does when she admits to Lovelace's women in the sheriff's officer's house, just when Lovelace is discussing "niceness" with his family, "I am not nice now" (io6o).26 Father and uncle use degrees of restricted code as an unmarked or "natural" expression of patriarchal privilege, or at least they wish they could. Paternal authority has already been compromised in this family by these men's father, who divided his estate according to personal as well as positional considerations, doing so not in an act of original sin against strict settlement, which might clearly mark an origin of discord, but rather to protect his favourite against resentment he had

48 Styles of Meaning

seen already brewing.27 This is why the Harlowe males make their case with such peculiar, "Jehu-driving"(226) vehemence: their use of restricted code does not express shared assumptions, it attempts to enforce them, especially on the Harlowe women, who must take up the positions offered them or suffer the consequences. When its own appeals do not succeed and the family enlists Mrs Norton in its cause, it engages in both modes of appeal at once, for as the mentor who has formed Clarissa's code of values and as one "for whom they know [she has] even a filial regard" (177), Mrs Norton can appeal at once to her senses of moral and filial duty. Clarissa's relation to these two kinds of attempts to control her behaviour is paradoxical and contradictory. Although no redefinition of her duty can persuade her into marriage with Solmes, she performs that duty (as she understands it) scrupulously, even when doing so only lays her open to greater family pressure. So strong is Clarissa's desire to live wholly within the limits of positionally defined duties that at times she seems wilfully blind to how much the lexis for family has changed, that "mother" and "father" no longer name roles in relationships of well-understood obligation, reciprocal and unconditional. Like Cordelia, she remains emotionally bound to a restricted coding of relationship, even when she sees siblings manipulate her loyalty to it to their advantage.28 And her adherence to restricted coding of family relationship increases with her physical distance from the family. Once Clarissa is out of Harlowe Place and in no danger from Solmes, the idea that "A father [would have condescended] to KNEEL to a daughter!" (5o6)29 moves her profoundly, indicating at what fearful cost she has maintained her right to "aversion" (506), to "thinking, weighing, reflection," "the finer sensibilities" (507) at the core of her ethical self-understanding. Even under the shadow of a paternal curse she restates the family's notion of "duty" in her own elaborated code, in carefully individuated moral sentiments she thinks consistent with the code of virtue that is the basis of her relationship with Anna, and she deploys this notion of duty against Lovelace.30 More seriously, she refuses to pursue the possibility of securing herself away from Lovelace (a possibility created by her personal relationship with Anna) largely because doing so would involve Anna in disobeying her mother. Forced by her family to act, Clarissa courageously rejects the abuses of a patriarchal order she knows, but once beyond the family's reach she timidly refuses to venture on an alternative to that order. If there is any unwarrantedly squeamish behaviour, any indication that she longs to flee (like Blake's Thel) away from experience and back to the security of her former state of innocence, it is her wish that she

49 Proverbs and the Language of Control

could be again a "dutiful daughter." This is what precludes a full commitment to her friendship with Anna, not (as has sometimes been claimed) her attitude to sexuality.31 Although Anna and Clarissa are praised for the "nobility" of their friendship (as it contradicts male expectations), Richardson's choosing not to give that friendship a larger role in determining Clarissa's destiny suggests how serious was the problem of there being no viable models of an alternative, exclusively female community, and it may indicate a fundamental unwillingness (or inability) on his part to challenge the assumption that women should be daughters and wives essentially, friends only accidentally.32 Clarissa remains loyal to a positional model in which social roles and relationships set boundaries on behaviour regardless of personal inclinations; Anna cannot persuade her to construct roles and relationships solely on the basis of the personal. The Harlowe family's language of control is often brutal and its implications are always ugly, but it sticks deep in Clarissa. She cherishes the word "child" from her mother's lips ("And my mamma said, let the child, that was her kind word, be heard" [59]), in the papers she writes in her delirium she longs to be again a dutiful child and contrite sister, and when she makes a new identity to repair the damage that has resulted from her disobedience, one of her means to do this is to take up the language of filial duty and express through it a meaning the Harlowes have tacitly ignored obedience to her superior duty. The allegorical letter Clarissa sends to Lovelace uses the lexis of family relationship to express devotion to the will of her heavenly rather than her earthly father, and it expresses as well a new sense of urgency, an impatience with her mortal life inspired by new knowledge of the significance of death. In religious meditations made through selection and minimal adaptation of biblical quotation, in the biblical verses, symbolism, and dating of her coffin, she makes a restricted code of her own, expressing through it a yearning for family both powerful and powerfully ironic. Clarissa's careful preparation for death indeed creates a new "family" around her, a self-selected, liminal community cohering through shared admiration of a secular saint and the values she represents, fit audience for this implicit style of meaning. Clarissa's use of this style demonstrates the great power of restricted code, its capacity to release the subject from the anxious burden of making personal meaning through means merely personal, its power to secure and ground the self within a set of meanings fully understandable only to those who fully share it.33 But as Clarissa prepares for death she also prepares herself for a Harlowe family place that has, as Moll Flanders says of Newgate prison, long expected her, that

5O Styles of Meaning

"awful vault of [her] ancestors" where she would have consented to be bricked up (305), that place from which her final work on the family cannot reform it as she wishes, only shake it to its foundations. As Terry Threadgold summarizes Bernstein's theory in a study referred to earlier, "styles of meaning and speaking are socially constructed phenomena, which reinforce established power structures, and ... the peculiarities of semiotic or semantic styles must be explained in terms of the peculiarities of social structure."34 Richardson suggests in Clarissa how forms of social structure with positional (as opposed to personal) role systems may appear in spite of, or in opposition to, the dominant style. As it enacts contrasting styles of meaning, the clash between personal and positional orientations in the novel suggests characters shifting between the increasingly personalized role system symbolized by the explicit style that was dominant in the novel's social context and more implicit styles symbolizing positional role systems. Implicit styles of meaning are no longer the primary semiotic routes through which power circulates, but they serve the formation of distinct groups, including oppositional communities, within the larger society. In a more abstract sense, the novel's opposition of implicit and explicit styles of meaning reflects on the long series of changes which had by this time largely transformed English society, the long transition from positional to personal relationships in which changes in middle-class family life were an important eighteenth-century development. Novels were significant agents and witnesses of these changes, and the longer they are subjected to contextually sensitive critical reading the more they are given to answer for. This chapter confirms suggestions made in a number of other studies. Ian Watt relates Richardson's choice of epistolary form to "the transition from the objective, social, and public orientation of the classical world to the subjective, individualist, and private orientation of the life and literature of the last two hundred years." According to John Richetti, "Suffering and confused female characters in eighteenth-century popular fiction enact ... a cultural crisis and enormous ideological transition, the privatization and fragmentation of experience." Studies by Lawrence Stone on companionate marriage and by Randolph Trumbach on the developing, more egalitarian relations in aristocratic families, by Katherine Green on the courtship novel, and by Nancy Armstrong on novelistic redirection of male desire and the gendering of private and public space have proposed accounts of this transformation to which Richardson's treatment of linguistic code seems most plausibly related.35 Does Richardson's use of codal variation express an opinion on these changes? The force with which restricted and elaborated orientations

5i Proverbs and the Language of Control

collide in the novel, and the fact that both Lovelace and Clarissa at some time choose restricted code to build positional relationships, together suggest that Richardson felt ambivalent about them. These changes had been underway for some time - elaborated codes arise as a consequence of the division of labour, a process Bernstein has sketched for England from the middle ages36 - and elaborated code so predominates in the novel that Richardson can hardly be projecting a revival of restricted code and positional relationships across his whole society. But the novel may be read as an evocation of lost community, a lament for the passing of shared understanding and close relationship such as Clarissa imagines in the form of family: "And yet, in my opinion, the world is but one great family; originally it was so; what then is this narrow selfishness that reigns in us, but relationship remembered against relationship forgot?" (62). As the next chapter will argue, the very form in which Clarissa expresses this ideal, the moral sentiment, marks its distance from her reality.

3 The Moral Sentiment as a Dialogic Style of Meaning

If the failure of proverbs as an interactive strategy suggests how Clarissa can be related to a long-term transition from public to private orientation in life and literature and to a growing ideology of individualism, so too can non-proverbial generalization, the style of meaning whose generic form Richardson refers to variously as the moral or instructive sentiment, aphorism, maxim, caution, observation, and reflection.1 The previous chapter has shown that when Clarissa was published these forms had replaced the proverb as the socially prestigious style for stating general truths and putting them to work in discourse, so it is not surprising that it is moral sentiments which most often foreground the issues Richardson wishes to be debated across readings of the novel. Characters speak and write moral sentiments to identify the crucial issues in their lives, to state the truths they believe their experience proves. It has been argued that the social significance of the proverb in the novel lies not in the meaning of individual proverbs, but rather in how the proverb works as a style of meaning; so the moral sentiment is less significant for what individual moral sentiments say (important as that is) than for how, as a style of meaning, it allows reflection on what it means to live in a privatizing and individualizing society. Studies of Richardson have sometimes given the impression that characters' generalizations show none of the penetrating psychological and social insight for which modern readers are encouraged to value his novels, but express rather that aspect of Richardson with which readers have (or are supposed to have) least patience.2 This

53 The Moral Sentiment as a Dialogic Style of Meaning critical tradition well illustrates how tenacious has been the disparaging attitude to didacticism which J. Paul Hunter has raised as a serious problem in the modern understanding of eighteenth-century fiction and its cultural contexts.3 Modern readers' unease with the number of general statements in Richardson's novels has only been increased by the enthusiasm with which Richardson went about extracting some of them for separate publication. Although this project was not originally his idea, when a friend sent him a collection of generalizations compiled from the novel, Richardson expanded it considerably, and in the third and fourth editions of Clarissa a table of "moral and instructive sentiments" organized under alphabetically arranged headings was included in the novel's textual apparatus.4 A similar (and larger) table accompanied Szr Charles Grandison in its first edition, and after encouragement from friends and considerable revision of passages from the novels, Richardson published A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison in 1755-5 Since that time, many readers have been unable to consider the moral sentiments in their original contexts without interference from the idea of the Collection. Despite references after each entry identifying its place in the novels - a clear indication of the work's derivative, cut-and-paste nature when it was thought of at all, the Collection for a long time fell across readings of the novels as the shadow of a plump, complacently moralizing printer, Mr Richardson. There is a curious contradiction in critical practice, however, for although Richardson's use of generalizations has been disparaged where it has been considered an intrusively didactic expression of an authorized (and normative) doctrine, generalizations are often quoted in discussions of characters' motivation and their interpretations of events. That he took considerable care in the selection, arrangement, sometimes strategic revision, and separate publication of generalizations has, however, only persuaded commentators unsympathetic to the moral sentiment as a style of meaning that generalization is an aesthetic blemish in itself and compelling evidence of a divided creative personality, of a moralist unable to appreciate his own artistic achievement.6 There is now a more positive attitude to the moral sentiments, and a simple juxtaposition of modern criticism with commentary by Richardson and his contemporaries would show this attitude to be the more historically sensitive response.7 But there is a more important reason for discussing this commentary, for it represents not just the opinions of individuals, but the perspectives of two overlapping

54 Styles of Meaning

groups of reader-writers (readers of novels who also write for publication themselves) within the larger community of producers and consumers of literature. These two subcommunities produce different kinds of book, the macro-genres of novel and collection, in which the micro-genres of moral sentiment and maxim appear for readers. Separate publication, first in the apparatus to the third edition of the novel, then again in the Collection, transposed the moral sentiments into a more explicit style of meaning (which, following Benjamin Kennicott's practice in its preface, I shall call the maxim) by framing them differently for readers. Depending on which group we contextualize his comments in, Richardson can be heard speaking primarily as a novelist and primarily as a moralist at different stages of publication and republication. What is striking about Richardson's participation in this process, however, is that he never wholly accepts the dichotomy which it implies. As the concluding section of this chapter will argue, even when he issued a collection of maxims he did not succumb to the lure of the collection's promise of a fully explicit, monologic moral voice. Instead, he retained the interplay of voices that characterizes the novel, an indication not only of a deep commitment to dialogism but also of a coherent sense of purpose, proof that the contexts of publication made a stricter separation of art and morality than Richardson himself was able to do. The two groups of reader-writers are distinguished by the kinds of literary activity in which they were associated with Richardson, and how we construe Richardson's authorship of moral sentiments/ maxims differs as we associate him with each group in turn. Whatever they might have thought of the Collection, two other novelists of the 17405 (Sarah and Henry Fielding) and a major critic (Samuel Johnson) championed moral sentiments in Richardson's and other writers' novels. Johnson is well known to have recommended that readers go to Richardson for "the sentiment" rather than "the story"; he also suggested that there are "few sentiments that might not be traced up to Homer, Shakespeare & Richardson."8 Whether or not he was suggesting that Richardson's sentiments have similar literary merit, Johnson probably meant that the sentiments in Richardson were appropriate to the spheres of life in which his novels were set and so complemented those of Homer and Shakespeare.9 Johnson also argued that to inspire readers to reflect closely on issues in their own lives, sentiments needed to be anchored in probable scenes of life. In the "Life of Addison," he says that his comments on the sentiments in Cato ("the noblest production of Addison's genius") confirm a long-standing consensus:

55 The Moral Sentiment as a Dialogic Style of Meaning of Cato it has been not unjustly determined that it is rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation of natural affections, or of any state probable or possible in human life. ... The events are expected without solicitude, and are remembered without joy or sorrow. Of the agents we have no care: we consider not what they are doing, or what they are suffering; we wish only to know what they have to say. ... But they are made the vehicles of such sentiments and such expression that there is scarcely a scene in the play which the reader does not wish to impress upon his memory.10

Richardson's fellow novelists considered that moral sentiments were an important stylistic resource for representing "natural affections" and states "probable or possible in human life/' marks of authenticity rather than inauthentic intrusions by a didactic authorial voice. One of the speakers in Sarah Fielding's Remarks on Clarissa, Mr Clark, approves of the sentiments even though he admits that they contribute to the novel's length: "Tho', upon the whole, I don't know but there may be some Exuberances that might have been spared, as they stop the Progress of the Story, and keep us in anxious doubt concerning Clarissa's Fate, altho' the Scattered Observations have generally the Recommendations of Novelty to amuse the Curious, Depth to engage the Attention of the Considerate, and Sprightliness to entertain the Lively."11 Bellario (who sounds remarkably like Samuel Johnson) vindicates Clarissa's religious reflections: "Nay, Sir, ... I cannot see how she can be said to cant; for her religious Reflections are neither nonsensical nor affected, but such as naturally arise from a pious Mind in her several Situations."12 Piety had been a problem in the early response to Pamela (Aaron Hill suggested it might alienate those readers most needing the novel's influence),13 and Clarissa's piety is more sophisticated than Pamela's, in keeping, Albrecht von Haller would have said, with her wider opportunities to gain knowledge and refinement.14 Sarah Fielding's own critical criterion for reflections is that they be expressions of sound judgment appropriate to the situations in which they are produced. In David Simple, for example, Camilla pauses in telling David her story and apologizes "for troubling you with my Remarks," but he quickly reassures her that, "as to her Remarks, he desired her always to tell him what she felt and thought on every Incident which befel her; for nothing could give him greater Pleasure, as he was sure, by what she had hitherto expressed, her Sentiments were just on all occasions."15 In his preface to the second edition of David Simple, Henry Fielding praises its sentiments warmly in terms that anticipate Diderot's

56 Styles of Meaning

praise of Richardson: "The Sentiments are in general extremely delicate; those particularly which regard Friendship, are, I think, as noble and elevated as I have any where met with: Nor can I help remarking, that the Author hath been so careful, in justly adapting them to her Characters, that a very indifferent Reader, after he is in the least acquainted with the Character of the Speaker, can seldom fail of applying every Sentiment to the Person who utters it."16 Richardson has considerable support for regarding the generalizations in his novels as one aspect of the "lively present-tense manner of writing" allowed by epistolary form, and an aspect of the "air of probability" he wished to create, as well as what he claimed they were in the preface, a rhetorical device for directing attention to moral questions: "the letters ... are written while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects: the events at the time generally dubious - so that they abound not only with critical situations, but with what may be called instantaneous descriptions and reflections, which may be brought home to the breast of the youthful reader"(35).17 It is interesting that although Sarah Fielding's characters model the positive opinion toward moral sentiments that all three novelists desire from readers, it is Henry Fielding who describes the contextualizing act with which both his sister and Richardson hoped readers' responses would begin, a close application of sentiments to speakers. The process that writers hoped would be set in motion depends upon and develops skills they would have associated with casuistry, the combination of practical divinity and applied ethics that taught the application of general principles to particular cases.18 For readers willing to perform this (sometimes strenuous) work, moral sentiments initiate critical reflection on personality and principle (including their own) as parts of a social process. This is how Richardson and his fellow novelists hoped readers would share in the meaning-making process, and however urgent he considered the issues he raised, as an epistolary novelist he surrendered much of the potential for unambiguous, authoritative statement in order to encourage their undertaking it. The optimistic hope that readers would read so carefully is the context for Richardson's comment that in Clarissa, "long as the Work is, there is not one Digression, not one Episode, not one Reflection, but what arises naturally from the Subject, and makes for it, and to carry it on."19 This is not a structural description, but a result expected of readers. A somewhat different view of moral sentiments is taken by a second group of reader-writers, those who encouraged and collaborated with Richardson and who worked as he did at editorial revision, selection, compilation, abstracting, or abridgment. These activities are

57 The Moral Sentiment as a Dialogic Style of Meaning closer than novel writing is to the commercial processes of assessing the literary marketplace (often in consultation with booksellers) and producing for it. As a result of this process, the Collection frames maxims for reception by readers, and the evidence suggests that Richardson (who knows he will engage through it a much smaller group than he had hoped would read Clarissa) addresses potential readers as a moralist rather than as a novelist. It is in this context that Richardson's generalizations are most easily read as unsympathetic critics have read them. But in the context of Richardson's writing career, the Collection links his production of novels and of primarily didactic work (The Apprentice's Vade Mecum, the revision of Aesop's Fables, the Familiar Letters) through the activities of compilation, copying, and revision that are important factors common to both. The friend who first proposed a treasury of sentiments (possibly Solomon Lowe) was suggesting an editorial activity of extraction and summary highly congenial to Richardson, one he had already practised in the Meditations Collected from the Sacred Books used by Clarissa, in the massive summary table of Sir Thomas Roe's letters, and in other tasks (still unidentified) that he had undertaken for booksellers. At some time, he made such a compilation from the wisdom literature of the Bible. This project might relate to Clarissa's meditations and thus could have predated publication of Clarissa, but since he mentions it in a letter to Lady Bradshaigh which John Carroll places between 20 February and 9 April 1753, it is uncertain whether or not Richardson undertook the project before a collection of sentiments from Clarissa was first suggested: I believe, Madam, that if such a low-classed scribbler as he is, who is now addressing himself to the Lady of Haigh, could but bend his mind to reading, he would better employ his time in collecting the wisdom of past times, than in obtruding upon the world his own crudities. He has, for a trial, classed under particular heads, alphabetically, the Proverbs of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, the Books of Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus, and called it (though he has not yet taken it into his head to publish it) Simplicity the True Sublime. Those books are a treasure of morality.20 This collection was not published and has not survived, but, if it did not predate Clarissa, Richardson may have made it while he was selecting and revising "his own crudities." Along with the revision of his novels, the editorial work on the "Collection" and the Collection forms a significant part of his literary career. In the same letter to Lady Bradshaigh, Richardson mentions that the Abbe Prevost has omitted much from the French translation of

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Clarissa and he refers unhappily to Pre vest's remark "that the English editor has often sacrificed his story to moral instructions, warnings &c." These were, he continues, "the very motive with me, of the story's being written at all."21 Prevost's unwelcome revision raised again an issue that Richardson had pondered before publication. When commenting on a manuscript version of Clarissa and declining to suggest cuts, Aaron Hill had written to him that moral instructions (he attributes the "observations and reflections" to Richardson, not to the characters, a small but significant indication that he regards readers' work differently from Richardson) should not be cut: "You crowd, indeed, your observations and reflections, in this charming work. But is not that the very life, and soul, and fire, that makes the use and beauty of it so impressive and so striking? In fact, it is in the first stages (if at all) that you must look for lopping-places. All your after-growths are sacred, to the smallest twig; and can admit no cutting, without downright violation."22 Richardson writes in his preface to the first edition that when he canvassed the problem of length with "several judicious friends" (35), one suggested rewriting the novel as a single narrative, focused much more closely on Clarissa, but this notion was rejected by others, who "insisted that the story could not be reduced to a dramatic unity, nor thrown into the narrative way, without divesting it of its warmth and of a great part of its efficacy, as very few of the reflections and observations ... the most useful part of the collection, would then find a place" (36). Richardson's own conviction of the importance of the generalizations suggests that another reason for publishing the Collection may have been to present once more and so reassert the significant message of his fiction. The self-deprecating tone of his remarks to Lady Bradshaigh - he refers to his novels as nineteen volumes "obtruded" on the world - is consistent with his resolve to write no more novels, but Richardson may have thought that a one-volume distillation for consultation by "the busy, the aged, and the studious" (those groups for whom Samuel Johnson had urged him to add an index to Clarissa) might expiate some of his prolixity.23 In a letter to J.B. de Freval of 21 January 1751, Richardson mentions the "restorations" to the text of Clarissa, claiming, "These additions, and a table of sentiments, collected from the whole work, shew it to be more than a mere amusement, and that it is designed to be a piece of life and manners." After comments on the sale of the novel and the correspondents it has brought him, he continues, "I have taken much pains in the table of sentiments I mentioned. Many of my friends wish to see it printed by itself, as a collection of maxims, aphorisms, &c. which they think would be of service to the world, independent of the

59 The Moral Sentiment as a Dialogic Style of Meaning history, as they relate to life and manners."24 Peter Sabor has pointed out that the Collection allowed Richardson to present Pamela on the same terms as the later novels and to insist (in contradiction to earlier claims to have written his novels without a plan) that the moral sentiments from the three novels together offered advice for most situations of life and that therefore "all together they complete one plan, the best I was able to give."25 If in presenting the Collection Richardson assumes an authority he had denied himself in Clarissa, he also responds defensively to criticism. As Peter Sabor writes, "There can be no misunderstanding the 'delicate situations' in the Clarissa and Grandison of the Collection, since these have been removed; the treacherous ambiguities of the narrative give way to the simplistic sententiousness of aphorisms."26 What Richardson chose to do with the authority he assumes as editor of the Collection can be disconcerting to a reader who remembers the contexts in which its maxims occurred, or who uses the provided references to locate them. (There is no evidence that Richardson expected readers doing this to notice his revisions.) Richardson's selection from Clarissa may tend to tame the novel's ironies, omit its satire, and restrict its psychological insight to what survives in short passages he thinks will be edifying when read by themselves, but it will be argued later in this chapter that the "Collection" appended to the third edition cannot help recapitulating the dialogic features of the novel and so illustrating the very interpretive struggles Richardson involved himself in when he adopted the role of editor of a collection of letters as his authorial persona. An admission to Benjamin Kennicott, who contributed the preface to the Collection, suggests that if Richardson considered the moral sentiments to be the most important part of Clarissa he also considered them fully effective only within Clarissa: "It [the Collection] is a dry Performance, Dull Morality and Sentences, some pertinent, some impertinent, divested of story, and Amusement; I cannot expect much from it, tho' enlivened by your kind Preface."27 However, the dominant themes in Richardson's thinking about a gathering of maxims, whether circulated within an edition of the novel or in a collection of maxims from all three novels, are the stronger emphasis on usefulness and morality, and his claim that these were his motives to write "more than a mere amusement." Modesty prevents him from calling the Collection a "treasure of morality" (my italics), but that is clearly the direction in which his thinking on the genre tended. The previous chapter has discussed proverbs and moral sentiments as examples of restricted and elaborated coding orientations. In this chapter I wish to distinguish between degrees of elaboration

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and so shall adopt the terms "implicit" and "explicit" from Ruqaiya Hasan's cross-linguistic comparison of middle-class English and middle-class Urdu semantic styles.28 Implicit and explicit styles correspond to Bernstein's restricted and elaborated codes; I shall use them here because it is clearer that implicit and explicit styles of meaning are ranged on a continuum, and because the terms are more easily usable as names for styles of reading. Hasan's study develops the Whorfian hypothesis that ways of meaning in languages develop in resonance with the ways of meaning in the cultures in which they evolve. Cultures develop characteristic ways of meaning in all semiotic systems; in language, these can be called semantic styles expressed in characteristic ways of saying. Hasan describes the difference between two semantic styles, the explicit and the implicit, by asking "what a normal person needs in order to interpret an utterance as it is intended by the speaker. Where explicit style is concerned, the correct interpretation of a message requires no more than a listener who has the average working knowledge of the language in question. When, however, the message is in the implicit style, its intended more precise meanings become available only if certain additional conditions are met."29 The "basic difference between the two styles" is that "the explicit string [here, moral sentiment or maxim] is semantically self-sufficient" but "the implicit string involves a semantic dependence. The precise meanings of the latter are not contained within itself but must be retrieved from some source extrinsic to the string."30 If we think of these styles not as features of texts (here, the micro-genres of generalization) but as a strategy for reading texts, then an explicit reading style will assume that a satisfactory interpretation of a maxim can be made from reading it by itself, and an implicit reading style will assume that some knowledge necessary for a satisfactory interpretation of a moral sentiment is to be sought from some aspect of its context.31 The crucial difference between moral sentiments and maxims is not formal; in many instances the wordings are identical, so that what appear in the novel as moral sentiments appear in the Collection as maxims. The difference is contextual, a matter of how the respective macro-genres of novel and collection frame their contents and so solicit different interpretive strategies. This framing is, however, no more than a set of instructions. Meaning will be realized through a reader's decision to contextualize the individual generalizations, whether (if reading them as moral sentiments) with reference to situations in the novel, or (if reading them as maxims) with reference directly to assumptions about the world at large. It is more likely that a reader of the novel will treat the moral sentiments as a more implicit style of meaning and so adopt an implicit reading style,

61 The Moral Sentiment as a Dialogic Style of Meaning

referring to the fictional contexts of writing or utterance (which can be highly complex and are themselves understood through interpretive constructs) as the first stage in deciding what they mean. Then the reader may go on to further contextualize the moral sentiment as a statement true across all their experience, as well as in the fictional world they construe in reading the novel. Such reading is an art of construing implication, a complicated procedure fraught (from an anxious author's point of view) with potential misreading. No general meaning of any moral sentiment of any importance comes whole and unqualified through this process. Meanings made in implicit styles, in novels especially, lie open to influence by readers' expectations, open to whatever connections readers may make to them, so they are maximally open to influence by the meanings circulating in a diversity of styles (Bakhtin's heteroglossia) outside the text. Implicit style is dialogic.32 A maxim in a collection of maxims, by contrast, asks to be read as if issuing not from a speaker located in a specific time and place, but from an anonymous, authoritative voice of "experience" or "common sense." It is monologic, it aspires to be the only statement on the topic; it says it is the last word because it believes it is the only one possible. It does not anticipate alternatives or disagreement, it declares truth, simply and transparently. The genre which lies behind the collection of maxims is the commonplace book, and in some sense the goal of a collection of maxims as a whole is not to persuade readers of any specific truth, but to dispose readers to fashion themselves as collectors of maxims on the way to becoming makers of them - authoritative, peremptory, and, above all, sure of themselves. The collection of maxims implies an authoritative voice, and if it anticipates any response, that is a response not foreseen by the maxims themselves, the reader's claiming the same authority to speak general truth. This is not true of the Collection, of course, for it circulates under Samuel Richardson's name, many maxims are attributed to characters, and references by volume and page number indicate where all maxims are located in the novels. It is not an impersonal authoritative voice that is sought, but the genre pushes in the direction of one. The following passage from Roland Barthes's "Myth Today" starkly contrasts "popular proverbs" and "bourgeois aphorisms." This antithesis parallels the distinction between implicit and explicit styles, choosing as examples forms from the extreme ends of the continuum: Popular proverbs foresee more than they assert, they remain the speech of a humanity which is making itself, not one which is. Bourgeois aphorisms, on

62 Styles of Meaning the other hand, belong to metalanguage; they are a second-order language which bears on objects already prepared. Their classical form is the maxim. Here the statement is no longer directed towards a world to be made; it must overlay one which is already made, bury the traces of this production under a self-evident appearance of eternity. ... The foundation of the bourgeois statement of fact is common sense, that is, truth when it stops on the arbitrary order of him who speaks it.33

The "moral sentiment" lies somewhere between these two forms; precisely where depends on the work of readers. Modern critics who object to the moral sentiments in the novel construe them as bourgeois maxims (in Barthes's sense) - minimally interactive, frozen formulas leaving little work for readers to do. Critics who react positively to the moral sentiments construe them as Barthes's proverbs - generalizations used in the living of life, speech, and writing as direct action, not reflection. Ideologically, the maxim gives no account of how it knows what it says; to those for whom it is an expression of "common sense" it functions in a way parallel to the process by which the specific "background knowledge" which enables discourse (knowledge of a language and the cultural contexts in which it is used, including knowledge of the world speakable through it) "becomes 'naturalized' or is assumed to be nonideological 'common sense' and hence [is] dissociated from [its] social base."34 And so maxims work ideologically when they are read as the naturally occurring facts or universals of human nature they pretend to be, rather than scrutinized as the particular, interested constructions they are. Hasan explains that the predominant semantic style for the educated middle-class speaker of English is the explicit one. As the discussion in the previous chapter has suggested, this has been true at least since the early eighteenth century, and a brief sketch of part of the relevant intervening history can show how Richardson's production of the Collection relates to our own unease with it.35 The one contemporary who figures in both groups of reader-writers in which I have contextualized Richardson's literary production is Samuel Johnson, whose Dictionary was the most significant single contribution to the process by which the explicit style dominant in eighteenthcentury prose became the defining characteristic of a "bourgeios sociolect," the standard written English used as a national language across a "linguistically homogenous bourgeois public sphere."36 John Guillory has argued that, from the mid-eightenth century, a vernacular literary curriculum was used to produce a distinction between credentialized and uncredentialized speech and writing and so to

63 The Moral Sentiment as a Dialogic Style of Meaning develop spoken and written linguistic capital whose gold standard (Guillory calls it a fetish) was linguistic prescriptivism: authoritatively defined words spoken and written with grammatically correct accidence and syntax. Guillory writes one part of the history of how the school developed as the mechanism for distributing access to elaborated coding orientations, teaching them (most emphatically through literary studies) and expecting them of students.37 What he describes as the macro-generic form for circulation of texts (the anthology), as the preferred interpretive strategy (decontextualized reading), and as the authority so established (the confidence to speak ideas derived from one range of social experience as if they are selfevident truths of a general human nature) could stand as a description of the Dictionary as used in the public sphere, or of a collection of maxims. The historical duration of the enthusiasm for maxims in which Richardson wrote his novels and published the Collection can be roughly estimated from the publication of similar compilations from the work of other writers. Before Richardson, Charles Beckingham had published a selection from the writings of Addison, Maxims, Observations, and Reflections, Moral, Political, and Divine, in 1719-20, and a similar collection of maxims culled from the writings of Lord Chesterfield appeared late in the century. An advertisement for Maxims and Opinions, Moral, Political and Economical with Characters from the Works of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (London, 1804) testifies to the persistence of the spirit in which Richardson thought of his moral sentiments: "Mere amusement ... is not the design of these volumes. They aspire to the superior praise of being useful. The writings of the great and good Mr. Burke are fraught, in every page, with lessons of the soundest practical wisdom. These, scattered ... through 8 vols., it has been the aim of the editor to collect, & arrange under various heads. By this means, the sentiments of Mr. Burke, on any subject, may be seen at one glance."38 And Richardson is not the only novelist to have been treated in this way: Alexander Main, an admirer of George Eliot's novels, published Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings Selected from the Works of George Eliot in 1872. George Eliot stands out among nineteenth-century commentators on Richardson for her appreciation of his moral sentiments, but a passage in her own The Mill on the Floss (1860), declaring that "All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims," better indicates a change in attitude to the maxim already well advanced.39 By the time the critical dogma that novelists should "show, not tell" was being expressed in disparaging criticism of generalization in eighteenth-century novels, Virginia Woolf had condemned

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generalization as the epitome of everything that was stultifying, peremptory, and (above all) bourgeois: "Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it."40 If maxim culture had a high point, it was in the periodical essays of Samuel Johnson. As a transition to the analysis of how the moral sentiment functions as a style of meaning in Clarissa, we can recall that Johnson's maxims read differently in their essay contexts from the way they read as remembered pronouncements in the pages of Boswell. As Isobel Grundy has argued, Johnson's reputation as an aphorist belies the strenuous testing of received ideas and simultaneous effort to discover general truth that characterize his essays: "The weightiness of Johnson's style, and his concision in phrasemaking, constantly press the reader to make that pause at the end of a general statement which will disconnect it from the progress of the argument, and make it permanent. ... On the other hand the momentum of that argument converts the individual nuggets of truth into incomplete steps in the movement to comprehend complex questions."41 In Clarissa, complexity results more often from the conjunction of different points of view than from complexity in the views of a single speaker: Richardson's preferred mode is drama, not philosophy. A complexity of voices rather than a single complex voice was his talent, and when a character's speech or writing becomes multivocal it does so by becoming the scene for dramatic interplay between voices rather than by handling ideas more profoundly. None of his characters alone moralizes as forcefully or convincingly as Samuel Johnson; only Clarissa comes close to persuading us, as Johnson does, of the importance of habitually reflecting on complex questions of conduct. We can understand why Richardson and his fellow novelists praised moral sentiments in fiction so highly by analysing some of Clarissa's in Harlowe Place, where she simultaneously expresses (or explores) her own feelings and negotiates her relation to the person addressed, strategically invoking general truths and moral principles in her appeals for help.42 In the letter to her uncle John Harlowe (letter 32), a reflection on marriage is central to an appeal for sympathetic consideration of her plight and a request for the action she expects must follow from it: Marriage is a very solemn engagement, enough to make a young creature's heart ache, with the best prospects, when she thinks seriously of it! - To be

65 The Moral Sentiment as a Dialogic Style of Meaning given up to a strange man; to be engrafted into a strange family; to give up her very name, as a mark of her becoming his absolute and dependent property: to be obliged to prefer this strange man to father, mother - to everybody: and his humours to all her own - Or to contend, perhaps, in breach of a vowed duty for every innocent instance of free will: to go no-whither: to make acquaintance: to give up acquaintance - to renounce even the strictest friendships perhaps; all at his pleasure, whether she think it reasonable to do so or not. Surely, sir, a young creature ought not to be obliged to make all these sacrifices but for such a man as she can approve. If she is, how sad must be the case! - how miserable the life, if to be called lifel (148-9)

cThis appeal to a man to sympathize with the mental state of a woman facing a forced marriage is remarkable enough that it is worth exploring its more important features in some detail. Mood choices over the course of the letter foreground the choice of declarative mood in this moral sentiment. Clarissa begins the letter and follows a second generalizing passage with imperatives - "Allow me ... to implore your interest with my papa to engage him to ..." (148), "Think seriously of these things ... and represent them to my papa ..." (149) - supported by intimate lexis in terms of address - "my honoured second papa" (148), and "dear good sir" (149) - which are part of a chain of such endearments. Interrogatives (of which there are several leading into the moral sentiment quoted) similarly include intimate address and, by demanding information, perform the rhetorical act of inviting John Harlowe to consider in detail the personal dilemma of his "poor niece" (149) - "Am not / to live with the man? Is anybody else? ... Why, I pray you, good sir, should I be made miserable for lifel" (148). Later in the letter, where the term of address establishes more distance, interrogative mood challenges not just the humanity but the practicality of the family actions: "Is this the way, sir, can it be thought, to be taken with a free and open spirit? - May not this strange method rather harden than convince?" (149). There is an unusual edge to Clarissa's exploration of the "young creature's" difficulties, in particular to the emotional lexis in which she aligns the innocence, sadness, and misery of a wife against the humours, pleasures, and (above all) strangeness of her husband, lexically allied with the family's "strange method": Clarissa may take action enabling her to avoid this "poor creature's" fate. The question of action - who takes what kind of action, who is affected by it, and how the agents originating it are referred to - is the dominant grammatical theme of Clarissa's moral sentiment. To appreciate the crucial features, it is necessary to understand how the grammar of the clause represents experience. As a representation,

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the English clause construes experience as processes, as participants involved in them, and as circumstances associated with them. With a systemic grammar this dimension of the clause can be analysed in two ways, in terms either of transitivity or ergativity, depending on the interpretive aim of the analysis.43 Transitivity asks whether processes extend beyond participants performing them to participants on which they are performed, while ergativity asks whether the participant crucially involved in the process (the participant without which the process cannot occur) is the causer of it. Ergativity is thus concerned with questions of agency, and an analysis of ergativity is useful for interpreting how language represents the exercise of power. The first sentence in the passage quoted sets up "a young creature's heart" as experiencing a behavioural process ("ache") which does not extend beyond itself, but which has been induced by a mental process, "thinking," with another person included only as part of what the person thinks about, "Marriage." Clarissa uses ellipsis to make a lengthy series of parallel clauses in which processes often appear first in the clause as the repeated features which establish parallelism. This rhetorical focusing of the reader's attention foregrounds the processes in which the woman is involved. First she is the implied Goal (in Halliday's technical sense) of material process clauses with passive voice - "To be given up ... to be engrafted ..." - disposed of rather than disposing. The Actors causing the processes are left unspecified and the other participants, or the circumstances, are manifestly ominous ("to a strange man," "into a strange family"). Then she is implied Actor in material process clauses, or Processor in mental process clauses with active voice, but the processes represent a grim prospect. They are either futile or negative ("to contend ... to go no-whither ... "), or they are constrained by an unmodified (and unquestionable) male attribute ("to make acquaintance: to give up acquaintance - to renounce even the strictest friendships, perhaps; all at his pleasure"), or they are caused by external agency left (again ominously) unexpressed: "to be obliged to prefer this strange man ... to be obliged to make all these sacrifices ..."). There is one clause in the passage with a relational process ("becoming"); it is contextually foregrounded by its contrast with material and mental processes in other clauses, and it states the essential feature of marriage from which all the rest proceed: "her becoming his absolute and dependent property." Clarissa draws no clear line between what befalls all women and what befalls the "young creature" of her moral sentiment. What she leaves unspoken John Harlowe may think for himself in applying it, that the family will commit an

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outrage in forcing Roger Solmes on the "young creature" whose presentation of this plight in a moral sentiment imagines and explores the useless material activity and anguished mental activity which the family plans as her fate.44 The question of action foregrounded in this moral sentiment and defined as a matter of obligation is also the key element in the sentence most closely approaching generalization in John Harlowe's letter of reply, which disputes Clarissa's intentions but not the ideology encoded in her grammar of marriage: "the virtue of obedience lies not in obliging when you can be obliged again: but give up an inclination, and there is some merit in that" (150). Richardson included both the reflections discussed here in the "Collection," as "The merit of Obedience consists in giving up an inclination" (8: 332) and as "Marriage, with the best prospects, is a very solemn engagement ... when she thinks seriously of it, Cl." (8: 357) Strangely, revision renders the sentiment used against Clarissa fully impersonal and thus projected by the undifferentiated authority whom readers of the Collection might assume to be the source of unattributed reflections, while Clarissa's resistance is marked as her own personal view. From this perspective, Clarissa's resistance seems a principle of questioning and disorder sinking slowly beneath the surface of a moral code no longer to be perturbed by her singular excellence, and the "merit" women are told they can earn is not recognizable as the instrument of oppression the novel has shown it to be in some marriages. The implied, unnamed "husband" of Clarissa's moral sentiment in the letter to John Harlowe is, of course, Roger Solmes, and when this passage is compared with what she suffers at Lovelace's hands it develops further ironic resonance. Lovelace himself she evaluates extensively through generalizations also charged with erotic significance, most notably in the letters to Anna Howe (letters 38 and 40) in which she discusses the state of her feelings, evaluates the degree to which "figure" should influence a woman's choice among men, and emphasizes that the "heart" is what women should consider in a prospective husband. As this conjunction suggests, generalization through moral sentiment is a means for Clarissa to explain (and explain away) what she feels under pronouncements of what is proper. It is also an important strategy for negotiating with - and failing to control - Anna, the sympathetic but strict judge of her heart. There are good examples of these personal and interpersonal activities, an important expression of Richardson's decision to have love imputed to Clarissa by Anna, in the longest of the passages of direct address to Anna which punctuate Clarissa's account of Lovelace's surprising her at the woodhouse:

68 Styles of Meaning You see, my dear, he scruples not to speak of himself, as his enemies speak of him. I can't say, but his openness in these particulars gives a credit to his other professions. I should easily, I think, detect a hypocrite: and this man particularly, who is said to have allowed himself in great liberties, were he to pretend to instantaneous lights and convictions - at his time of life too: habits, I am sensible, are not so easily changed. ... What pity, where there are such laudable traces, that they should have been so mired, and choked up, as I may say! - We have heard that the man's head is better than his heart: but do you really think Mr Lovelace can have a very bad heart? Why should not there be something in blood in the human creature, as well as in the ignobler animals? None of his family are exceptionable - but himself, indeed. The ladies' characters are admirable. But I shall incur the imputation I wish to avoid. Yet what a look of censoriousness does it carry to take one to task for doing that justice, and making those charitable inferences in favour of one particular person, which one ought without scruple to do, and to make, in the behalf of any other man living? (169)

Clarissa's first generalization, "habits ... are not so easily changed," is intended at once to ground her assessment of Lovelace and secure Anna's approval of it. Yet though Clarissa begins by intending scrupulous accuracy (marked by "You see" and "I can't say, but," which direct Anna's attention to Lovelace's candour and express a reluctance to overvalue that candour), the modalizing "I think" questions whether she will be able to steer by this acknowledged truth. (Lovelace much later says to Belford, "Strong habits are not so easily rooted out" [1432] and the "Collection" [8: 342] refers to both instances.) Clarissa's "What pity ..." marks a shift into cautious hope. Anna, picking up on two features used by Clarissa in this passage, will later condemn women at Colonel Ambrose's ball for their admiration of Lovelace "qualified with ifs, and but's, and what pity's, and such sort of stuff" (1137). Clarissa extends her hopeful line of thought tentatively, through an appeal to Anna in modalized questions - "but do you really think," "Why should not there be" (my italics to show modality) - ending in a generalization which might give her solid reason for hope, if it applies. (Clarissa does not often draw on this field of discourse, domestic animals, although she later uses the training of horses as an analogy for familiarizing herself with death [1305].) The number of adversative conjunctions in the latter stage of this passage both suggests a mind turning back upon itself (turning also toward its interlocutor, as if in sudden awareness of her presence) and marks how readily Clarissa's hope has taken her beyond the limits of her knowledge. Only the statement about Lovelace's

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relatives is neither qualified by a dependent clause, nor modalized, nor put as a question. Clarissa's final anticipation of Anna's examination of her ("But I shall incur the imputation I wish to avoid") shifts out of inconclusive direct consideration of Lovelace into a third stage of interaction with Anna. Interpreted strictly according to grammatical form, Clarissa's use of "one" makes impersonal the moral sentiment aimed at Anna's behaviour ("what a look of censoriousness does it carry"), invoking the authority of principles which enjoin "charity" and stigmatize "censoriousness." Anna is well aware, however, that third-person pronouns, personal and impersonal, are in this game options lying between first-person particularized statement and generalizations in which the participants are referred to by nouns as opposed to pronouns. At the end of this letter, Clarissa comments on Lovelace's explanation of his behaviour at the Harlowe family church: "I fancy, my dear, however, that there would hardly be a guilty person in the world, were each suspected or accused person to tell his or her own story, and be allowed any degree of credit" (172). The masculine pronoun generalizes the statement beyond Lovelace, and by including the feminine pronoun as an alternative (in a period not given to practising gender-neutral language) Clarissa brings herself under its scope, anticipating what will become an important theme of the novel, perhaps acknowledging some degree of self-partiality in this letter. This possible hint is not lost on Anna, whose significant generalization in response picks up on Clarissa's "one" and her "he or she" alternative, then fuses the latter into a nonce third-person "he-she" to tell Clarissa how she reads her use of these pronouns: "When a person gets a great cold, he or she puzzles and studies how it began; how he-she got it: and when that is accounted for, down he-she sits contented and lets it have its course, or takes a sweat or the like, to get rid of it, if it be very troublesome" (173). Not surprisingly, Clarissa is stung by this, but rather than abandon third-person pronouns and generalization, she uses them even more obviously in self-defence: But lives the man, think you, who is so very bad that he does not give even a doubting mind reason at one time to be better pleased with him than at another? And when that reason offers, is it not just to express one's self accordingly? I would do the man who addresses me as much justice, as if he did not address me: it has such a look of tyranny, it appears so ungenerous, methinks, to use a man worse for his respect to one (no other cause for disrespect occurring), that I would not by any means be that person who should do so.

jo Styles of Meaning But, although I may intend no more than justice, it will, perhaps, be difficult to hinder those who know the man's views from construing it as a partial favour: and especially if that eager-eyed observer has been formerly touched herself, and would triumph that her friend had been no more able to escape than she!- Noble minds, emulative of perfection (and yet the passion, properly directed, I do not take to be an zm-perfection neither), may be allowed a little generous envy, I think! If I meant by this a reflection, by way of revenge, it is but a revenge, my dear, in the soft sense of the word! - I love, as I have told you, your pleasantry - Although at the time it may pain one a little, yet on recollection, when one feels in the reproof more of the cautioning friend than of the satirizing observer, an ingenuous mind will be all gratitude upon it. All the business will be this, I shall be sensible of the pain in the present letter perhaps; but I shall thank you in the next, and ever after. (175-6)

Well-calculated shifts between the options for self-reference through general and particular statement beg all the questions Anna might ask or a suspicious reader wish to have asked. Beginning with "the man" assessed (through the mental process "pleased") by "a doubting mind," Clarissa moves in the next sentence to third-person "one's self," then to first-person "I" set in relation to "the man who addresses me." A more archaic form of the first person, "methinks," projects a generalization setting up a pattern of behaviour (the words "tyranny" and "generosity" in this point directly at Anna) as a role (marked by "one" and "person") which Clarissa now refuses (in first person) to play. What is fascinating about Clarissa's movement through these options is that the entire range of them is foregrounded: none is meaningful simply in itself in this context, only as a movement toward or away from first-person self-reference and the confession that implies. Clarissa does not work this referential legerdemain just on herself. In the second paragraph of the passage she extracts a singular "eager-eyed observer" from a plural "those who know the man's views" and lets her know that any satiric reflection on "justice" will be construed as retaliation for Clarissa's having detected Anna's planned elopement with Sir George Colmar. The final generalization about "Noble minds" is nicely contradictory, and possibly ambivalent. Through it Clarissa "allows" Anna the faint praise of "generous envy" (does she include herself in this?) while, in a parenthesis at best provoking and at worst downright impudent, she claims that "properly directed" (as she is doing but as Anna did not do?) love is not an "zra-perfection." In thus detaching and laying implied intonational emphasis on the prefix which establishes a contrast between

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the items paralleled, Clarissa, taking "revenge ... in the soft sense of the word" (176), states and yet conceals from herself the central problem in her own "emulation of perfection," the difficulty she will encounter respecting "and yet" directing "the passion." In the final paragraph of this passage, Clarissa again moves from first person ("I love ... your pleasantry") through third-person generalization to first person ("I shall be sensible of the pain ... but I shall thank you"), the intervening sentiment bridging and reconciling the two states of feeling. Although beginning with a conditional "If I meant by this a reflection ..." which could be construed as teasing, Clarissa qualifies, addressing Anna intimately ("my dear"), and through shifts between pronouns in the following sentences she associates herself almost exclusively with mental processes: "love," "pain," "recollection," "feels," and "be sensible of the pain." Whatever the state of her heart toward Lovelace, there can be no mistaking Clarissa's voluntary opening of it to Anna here. "A dry Performance, Dull Morality" this is not; and although such delicate explication of the female heart does not survive in the "Collection," several other important features of the novel do. By contrast with the implicit proverb, in which the signalling of individual experience is restricted, the moral sentiment is an explicit style of meaning in which characters readily express personal distinctiveness, but this expression of individuality nonetheless implies loss and isolation. Individual moral sentiments may suggest inwardness as characters turn away from their immediate circumstances and take up reflective, critical distance from themselves, or open themselves to the movement of their thinking. As unreflective declaration, moral sentiments may reveal aspects of character surprising both to readers and to the speakers or writers making them; and in stating explicitly characters' expectations and strategies for engaging others, moral sentiments allow a complex cross-referencing through which Richardson strategically blends the voices of different characters and suggests that they share assumptions to a degree of which they are unaware. Implicit style takes much for granted because it can; it symbolizes a society whose members understand one another with less being said. Explicit style states principles repeatedly, obsessively, because it must; it symbolizes a society whose members are free to think for themselves and to speak truth as they perceive it, but this is a society whose truths are relative to its members' perceptions, where others may misunderstand and disagree no matter how much is said. Within the ideology symbolized by explicit style, individual identity as a starting point, empiricism as a method, and discovery as a goal seem obvious facts, good news for a satirical

72 Styles of Meaning Lovelace, whose moral sentiments gleefully anatomize all that is hypocritical and ridiculous, or confidently elaborate an account of human nature to explain and justify his libertine exploits. But for a Clarissa, it is far otherwise. Having from the beginning of the novel to justify herself to public opinion, she experiences these "facts" as dismal necessity. Her moral sentiments state the principles by which she wishes to be (but cannot depend on being) judged, and they work to clear her of malicious misconstruction which nonetheless returns from her enemies or arises when she least expects it from her friends. Those who adopt the moral sentiment as their style of meaning have been forced (or have preferred) to shift for themselves; their moral sentiments bear the weight of their hope to rebuild community, or further their selfish desires for change. Their very use of this style of meaning is proof that whatever may be their nostalgia for the close communities they have known in the past, they have been estranged (or have estranged themselves) from them. However confident individual moral sentiments may be in their statement of general truths, their being stated at all mourns lost understanding. Characters make moral sentiments to consolidate a self in relations to others in which little may be assumed. These express both the pain of isolation and the sometimes hard experience through which they have come to be able to speak their moral principles.45 Moral sentiments also suggest what it means that a moral stance cannot simply be assumed, but must be claimed, constructed, and performed in meanings made with others.46 Many of the generalizations were rewritten for the "Collection," and maxims were made out of passages not explicitly presented as generalizations in the novel, with a variety of resulting effects. Some of this revision enables Richardson to use the "Collection" to address its readers as a moralist, gleaning whatever "good advice" seemed worth inculcating, regardless of its function in the novel. The bland statement that "A prodigal man generally does more injustice than a covetous one" (8: 323) is, in the novel, part of Antony's crude contrast of Lovelace and Solmes, intended to persuade Clarissa to accept Solmes (154). Another maxim, in the novel a piece of advice from Anna - "Punctilio is out of doors the moment you are out of your father's house" (355) - Clarissa ignores in its narrow sense as a guide to her own conduct (and by maintaining a strict punctilio often resists Lovelace's encroachment), but, tragically, her experience proves it true. Presented as the view of one character and tested in action, the maxim is plausible, mistaken, and all too just; rewritten to "Punctilio is out of doors the moment a Daughter clandestinely quits her Father's house" (8: 327), the translation from implicit meanings

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which must be retrieved from the context of the whole first section of the novel ("you" and "your father's house") into explicit ones (a generic "Daughter" and "her Father's house") falsifies the situation from which it has been drawn. "Clandestinely" makes starkly simple and explicit what readers must qualify if they contextualize Anna's "are out of" with reference to Clarissa's reasons for meeting Lovelace, her reluctance to argue with him, and the deception by which he precipitates their flight. The assembly and revision of generalizations often revise away such mitigating circumstances, but this is not the only effect. To focus once again on a pronoun, there is an unexpectedly wide application given to a moral sentiment which, when Clarissa formulates it, refers explicitly (and only) to the Harlowe family. In the "Collection," with "us" now implicitly unbounded, it hauntingly evokes a world free of all interpersonal boundaries, not just patriarchal ones: "What is the narrow Selfishness that reigns in us, but relationship remember'd against relationship forgot?" (8: 387). Not all of Richardson's editorial work suggests that when he prepared the "Collection" he failed to appreciate what he had achieved in Clarissa. Addressing readers through a different genre, however, he actively explored the possibilities this opened to him. Clarissa, which works so largely through implication, through accumulation of detail and subtle variation in repeated situations, and a treasury of moral sentiments in which each aphorism speaks part of an authorized doctrine need to be read as different kinds of production. But not even the "Collection" is written wholly in a voice that can be interpreted directly as "Richardson"; a number of the passages included are attributed to those who produce them in the novel, and a discussion of the novelistic quality this lends the "Collection" can raise some important interpretive issues for the novel. Lovelace is the character most often identified as source of generalizations in the "Collection," with more reflections than are attibuted to all other characters put together, but the surprising number of characters other than the four principal correspondents also identified as sources (for however few sentiments) strongly suggests that even when selecting "SUCH of the Moral and Instructive SENTIMENTS ... As are presumed to be of GENERAL USE and SERVICE" (8: 309) Richardson thought in terms of an interplay of voices, rather than simply of an authority to be taken up directly in the single persona of a moralist responsible for all the sentiments. The topics on which he includes reflections attributed to minor characters have frequently to do with women, and rather than being qualified by the context (as they are in the novel) these reflections sound like voices grouped in an anxious chorus. Antony Harlowe appears to speak of woe that is

74 Styles of Meaning in marriage (8: 358) and of female perversity (8: 379); Colonel Morden moralizes on women's friendship (Clarissa and Anna are an exception to the rule [8: 339]) and on women's misuse of power (Anna's treatment of Hickman is his example [8: 373]); Solmes declaims on fondness in marriage (8: 336) and repeats his shocking statements on love and fear (8: 379) unaccompanied by Anna's indignant gloss. James Harlowe's malicious, tactical jabs at Clarissa - on "tragedypride" in "young women" and "young creatures" being fond of "a lover-like distress" (8: 379) - are, because they fit this pattern so snugly, less surprising inclusions than his entry under the heading "Parents. Children": "Daughters ... are chickens brought up for a stranger's table" (8: 365). Freed of James's corollary, "That a man who has sons brings up chickens for his own table," and Clarissa's witty question whether the sons are to have their necks wrung to make the analogy good (77), the sentiment is translated from a challenging exploration of the politics of patriarchal families into simple misogyny. Many of the most provocative statements about women appear in the section titled "Reflections on Women" (8: 379-81), which is among the longest and is by far the most heavily attributed group of generalizations in the "Collection." Richardson's editorial introduction to it (the only one in the "Collection") speaks from a perspective noticeably male and so allied with the male characters quoted: "Designed principally to incite Caution, and inspire Prudence, &c. by letting them know what Libertines and free Speakers say and think of the Sex" (8: 379). The pronoun "them" tying back to "women" in the section heading, and "the Sex," presuming shared knowledge of which sex is meant, together suggest a man speaking to other men, intending women to overhear him. There is a good deal of "freedom" in the voices foregrounded by specific attribution, and not just in Lovelace's. Less specifically tied to textual situations in which women's voices sometimes appear to state opposing positions, Richardson's male chorus warns against a vague but widely pervasive threat: the sentiments are included to raise women's awareness of male hostility, and what might be meant by "caution" and "prudence," what women can do to protect themselves, must be recovered from other entries. Women's voices do appear as such in the "Collection," of course. Several of the reflections attributed to Clarissa include editorial comment praising her as an example and in several instances inviting women to join their voices with hers: "An ingenuous and worthy mind will say with Clarissa ..." (8: 338); "How glorious is it for a

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woman reduced to the greatest distress by an ungrateful Lover to say, as Clarissa does ..." (8: 357); "How glorious is it for a child to be able to say with Clarissa ..." (8: 391; see also reflections on 8: 337, 8: 349). But these are strategies for securing self-acquittal addressed to women suffering at the hands of others, not strategies for resistance such as Clarissa models in the text, and they suggest that the editorial work on the "Collection" was undertaken in the spirit of a more sharply drawn distinction between a triumphant Clarissa and the malevolent world she transcends than obtains until late in the novel. Clarissa now tends to symbolize a code of values, rather than actively produce and explore it. Because he not only sometimes names characters as sources of moral sentiments but also treats them as separate voices not reducible one to another and independent of his control as author, even in the "Collection," Richardson appears there, as he does in the text of Clarissa, as editor. One of the strangest of these appearances is the parenthetical interjection in one of the three "Reflections on Women" contributed by Anna Howe: "Women, according to Miss Howe [some only she must mean] are mere babies in matrimony; perverse fools, when too much indulged and humour'd; creeping slaves, when treated with harshness" (8: 379). The modalizing "must" suggests unwillingness to erase (as an unmodalized "she means" would do) the character's difference of opinion. The editor seeks to limit the scope of the reflection, not negate it, but this could have been done by including it in the form Anna pronounces it in the text, as "many of us are mere babies ..." (213). The grammar of the reflection makes the unrestrained generalization more outrageous. "Women" are identified as "babies," "fools," and "slaves" with only indirect indication (in circumstantial adjuncts) of the (male) agency which assigns those identities. That agency is expressed as an institution ("in matrimony") or as processes in past participles without agents, "when too much indulged and humour'd," and "when treated with harshness," and in the second of them the negative quality of (male) activity is expressed not in the process itself ("treated") but more obliquely, in a manner adjunct ("with harshness"). The following sentences in the novel place women under the public scrutiny of what may be said about them, asking rhetorically whether "fear makes us more gentle obligers than love" (213), with male agency represented as mental states caused in women and in turn causing women's behaviour. The Actors to which Anna finally appeals to guard women's reputations from proving true this Solmesian proposition are abstract moral qualities ("Forbid it, honour! forbid it, gratitude!

76 Styles of Meaning forbid it, justice!" [213]) which implicitly oblige women differently from men. The "Collection" does not include even this limited scope for self-preservation in its "useful" cautions. Other aspects of Richardson's editorial work in the "Collection" involve him in the same activities (and difficulties) as engage (and entangle) him in the text. For example, two sets of directions (functioning analogously to the footnotes) connect separate passages. Both connections stage sharp contrasts, one between the deaths of Belton, Sinclair, and Lovelace on the one hand and that of Clarissa on the other (8: 326-7), while the other contrasts Tony Jenyns and Belton as keepers (8: 351) with Belford's scheme of reformation (8: 382). Editorial notes pointing morals occur significantly with moral sentiments cautioning women, the most sensitive topic so addressed being the problem of reforming rakes. The sentiments gathered under "Reformation. Conviction. Conversion" (8: 381-2) are arranged around Anna's (unattributed) admission that "There is more hope of the Reformation of a man of sense, than of a fool" (8: 381, condensed from three consecutive clauses on 351). There is a mere page reference to Clarissa's statement of the same idea, which, did it appear, could not now express aching uncertainty, only declare unequivocally what the editor condemns as "a delusive hope ... the cause of great mischief; for who thinks not the man she loves a man of sense?" (8: 381-2). Grimmer sentiments follow, introduced as "more the truth" (8: 382), and in the most spectacular typographical foregrounding in the "Collection" Lovelace's maunderings on deathbed repentance and his own plan to reform one day are punctuated by an editorial reminder in gothic type, "Lovelace lived not to repent!" (8: 384) In spite of darkening some of the sentiments, Richardson still shows the editorial willingness he does in the novel, to work through an orchestration of characters' voices rather than to eliminate all traces of them. What is in many ways the most interesting instance of editorial work in the "Collection" suggests that part of the reason for this is the need to address readers' responses. At the end of the entry on marriage, Richardson includes a series of comments attributed to Lovelace and accompanied by a footnote (8: 359): Let a man do what he will by a single woman, the world is encouragingly apt to think Marriage a sufficient amends, vi. 52 (a). What is that injury, on this principle infers Lovelace, which a Church-rite will at any time repair? ibid (a). Marriage, says Lovelace, is a true dramatic recompence for the worst that can be done to a woman, vi. 227 (a). ...

77 The Moral Sentiment as a Dialogic Style of Meaning (a) (a) (a) These three articles are recommended to the consideration of those who would have had Clarissa to marry Lovelace, after his outrage on her honour. The doctrine inculcated in them was what he depended on, and was what encouraged him to commit the outrage. It was necessary that he should be convinced of his mistake. The conviction was given by Clarissa; and his utter ruin was the consequence of his atrocious guilt. (8: 359) This expands Lovelace's declaration to Belford in reporting the trial by his family: "MARRIAGE, with these women, thou seest, Jack, is an atonement for all we can do to them. A true dramatic recompense!" (1039) Richardson's editorial voice is at its most directingly didactic, but, in response to Lovelace's satiric intelligence at its most subversive, it is expanded here to speak what not just "these women" but "the world is ... apt to think" and confirmed by the editor in his claim that this attitude "encourages" behaviour like Lovelace's. Even in the "Collection" Richardson's fictional method implies the Blakean principle that "Without Contraries is no progression."47 It is possible to pass off the exclamation to Belford as characteristic vapouring by Lovelace (he ends the letter comparing the trial to a comedy because his relatives, his allies in sharing this assumption, are bent on patching up the appropriate "dramatic" ending, a marriage), but Richardson's deeper purpose is to put on trial an assumption insufficiently examined, to the end (again Blakean) that error may be identified, consolidated, and cast off. The editor's anxious guidance testifies that this is a process which can be completed only by readers.48 Since the linguistic and literary studies of Mikhail Bakhtin have become available in English translation, his theory of the novel as a "dialogic" mode has been regularly cited in studies of Clarissa.49 Donald R. Wehrs has castigated critics of Clarissa (Warner, Castle, and Eagleton) for paying too much attention to the novel's dialogic qualities and not enough to the devices of plot and irony by which Richardson resolves the conflict of interpretations he generates through them. Blaming this on misguided attempts to read Richardson as Bakhtin read Dostoevsky, Wehrs argues that "the story constitutes a world of experience that justifies a context for irony: irony challenges the anarchy of a gabble of voices by setting them into an order of rank, by assaying their degree of truth."50 There is just one problem with this argument: the all-regulating "story" Wehrs postulates is itself "constituted" only through reading of letters written from specific positions and articulating particular assumptions, so it can never establish a perspective on the novel that is less the product of interpretation than those perspectives it would exclude. The selection of a critical hypothesis to test in reading the novel and to argue

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in discussing it cannot without circularity be controlled by categories such as "plot" and "irony"; as Wehrs uses them, these simply insulate his preferred hypothesis from the questioning of assumptions in which Richardson engages. This is a good example of how the unreflective use of literary critical categories ("plot," "character," "irony") may be a defence against the disruptive consequences of style. Wehrs's claim that "a gabble of voices" and not "an order of rank" has resulted from applying Bakhtin's theory of the novel to Clarissa is ironic, because Bakhtin himself places Richardson in a tradition in which dialogism (the relation established between voices in a novel) is deliberately organized by an author and opposed to the diversity of voices (heteroglossia} in the novel's social context. For Bakhtin, "The transmission and assessment of the speech of others ... is one of the most widespread and fundamental topics of human speech," and "the problem of the artistic representation of another's speech ... is the central problem of novelistic prose."51 Although, according to Bakhtin, Richardson adopts a different strategy from those novelists (such as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett) who represent the heteroglossia of their social context directly in their novels, his novels do exemplify the profoundly Bakhtinian principle that language is double-voiced in the sense that language is for every speaker first the words of other people, words the speaker reaccents for a present purpose, while never wholly erasing how they have been used before, or, even in anticipating a response, foreclosing how they might be used in the future. Doubly voiced discourse is discourse aware of alternatives to itself, and many texts in the "Sentimental psychological" branch of his history of the novel in which Bakhtin locates Richardson develop such an awareness through epistolary form. The discourse of "sentimental pathos" which predominates in these novels always, according to Bakhtin, works to restore genres - and the ranges of meanings available in them - which are otherwise unavailable to the author.52 This "conditionally reproduced" discourse is directed polemically to the testing of a hero proposed as a model and enters into the minutiae of everyday life. Bakhtin's characterization of Richardson might be qualified or disputed in several of its details, but it does suggest why Clarissa might provoke debate that no single reading of the text could resolve.53 The line between text-internal dialogism and the exclusion of both the single-voiced poetic or rhetorical styles of literary tradition and the heteroglossia surrounding the novel may not be as clear or tight in practice as in theory; and in the deliberate recognition that "sentimental pathos" implies the impossibility of its ever becoming fully "internally persuasive discourse" for all readers

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- much less authoritative in its society (Bakhtin's "monologic" discourse) - there is a recognition, which Richardson presumably shared, that his novel will not utterly change the ideologies of which he creates novelistic images. As Bakhtin puts it, the sentimental pathos of Sentimental psychological novels "attempts to replace the brute discourse of life, [but] inevitably ends up in the same hopeless dialogic conflict with the actual heteroglossia of life" (398).54 Bakhtin's opposition of dialogic and monologic modes of discourse suggests a model for readings of, as well as for voices in, Clarissa. As John Frow explains them, "[W]e could define monologic modes of discourse in terms of the suppression of alternative ways of speaking and the reproduction of official norms, and dialogic modes in terms of the pluralization of the text and the transformation of official norms."55 In these terms, Richardson wrote a dialogic text which resists monologic restatement: having written for his readers characters whose "voices, and points of view, ... challenge the validity of the authorial position," and having contrasted all characters as "opposing voices in which conflicting world-views resist submersion or cancellation,"56 if he nonetheless wished readers to derive from the text a unified or "monologic" set of values - or believed that this would result unproblematically from careful reading - then he made that task a difficult one. His characters may strive for monologic finality, but Richardson does not advocate an "official" position. His use of the dialogic mode with its opposition of relatively independent voices is intended to discredit positions espoused by Lovelace and promote positions espoused by Clarissa, but even as it does this an anxious anticipation of how its audience may respond (or reaction to how readers of pre-publication versions have responded) reveals something of the process of the novel's production through vigorous reading and debate. However much Richardson and many of his readers may wish to exalt Clarissa, they cannot pretend that the practices of her persecutors will disappear. Richardson's styles of meaning preserve them; styles of reading revive them.

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PART TWO

Meanings of Style

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4 Surprised by Style: Lovelace, Clarissa, and Language for Love

The first section of this study, "Styles of Meaning," has discussed Richardson's use of proverbs and moral sentiments as contrasting genres of generalization, as implicit and explicit modes in which characters seek to influence and control one another, to understand and to justify themselves to the world. The generalizations in Clarissa range widely in tone, from sincere piety to demonic irony; by repeatedly choosing the moral sentiment as their preferred mode of generalization, Clarissa and Lovelace symbolize their rejection of communities and shared understandings which have failed them, or which they spurn. As a style of meaning, their moral sentiments declare that they will strike out on their own, state out of their own experience the codes of value by which they will live. This is in many ways a modernist project, an unblinking assessment of the ravaged state of the moral economy around them and a determined effort to build a new moral order with what they can salvage from it. Yet neither character breaks free of the past, and through their most intensely personal struggles, their encounter as desiring, sexual subjects, Richardson directs readers to pay critical attention to the ideologies of love, sex, and gender which are foregrounded in their language for intimacy. The next three chapters will discuss this exploration of meanings of style. "Love, eternal Love, is the subject, the burthen of all your writings; it is the poignant sauce, which so richly seasons Pamela, Clarissa and Grandison, and makes their flimzy nonsense pass so glibly down."1

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This chapter and the next one discuss Richardson's exploration (and challenge) of the meanings typically made in discourses of desire, the styles in which, whether as libertinism or as love, his society makes sexual meaning. Richardson conducts the exploration of the heart for which he is famous, carries the torch to the depths of the cavern, and reveals the unacknowledged desires hiding behind the motives eager to show themselves, as Diderot put it, by setting his characters in situations where few safe forms are available to express what they feel and to meet the expressions of others. The central characters in all three of his novels must find their way through the "critical situations" in which young women and men first meet as sexual beings. Their struggle to integrate desire into their lives, and to win the world's approval as they do it, is the price of whatever adulthood they are able to achieve. The most important (and most conflicted) set of meanings in which his characters confront desire is that realized through discourses of "love." Acting as they do, beyond the control of their families and at a distance from their correspondents, Clarissa and Lovelace draw upon the language and central assumptions of these discourses when they are isolated, insecure, vulnerable. Richardson's didactic purpose of revealing and analysing the ways in which women are put at particular risk in these discourses exposes him to the criticism made by the author of the Critical Remarks, that while claiming to warn against the passions, Richardson's novels irresponsibly (and dangerously) indulge them. Such criticisms would be just if Richardson sought to persuade readers to repress all desire; but as modern critics have shown, Richardson deals with desire rather as Michel Foucault suggested the nineteenth century dealt with sexuality, not by repressing it (as has often been assumed) but on the contrary by making it loquacious, making it visible in countless situations and telling it to speak the truth of itself. So in Richardson: desire is made to speak, to utter and assess the truth of itself. Richardson engages the problem of what language men and women use in situations of love and courtship in the Familiar Letters and in all three of his novels, especially in Clarissa, where discourses of courtship and seduction play a central role in the tragedy. Lovelace approaches Clarissa as a lover, offering various behaviours as signs by which she may read his intentions toward her. As they take up the discourses of love and desire, sometimes deliberately and sometimes scarcely knowing what they do until they find themselves doing it, Lovelace enacts, Clarissa rejects, and both reflect upon stereotypes from previous literary treatments of love. Through their confrontation as lovers, Richardson reveals to readers the attitudes and strategies of

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libertines, modelling behaviour by which they may be answered, confronted, and foiled. But inconsistencies in Clarissa's resistance show that Richardson's exploration of these love stereotypes aims at more than a simple lesson in how to construe a stable inventory of unambiguous behaviours. Although usually poised and selfpossessed, able to respond with distance or with scorn to Lovelace's performance as stereotypical lover - his compliments, vows, and kneeling at her feet - Clarissa is moved by a more subtle form of flattery, Lovelace's appeal to her as a man capable of reform. Her most desperate writing, her mad papers, remember former hopes in language that suggests she has fallen victim to the old stereotypes restated in a new, morally acceptable form. Richardson's point is not so much to warn against a more sophisticated strategy for seduction as it is to suggest that finally no language for love is safe and no degree of sexual self-consciousness can make it so. Everyone who loves must struggle through - and against - an inheritance, the meanings and the desires with which others have invested the erotic. The language in which Lovelace approaches Clarissa as desiring lover must be understood in the context of his philosophy of libertinism, condensed in the proverb-like maxims of his "rake's creed," the restricted code he shares initially with Belford. As brother rakes, Lovelace and Belford frequently write to one another and assess situations in the libertine style (regarded here as a register), the patternings of words and grammar which express meanings made between rakes on the topic of women. Neither of them is limited to this style (they can draw upon other registers as well), but the meanings they have been accustomed to make when discussing women in it are the enabling assumptions (what Richardson tests) in Lovelace's trial of Clarissa. Lovelace states one of them at Mrs Sorlings's farm: "Importunity and opportunity no woman is proof against, especially from a persevering lover, who knows how to suit temptations to inclinations. This, thou knowest, is a prime article of the rake's creed" (426). Beginning with the word "especially," Lovelace moves from a more restricted coding of experience (in the rake's code proper) to more elaborated meanings available in the wider libertine register. The maxim itself was a commonplace assumption in earlier novelistic treatments of the erotic, stated in so many words by Eliza Haywood: "Knowing Opportunity and Importunity to be the two great Ruiners of the Sex, he gave not over the one, till he had found the other."2 Haywood's narrator presents the propositon as knowledge of an individual character; Lovelace's comment to Belford ("This, thou knowest... ") presents it as knowledge shared between brother rakes and now offered to readers.

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Significantly, Belford does not dispute the principle; when he responds to it, he has seen Clarissa and is confident that she will prove Lovelace wrong as her behaviour progressively refutes his assumptions. He will agree to the trial because he still argues, as Lovelace has challenged him to do, "according to our principles" (559). (Richardson's italics indicate that the words Lovelace uses are to be understood as expressing a set of meanings not unique to him but shared by all rakes.) Provided Lovelace stays within certain limits, Belford is not yet ready entirely to abandon those principles: "If she yield to fair seduction, if I may so express myself; if thou canst raise a weakness in her by love, or by arts not inhuman; I shall the less pity her. And shall then conclude that there is not a woman in the world who can resist a bold and resolute lover" (560). Belford moves into and out of the rake's register in this letter, indicating a capacity to be moved by Clarissa (which allows for his eventual reform), but treating her as a collection of remarkable qualities rather than as a whole person. He uses words from the register of moral decorum, but cannot yet value her fully within it. He mentions "the lady's merit" (559), but he admits that Clarissa will "fall" (560) "if thou art not to be moved by beauty, by learning, by prudence, by innocence, all shining out in one charming object" (559). Belford speaks here as a rake who has been impressed by one woman but who has not revised his assumptions about all women: he imagines a "fair seduction" as he appeals to Lovelace, "if thou art a man," not to use "unmanly artifices" (560), and his foregrounding italics and permission tag ("if I may so express myself") invite us to read him as wavering on a boundary between the two registers. The following definition of what count as "fair" tactics, "arts not inhuman," hints distantly at the course of action Lovelace eventually takes, not to suggest that it is inevitable so much as to establish that, should he take it, Lovelace will not have proven his assumption about women, which Belford can still imagine himself accepting. Finally, Belford's tacit agreement to Lovelace's representation of himself as "lover" in a process they both well know is seduction assumes with Lovelace the libertine subordination of erotic desire to the will to control. Belford's epithets "bold and resolute," however, express simply and straightforwardly a feature of heroic libertinism - in a literary allusion, for readers who recall the witches' counsel to Macbeth. Lovelace's "persevering lover," by contrast, is further modified through a knowledge of how to appeal to inner states ("suit temptations to inclinations") which Clarissa will eventually declare Satanic. Although they both believe that the seduction process can test essential aspects of women's nature, and tacitly admit that the "knowledge"

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it produces will not be separable from its demonstration of male power, Belford is shown as reformable whereas Lovelace is not. Lovelace plays the role of courting lover from the beginning of the novel, but his first letter establishes that polite courtship has little to do with what he means by "love." Readers have always made up their own minds about Lovelace's capacity for what they understand as "love," however, and before we analyse some of the features through which Richardson intended to sound a note of warning against Lovelace, we need to remember that the openness of Richardson's epistolary form allows readers to suspend judgment even where Richardson assumes they will be judging as he wishes. For all that this letter cites conventions to establish what issues will be at stake, epistolary form presents this exposition of Lovelace's character sometimes as staged self-revelation, sometimes, when Lovelace is uncertain or self-contradictory, as confession. So even as we construe dark, even murderous passions in Lovelace, we construe them in contexts where convention allows (even induces) us to wish they could be otherwise. It would seem that Lovelace has never known sexual passion separately from the stereotyped language of the sonnet tradition - the "confounded poets, with their celestiallyterrene descriptions [who] did as much with me as the lady" (143) language which shaped erotic feeling as it emerged and scripted his progress as "goddess-maker." Since his unhappy experience at the hands of a "quality-jilt," however (hyphenated expressions deviating from the usual patterns of English, often as epithets in modifying structures, are among Lovelace's - and Richardson's - favourite resources for arrestingly compressed expression), Lovelace has regarded the articulation of passion primarily as a matter of power, of a man conquering women in order to restore a sense of self-control alienated through his victimization by the language of love, here presented as a problem for men as well as for women. This aspect of the rake's register, which underlies all the maxims of its creed appears in this letter in Lovelace's favourite grammatical options for representing his past experience. Lovelace's grammatical choices (choices in transitivity and ergativity) represent "love" as a matter of control in interpersonal situations as well as a matter of what is felt internally. Analysis of Lovelace's key statements in terms of ergativity, showing where he locates agency and thus showing who he considers exercises effective power in activities, suggests that for Lovelace love is a relationship in which one controls or is controlled. In a brief sketch of his amatory career, he says he has exercised "a pretty lady-like tyranny" (143) over women who have loved him. Ergative analysis of this account shows

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that Lovelace is the external Agent in processes where women are Agents and their persons or possessions are Medium: "many an eye have I made to sparkle with rival indignation: many a cheek glow; and even many a fan have I caused to be snapped at a sister-beauty" (143, my italics to show external causative processes). Lovelace has tyrannized in love to take revenge on all women for having been deceived by the first woman he truly loved. He alludes to this experience later, when he mentions Anna's thwarted passion for Sir George Colmar and reflects, "I always found in others, as well as in myself, that a first passion thoroughly subdued, made the conquerer of it a rover; the conqueress a tyrant" (635). This suggests that, as in his treatment of family relations (particularly the relative duties of parents and children), Richardson explores the language of sexuality in the aftermath of catastrophe, in a fallen world where experience has already rendered problematic characters' relations to it.3 An ergative analysis of the Otway quotation which he uses to declare his present state shows that Lovelace is not now free to play with gender roles and affect a lady-like tyranny. A reversal in the pattern of agency now confirms his masculinity: "CLARISSA! - Oh, there's music in the name, / That soft'ning me to infant tenderness, / Makes my heart spring like the first leaps of life!" (144). Here Lovelace ("me") is Medium of a process ("soft'ning") in which an aspect of Clarissa is Agent, and his heart is Agent and Medium of a process ("spring") in which that aspect of Clarissa is external Agent or ultimate causer. To declare himself in love with Clarissa is to acknowledge that she has power over him, and in other parts of the letter he recognizes this power by elevating her in traditional love language, referring to her as "this proud beauty" (142), "this angel of a woman," "the divinity" "a goddess" (143), admitting that she has become the master of his heart (143) and bound him in iron fetters (144). Lovelace goes beyond this language when he distinguishes her motive for keeping him at a distance: "'tis not scorn - 'tis not pride - 'tis not the insolence of an adored beauty - but 'tis to virtue, it seems, that my difficulties are owing" (142). He does recognize that the traditional language misrepresents Clarissa (and that she is more truthfully represented in her own "dialect," the register of moral decorum), but he later chooses to justify his trial by the claim that "virtue" is merely one more tactic in the struggle to control a lover (420), thus translating it into his libertine register, rather than risk exploring the possibility that Clarissa might understand love, and might practise it, altogether differently. Lovelace's conception of love as matter of control is complicated by his statements about his motivation as a lover. When he writes of

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his early experience (recalling what Belford knows so that the reader may learn it), features of modality are prominent; Lovelace works to persuade us that his assertions state the truth but at the same time makes them neither simple affirmations nor denials and thus raises doubt about them. Modal expressions ("indeed," "I thought," "I believe," "cannot," "ever") are threaded through his recollection of the "quality-jilt": "I have boasted that I was once in love before: and indeed I thought I was. It was in my early manhood - with that quality-jilt, whose infidelity I have vowed to revenge upon as many of the sex as shall come into my power. I believe, in different climes, I have already sacrificed a hecatomb to my Nemesis in pursuance of this vow. But upon recollecting what I was then, and comparing it with that I find in myself now, I cannot say that I was ever in love before" (143). He decides that not the woman or love, but poetry, love language itself, and his pride in his ability as plaintive sonneteer, have driven him along a trail of conquests, restlessly searching for a woman to match his literary conception of beauty. Although there is no confusion about whether he was in love or not, this revision of his opinion about the matter suggests that readers should respond sceptically when he declares (with intonational emphasis, implied by italics foregrounding a modal adjunct) "But now I am m-deed in love" (144). He later admits, "I have three passions that sway me by turns; all imperial ones. Love, revenge, ambition, or a desire of conquest" (719). Of these, only "love" allows readers to think well of him, and since Lovelace's assessments of himself are such an important basis for readers' assessments of him, the multiple possibilities are unsettling. It is not that Lovelace might be deliberately lying about whether he is "in love"; he just cannot know for certain. Love is a passion like the others, and he cannot know in advance which of his passions will drive him in a given situation. He is a difficult figure to interpret because he presents so many modalized interpretations of himself, and because for Richardson the erotic is a radically indeterminate space, one in which it is impossible to distinguish a well-simulated desire expressed through the cultural stereotypes encoded in available language from an originary (and authentic) passion. Lovelace's experience poses "love" as a linguistic problem, a matter of establishing a right (that is to say, mastering) relation to sonnet language. But his belief that women and erotic desire are therefore insignificant in themselves will not solve it. Readers know more than Clarissa does, but it is not much easier for them to assess what Lovelace says of himself in this letter than it is for Clarissa to judge his declarations to her. What motivates Lovelace's new, "true" love is equally ambiguous. The quotation from Otway already analysed follows this declaration;

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Lovelace criticizes the passage as "over-tender" and quotes from Dryden, citing the last three lines as a more accurate account of how he loves and his model for engaging Clarissa: Love various minds does variously inspire; He stirs in gentle natures gentle fire: Like that of incense on the altar laid. But raging flames tempestuous souls invade: A fire, which ev'ry windy passion blows; With pride it mounts, and with revenge it glows. And with REVENGE it shall glow! (i44)4

Although much preferring to imagine love as a rough (apparently masculine) god who will encourage his own stormy passions, rather than as a process in which he will be softened by a woman, Lovelace has, within a page, used high probability modalities ("indeed" and "shall") to commit himself equally strongly to two quite different passions, love alone, and love augmented by revenge. If he is driven by the latter, seducing and dominating Clarissa is the only course of action that will satisfy him; if by the former, another story will be possible. But if Clarissa does seem to "soften" him to "infant tenderness," the note of warning sounded in his first literary quotation will be relevant: "He who seems virtuous does but act a part, / And shows not his own nature, but his art" (143). (Clarissa's penchant for naive interpretation is not a naturally occurring literary phenomeon, but an artificial feature made by subtracting from her education, or temporarily disabling, the knowledge available to her in such passages.) The question that follows (for Lovelace it is a real one) will become the important issue - "Cannot I indeed reform?" (143) - and however readers choose to construe the possibility, Lovelace's uncertainty in this first letter sensitizes them to question any language he uses to speak of love or of his motives. Indeed, readers' dilemma with Lovelace is similar to Clarissa's: they cannot simply know him as he is, but must assume he is as he performs, and he depends upon their not being able to maintain a moral assessment against an aesthetic appreciation of his performance. Richardson seems not to have understood that Lovelace's engagement with Clarissa would so persuasively engage readers' desire for a comic pattern or that the interpretive work Lovelace's writing demands would become an investment readers would not willingly abandon, however they had placed it.

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One significant aspect of the language that was available to Lovelace for speaking of love, one which he includes in his rake's register (often in general statements), involves a grammatical metaphor by which "Love" is given power of action as an allegorical personification.5 Anna and Clarissa also make reflections with the same feature, and it is not the metaphor in itself but subtle differences in the grammar of their reflections with it which distinguish and set in opposition the meanings being made. In the earlier novels of love and seduction on which Richardson drew for this stylistic feature, the power of love is a central theme, and such shifts from human to abstract agents are an important technique for representing it. Rhetorically, the purpose of the device is to mystify the events narrated or projected into the future, transferring responsibility for what happens from human participants to an abstract force they serve and manifest. In the following passage, from Eliza Haywood's The Rash Resolve, the allegory begins after the narrator's breathless expression of the moral of the scene ("O how dangerous ...," spoken from a woman's point of view) at what Lovelace would call the moment critical: Their mutual Vows however, and her firm Resolution to marry him as soon as this Affair was settled, gave, as it were, a Sanction to much greater Freedoms than otherwise he would have dar'd to have taken, or she would have permitted; and at last, O how dangerous is it to transgress, even the least Bounds of that Reserve which is enjoined by Virtue for our Guard! from one Liberty they ventur'd on another, till rapacious, greedy Love, too conscious of his Power, encroached on all, and nothing left for Honour.6

Before the shift in agency, pronouns indicate that activities by the man and the woman are mutual ("Vows") or complementary (her "Resolution" sanctions "Freedoms" he "dare[s]" to take and she now permits), and the moral transgression is performed jointly. The word "ventur'd" suggests tentative (and again joint) movement from one stage to the next, until, in the final clause, the actions (mental and material)7 of a single participant "Love" express what is being done. Presenting actions in this summary way enables a quick narrative pace, and the shift to abstractions allows readers to imagine the concrete, physical details for themselves. On this interpretation those actions are, if not mutual, at least negotiated from gendered positions which the narrator does not hierarchize. While Haywood subjects both characters to the force of love, Lovelace prefers to think of "rapacious, greedy Love" not as a force overmastering its servants male and female, but rather as a force within

92 Meanings of Style the woman who feels it, her lover's natural ally in his designs. In his reflections in the style of Haywood there is an important difference from her, in that by harmonizing the action of "love" with the representation of his own agency as a male, Lovelace assumes he can harness its power for his own ends without becoming subject to it himself. In the following passage, the complementary activities are rigidly hierarchized as they are not in Haywood, Clarissa as woman (and nothing more) loving, tripping, and harbouring love, Lovelace as man (and nothing less) catching her and succeeding, in each case taking advantage of actions he has not directly caused: "If she be a woman, and love me, I shall surely catch her once tripping: for love was ever a traitor to its harbourer: and Love within, and I without, she'll be more than woman, as the poet says, or I less than man, if I succeed not" (431). Another point picked up from Haywood and represented not as mutual activity but as a revelation by the woman alone of her own desire - "acknowledged love sanctifies every freedom: and one freedom leads to another" (465) - informs Lovelace's plan to extort an admission of love by staging illness: "Then I shall be in hope of building on a good foundation. Love hides a multitude of faults, and diminishes those it cannot hide. Love, when found out or acknowledged, authorizes freedom; and freedom begets freedom; and I shall then see how far I can go" (673). The meaning of "Love" here is that it bridges Lovelace's actions in the first sentence and in the final clause of the third sentence, both of which consist in him regarding ("hope" and "see") his own activities ("building" and "going"). Love is an activity performed by Clarissa to her detriment ("hiding" and "diminishing" "faults"), its "freedom" is a space for Lovelace's aggression, a space opened, significantly, not by a shared passion, but by the man's not being affected in the same way as the woman.8 In a subsequent reflection with the same stylistic feature, the pattern of agency is even more skewed. When Clarissa resents "innocent liberties" after "acknowledging" her love at his bedside, thus disproving the truth claimed in the passages analysed, Richardson foregrounds the wisdom of her resentment through Lovelace's admission that "the woman who resents not initiatory freedoms must be lost. For love is an encroacher. Love never goes backward. Love is always aspiring. Always must aspire. Nothing but the highest act of love can satisfy an indulged love. And what advantages has a lover who values not breaking the peace, over his mistress who is solicitous to keep it!" (704). Covert gender (confirmed by the opposition of masculine "lover" and "mistress" in the concluding sentence) is particularly pronounced in this representation of "love": as "an encroacher"

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"going," "aspiring," obliged to "aspire," needing the "indulgence" of "the highest act of love," love is here clearly not a mutual passion but a euphemism for male activity, for possession without even momentary attachment or submission to any force but its own will to power. Anna and Clarissa are under no more illusions about love than is "the other L" (185), but whereas in Lovelace's and Belford's libertine register love is allied to "seduction," in the women's register of moral decorum it is allied to "courtship." Occasionally the women recognize the power of love as Lovelace does, writing it as an implicitly male force in clauses where, as in Lovelace's libertine reflections, Clarissa is, explicitly or implicitly, represented as the other participant. When Clarissa denies "throbs" and "glows," Anna congratulates her as "the first of our sex ... who has been able to turn that lion, Love, at her own pleasure, into a lap-dog" (73),9 and Clarissa later declares that if what she has experienced is "love," then it is "no such mighty monarch, no such unconquerable power, as I have heard it represented" (185).10 In other allegories made through the grammatical metaphor in which "love" is an Actor in material processes, generalizing allegories which Clarissa, Anna, and Lovelace all find persuasive, "Love's" activity is more stubbornly intransitive and the person it influences (not always explicitly female) relates to it grammatically not as Goal of the processes it performs, but as a circumstance associated with them, a setting for the process rather than a direct participant in it. Clarissa declares of Lovelace's deliberate shyness toward Arabella that, "if love has not taken root deep enough to cause it to shoot out into declaration ... there is little room to expect that the blighting winds of anger or resentment will bring it forward" (43). When she first warns that "a beginning love is acted by a subtle spirit" (70), Anna reminds Clarissa that "[her] man" "had natural philosophy enough to observe ... that Love takes the deepest root in the steadiest minds" (71), and just before rejecting love as "mighty monarch" Clarissa herself accepts Anna's claim that "love, like the vapours, is the deeper rooted for having no sufficient cause assignable for its hold" (185). In this grammatical manifestation, love is powerful, and it may grow in male as well as female soil, but the grammar also suggests that the knowledge made available in these reflections is oriented to women's needs, since the focus taken when a man is the circumstance is on external (and therefore public) signs by which she may know whether it is present in a man, and when the woman is the circumstance the focus is on signs by which she may know whether it has begun in herself. In that it is difficult to detect, the power of love in women is still to some degree mystified

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here, but it cannot easily be separated from the qualities of mind which significantly condition how it will grow. Indeed, this grammatical pattern allows for "love" to be integrated with the values expressed in the women's register of moral decorum, and thereby suggests a recognition and integration of erotic force among the other powers of the human person in a way the resources of the libertine's register do not allow.11 In their reflections on courtship, Anna and Clarissa might be proposing a stylistic antidote to Lovelace's libertine philosophy of "Love," were it not that, as they represent it, courtship involves the same contest for control as does seduction, with the woman's power terminating in marriage. Anna is in no doubt as to how (and whether) women can (and should) exercise their power, placing women's actions or the abstractions they realize ("favour," "distance," "smiles," and "frowns") in grammatical roles where they determine men's behaviour: "Our courtship days, they say, are our best days. Favour destroys courtship. Distance increases it. Its essence is distance. And to see how familiar these men-wretches grow upon a smile, what an awe they are struck into when one frowns! Who would not make them stand off? Who would not enjoy a power that is to be so short-lived?" (274). Anna's three singleclause, declarative sentences closely resemble the rhythm of some of Lovelace's reflections on love, this staccato grammar perhaps suggesting a contained rage resulting from their frustrated first loves. Clarissa agrees with this sentiment, believing with Lovelace and Anna that courtship is a struggle for power and that men achieve significant power when women admit to loving them. Not only does she tell Anna, with reference to her mother, that "Our sex perhaps must expect to bear a little uncourtliness shall I call it? - from the husband whom, as the lover, they let know the preference their hearts gave him to all other men" (55), but she also reproaches Anna for not having become the "sister" she now needs, it having been "Once, my dear, ... perhaps in your power to have moulded [my brother] as you pleased" (55). But because she will take no part in this struggle herself, Clarissa insists upon "conditional liking" rather than "love" as the state of her feelings toward Lovelace and consistently rejects the illusory (because false) positions of transient power he offers her. Clarissa simply refuses to feel love in the sense Lovelace intends, considering it "a worse than Moloch-deity" if it "expects an offering of reason, duty and discretion to be made to its shrine!" (242). Reason, duty, and discretion, the mental qualities and moral commitments through which women judge the world and act on the basis of their judgments, are effectively separated from "love," and

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it is only after Lovelace has placed her in a situation where she must act on her judgment of him that Clarissa finds that "love" can work in spite of them. Richardson achieves two purposes through Clarissa's confrontation with love, a critique of compliments, vows, and kneeling, the stereotyped practices designing men use to seduce women, and an exploration of how a woman's liking can ripen into love, even if she exercises the utmost watchfulness and prudently approves only of a man's truly laudable actions. The unusual degree of self-consciousness implied by the fact that characters pronounce the principles of actions as they take them pursues Richardson's didactic purpose and at the same time deepens the irony of the fact that characters who wish respectively to exploit and to deny the power of love find to their surprise that they can be subject to it. Clarissa reads compliments dismissively, as "elevated absurdities"; they are meaningless in themselves, but as a strategy to encourage a woman to surrender significant power by accepting a mistaken estimate of herself, they indicate real contempt: "Such language always looks to me as if the flatterer thought to find a woman a fool, or hoped to make her one" (296). When she suspects that Lovelace's courtship speeches after the flight from Harlowe Place express a triumph over her, she sketches an alternative, preferring that a lover's esteem be expressed through other semiotic systems, such as gesture, and through paralinguistic features, such as voice quality, rather than by words alone: I have not the better opinion of Mr Lovelace for his extravagant volubility. He is too full of professions: he says too many fine things of me, and to me: True respect, true value, I think, lies not in words: words cannot express it. The silent awe, the humble, the doubting eye, and even the hesitating voice, better show it by much, than, as Shakespeare says, - The rattling tongue Of saucy and audacious eloquence. The man, to be sure, is, at times, all upon the ecstatic, one of his phrases; but, to my shame and confusion, I know too well what to attribute it to, in a great measure - To his triumph, my dear, in one word. (397-8)12

The shift in tone between the two paragraphs of this passage is significant. In the first, Clarissa strikes a lofty, slightly formal pose as moralist, expressing a leading truth in a chiasmic structure ("True respect ... words: words ... it") and then enumerating the features of behaviour it explains, features well enough known to her audience

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to be modified by the definite article ("the silent awe/' "the humble, the doubting eye," "the hesitating voice"), which involuntarily indicate a state of mind in the suitor inconsistent with a will to control. This piece of theory is presented as a matter of opinion, modalized by Clarissa's "I think," but the account of her experience, the analysis of Lovelace's state of mind particularly, is presented as a matter of knowledge, confirmed by "I know." Two colloquial features, the affirming "to be sure" and the structure in which she cites Lovelace ("all upon the ecstatic"), combine with the intimate address to Anna ("my dear") to suggest combined confession and apprehension. Lovelace's scope to act as he wishes is such that to say what he is doing Clarissa must refer to the kind of courtship language she rejects. Lovelace's "triumph" is limited, however; he holds Clarissa in a position where she must listen to his speeches, but he finds them strangely ineffectual as they only confirm her theory of courtship and recommend her practice of resistance to women in similar situations. Clarissa's control of her response makes love language a limited means of action. "What can be done," Lovelace asks Belford from Mrs Sorlings's farm, "with a woman who is above flattery, and despises all praise but that which flows from the approbation of her own heart?" (423). Theory also warns Clarissa against "ardours," the vows and oaths which tempt women to mistaken estimates of their lovers' passion, but in her dealing with Lovelace she finds that, in practice, judging the state of a man's heart can be extremely difficult. In contexts where she believes (or must trust to) his generosity, she wavers; for instance, when reading his letter in the afterglow of Anna's second report of his behaviour to "Rosebud": "The ardour with which he vows and promises, I think the heart only can dictate. How else can any one guess at a man's heart?" (289). Later, when she appeals weakly to his "generosity" and begins to weep in response to his offer to enter Harlowe Place with drawn sword, he kneels and responds convincingly: "Who can bear, said he, with an ardour that could not be feigned, his own eyes glistening, as I thought, who can bear to behold such sweet emotion?" (378).13 The modality of these estimates contrasts significantly: Clarissa is tentative, saying "I think" when suggesting he is sincere and asking Anna for advice (or challenging her to propose an alternative standard of judgment), but she is strongly affirmative, claiming he showed "an ardour that could not be feigned," even when she knows at the moment of writing (in St Alban's) that it was feigned. Once she has been, as she fears, outwitted and in consequence compelled to live under the same roof with him, Clarissa exercises a

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consistent mistrust of Lovelace's demonstrations of ardour and prevents him from achieving his purposes through them. In his account of her behaviour, Lovelace's reflection on it includes her point of view and thus points Richardson's moral: "Then she cuts me short in all my ardours. To vow fidelity is, by a cursed turn upon me, to show that there is reason, in my own opinion, for doubt of it. ... So Belford, all my poor vows are crammed down my throat before they can well rise to my lips. And what can a lover say to his mistress, if she will neither let him lie nor swear?" (413). In this indirect report of Clarissa's response (her words, "to show that there is reason, in my own opinion, for doubt of it," are cited, with her "shows" shifted to "to show" and her "your" to "my"), Richardson blends Clarissa's voice in the scene with Lovelace's voice commenting on it, and the fact that Lovelace has to voice her assessment of him as an admission about himself suggests what power she has wielded in the situation. As in references to his heart, Lovelace distances a loss of control by representing his experience in an absurdly physical figure of speech (here, metonymy), but the implication that his vows would "rise" (seemingly of their own accord) if not "crammed" down his throat by a woman who could have chosen to "let him lie [and] swear" holds women largely responsible for men's deceiving them this way. As he has done with compliments and vows, Lovelace reflects on a third stereotype, kneeling, to foreground the significance of Clarissa's refusal to be moved by it. In one of their interviews in London she reproaches him sternly and he is startled: "Rise, sir, from your too-ready knees; and mock me not. Too-ready knees, thought I! Though this humble posture so little affects this proud beauty, she knows not how much I have obtained of others of her sex, nor how often I have been forgiven the last attempts, by kneeling" (653). Again, Clarissa exerts control through speech, this time (in a good example of how women's writing of familiar letters prepares them to deal with men) by using language she has developed in her correspondence with Anna. In her account of their chance meeting at the woodhouse, Clarissa mentions his "ready knees" (166), putting a lexical item occurring more usually as an adverb with the verbal form of this noun (as in "he kneels readily") into an adjectival role it fills in relation to other nouns (as in "ready writer"), focusing on the part of the body rather than the action and so suggesting that the action is mechanical and therefore insincere. She makes the collocation again - "the ready kneeler" (379) - in her account of the flight from Harlowe Place, so by the time she uses the words against him, the compound epithet "too-ready" is a small addition to an existing resource, the more effective for Lovelace's not suspecting that Clarissa

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possesses it. When he kneels fruitlessly at Hampstead, he notes that his submission has affected the women present and he further confirms the wisdom of Clarissa's rejection by explaining, "Women, Jack, tacitly acknowledge the inferiority of their own sex in the pride they take to behold a kneeling lover at their feet" (796). Through its appearance in the writing of both characters, the word has been accented with women's knowledge and resolve to resist, an accent the man's reflections on the process acknowledge as significant for the way it diminishes gender inequality. Characteristically, when she does feel pride (of a different kind) with Lovelace kneeling at her feet, Clarissa tells him so directly: "I cast myself at her feet - Begone, Mr Lovelace, said she, with a rejecting motion, her fan in her hand; for your own sake leave me! - My soul is above thee, man! ... Urge me not to tell thee how sincerely I think my soul above thee! - Thou hast a proud, a too proud heart, to contend with! - Leave me, and leave me for ever! - Thou hast a proud heart to contend with" (646). Although she uses high language recalling the tragic heroines of the Restoration stage - exclamations, imperatives, emphatic repetition, the archaic second-person singular pronoun "thou" - and draws from an astonished Lovelace the admiring epithet "lion-hearted" in his account of the scene (647), Clarissa expresses not pride at having overcome him but contempt at his self-abasement. If, as seems likely, hers is the "proud heart" she means, she has already begun to criticize herself for spiritual pride. And she has begun to construe Lovelace's kneeling as a sign of the strongest impulses in his nature, believing that in every way that matters to her (the moral and spiritual qualities she subsumes under the word "soul") she is his superior. Clarissa's rejection of stereotyped love language and the positions of power associated with it is thorough. She will not accept Lovelace as humble servant or as proud lord; time and again she refuses the influence over him he seems so willing to offer her. Both the reflections she makes on marriage in protest against Solmes and her response to Lovelace's marriage settlements show high notions of a husband's right to obedience. Clarissa does not resent male control in marriage as a matter of principle, as Anna does; she believes that marriage is a framework for personal growth, even for instruction of the wife by the husband, as she pleads with her Uncle Antony: "Dear, dear sir, if I am to be compelled, let it be in favour of a man that can read and write - that can teach me something: for what a husband must that man make, who can do nothing but command; and needs himself the instruction he should be qualified to give?" (151). "Command," the preferred way to direct behaviour in the

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restricted code of Harlowe Place, Clarissa knows only too well; her elaborated alternative, "teach" (cruelly parodied in Antony's retort that she wants a husband who can "learn" [155] her something), is submissive, but its personal rather than positional orientation allows for change in ways the other does not. Clarissa places such importance on her assessment of a prospective husband's heart and mind because she hopes that marriage will strengthen and be strengthened by the principles that inform her friendship with Anna. What Clarissa wishes for is a marriage founded on esteem, developed into moral, emotional, and intellectual friendship, made capable finally of supporting the full passion of unselfish love.14 Although so bent on taking control, Lovelace, ironically, never knows how willing Clarissa would be to cede control in marriage if the marriage were made for love and the generosity she shows as a woman (55) met with a return. Lovelace is shrewd enough to know he must approach Clarissa's feelings through her assessment of him, and in one highly significant conversation between the flight from Harlowe Place and the choice of their ultimate destination in Dover Street, a conversation which Clarissa "must call agreeable" (441), he makes just such an appeal. By promising to reform, by assuring her that he has never doubted the truths of religion and has even, in moments when his life seemed in danger, thought "deeply and seriously" (444) on them, by making reflections on the pleasures of virtue and the difficulties of reformation, most of all by appearing sincere and willingly carrying on the conversation, he suggests a mind she can learn from and a heart she can trust. Lovelace conducts his approach in the style of meaning Clarissa prefers, the moral sentiment, so his strategy might be called temptation by reflection, and there are many indications in Clarissa's letter, admissions to Lovelace in the scene itself, and admissions to Anna in her account of it that she is strongly moved in his favour. In one exchange they relate as one thinking person to another, trading moral sentiments for mutual encouragement and correction, Clarissa in the role of corrector that she takes up in so many relationships. Lovelace appeals politely to the generosity on which she prides herself (and which Anna has questioned as a sign of incipient love), alluding to "the generous task of my reformation, which I flatter myself you will have the goodness to undertake" (443), then promising that Clarissa will be the source of benefit to him should she undertake it. This allows her to respond with "The divine grace or favour, Mr Lovelace, must do all, and confirm all. You know not how much you please me, that I can talk to you in this dialect" (444). The word "dialect" indicates that Richardson thinks of this style as

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a register; specifically, it is the register of moral decorum, a dialect in a language which Clarissa has assumed is still foreign to Lovelace. By speaking to her in it as he does, Lovelace establishes himself within the set of meanings on which Clarissa has formed herself, managing to influence her so subtly that she can think she directs the situation, even though her account indicates that she is influenced by her partially false knowledge of him. She tells Anna that at this moment she "thought of his generosity to his pretty rustic; and of his kindness to his tenants"; a few sentences later she reports that her delight did not get the better of her discretion: "And twenty things of this sort I even preached to him; taking care, however, not to be tedious, nor to let my expanded heart give him a contracted or impatient brow" (444). Significantly (and appropriately for the meanings being made in this scene), Clarissa is not enforcing decorum in this preaching, not keeping an encroaching lover at a distance by dignified reserve or rebarbitive moral reflection, so much as she is using wisely a spiritual adviser's degree of influence over a tender conscience. That she should not see herself as exerting force to resist a force that would control her (and thus as not needing that part of the register of moral decorum which she and Anna have deployed in opposition to Lovelace's libertine assumptions about courtship) suggests that Clarissa speaks not from the defensive outworks of the register, but from the very centre of the meanings which constitute it, meanings expressed through the words "kindness," "generosity," and "goodness," and the word "heart" itself.15 This precise subfield of discourse might be called "moral feeling" to distinguish it from "moral decorum," and Clarissa has always allowed for the difference, as in this comment in response to Anna's report of how Lovelace treats the alehouse innocent: "The distance you recommend, at which to keep this sex, is certainly right in the main. Familiarity destroys reverence: but with whom? - Not with those, surely, who are prudent, grateful and generous" (289).l6 This is language for the emanations of the heart, not for defending the heart from hostile attack; it is Clarissa's language for love, and suitably encouraged, she will speak her full mind in it. The thought that her "expanded heart" may act on Lovelace directly expresses not pride in her power but joy at a first glimpse of possible happiness. They do not fall to hymn-singing after Clarissa's impromptu sermon, but they do exchange poems, Lovelace offering blank verses he wrote during illness, Clarissa reciting lines on dissimulation from Rowe's Ulysses. Many aspects of letters by Lovelace immediately preceding and following this conversation show by contrast with his sentiments and behaviour in it how studied is his deception, or how transitory

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are his good resolutions, or how difficult it is for him to resist playing an intriguing role when one offers. Even Clarissa's own account indicates that she has seen more in Lovelace's performance than she might wish. Lovelace seeks control in love relations, and in the obligatory statement of deceitful purpose to Belford (which, significantly, follows Clarissa's account of the scene [447]) he speaks both of preparing himself and of his hopes to affect Clarissa. This purpose is threaded through his speech in the conversation: he makes statements about his character and his intentions, in declarative clauses, but he also insinuates himself into a position of influence, attempting to direct Clarissa's thinking and her behaviour through imperative clauses or declarative clauses which state her obligation to take some action: "I have run a long course: let not your purity of mind incline you to despise me for the acknowledgement" (443); "Your example, madam, must do all, must confirm all. ... Yet, madam, be pleased to remember one thing ... Judge, dearest madam, by what I am going to confess ... Let me not then be checked when I mention your example for my visible reliance" (444). Grammatically, these clauses offer him the opportunity to address Clarissa, and he turns it to advantage, addressing her respectfully as "madam," rather than as "my charmer," "my angel," or other terms of stereotyped language for courtship or seduction.17 Although he aims to persuade her that she can rely on his mind working as she would expect it to from her knowledge of her own, there are several indications that it does not. Most of the imperatives cluster around an admission that contradicts the character for serious thinking he works to establish, a claim that because he does not understand "the grace you mention" and "cannot enter into the meaning of the word, nor into the modus of its operation" (444) he should be spared the need to profess reformation - except in flattering declarations of reliance on her example. He does this in his admiration for the lines from Rowe's Ulysses (one of the most deeply ironic passages in the novel), praising her recitation as much as the poet's sentiment: "He had often read these lines, he said; but never tasted them before - By his soul (the unmortified wretch swore) and as he hoped to be saved, he was now in earnest, in his good resolutions. He had said, before I repeated these lines from Rowe, that habitual evils could not be changed on a sudden: but he hoped he should not be thought a dissembler if he were not enabled to hold his good purposes; since ingratitude and dissimulation were vices that of all others he abhorred" (445).18 As Clarissa's reference to him as "unmortified wretch" suggests, the vows Lovelace uses to reinforce his "earnestness" represent a lapse into stereotyped ardours and the casual infidelity of the libertine

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and call into question the sincerity of his earlier profession. The tactical statement that he will (or will not) be "enabled" to reform is his way of recognizing this possibility. Grammatically, it follows the pattern of the "good motions" he experienced during convalescence having (seemingly of their own accord) "[gone] off" (445) on his recovery. It should warn Clarissa that the relations between intentions and words, and between words and actions, are different for Lovelace than for her - if only because this statement about grace betrays what he has disclaimed, a working knowledge of the "modus" through which it operates.19 Lovelace does not gain Clarissa's entire confidence, the "Credulity ... the God of Love's prime minister" he seeks, nor does he replace her "fear" with "love" in his sense of the word (447); he inspires instead an emotion between them, hope. This makes the situation less certain for both of them, but especially for Clarissa, who tells Anna that although a "ray of hope" has darted in upon her, she understands her own mind well enough to be able to promise, "Nevertheless, you may depend upon it, my dear, that these agreeable assurances and hopes of his begun reformation shall not make me forget my caution" (445).20 Lovelace has not taken control over her thinking, but in making himself the object of hope as well as caution, he has increased the importance of Clarissa's judgment of him and increased her dependence on factors beyond her control. The most interesting indications of Clarissa's dilemma, and of her hope, are her uses of modality in those assessments. In the first letter, high probability choices ("surely," "must," "could not") indicate an anxious certainty, or a wish to be certain: "Surely, my dear, the man must be in earnest. He could not have said this; he could not have thought it, had he not" (443). In a subsequent letter, after Anna has given reasons for doubt, a series of questions, made not to elicit answers but to present Clarissa's thinking, lead to a restatement of the same wishes, followed this time by the equally fervent wish that Anna agree with her assessment: If his pretences to reformation are but pretences, what must be his intent? But can the heart of man be so very vile? Can he, dare he, mock the Almighty? - But may I not, from one very sad reflection, think better of him; that I am thrown too much in his power to make it necessary for him (except he were to intend the very utmost villainy by me) to be such a shocking hypocrite? - He must, at least, be in earnest, at the time he gives the better hopes. Surely he must. You yourself must join with me in this hope, or you could not wish me to be so dreadfully yoked. (452)

Clarissa's use of words marking high degrees of qualities or actions ("so very vile," "one very sad reflection," "too much in his power,"

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"the utmost villainy/' "such a shocking hypocrite/' "so dreadfully yoked") reinforces the high probability modal "must" to suggest desperate wishes such that the modal "must" verges on modulating "must," which expresses a high degree of obligation. Her language would not just hope against hope here, it would compel Lovelace, if it could. It is remarkable how little Lovelace has had to do to persuade Clarissa to hope that a brighter day might be dawning. Anna realizes this, and in her response we see the friendship functioning as it is intended to; Anna warns Clarissa of dangers which are apparent to a third party observing at a distance, and reminds her of the principles by which she would want to judge the situation. After picking up the religious aspect of Lovelace's appeal and Clarissa's "ray of hope" in an arch comment on "the new light that has broke in upon your gentleman" (451), Anna says frankly that, judged by the lines from Rowe he has so admired, "he is certainly a dissembler," and the high degree of probability she assigns by the modal adjunct "certainly" flatly contradicts Clarissa's assessment. She then states Clarissa's dilemma in contrasting reflections. On the one hand, "He is certainly a man of sense: there is more hope of such a one, than of a fool: and there must be a beginning to a reformation"; on the other hand, he has confessed to nothing Clarissa did not already know and is "cunning enough to know that whoever accuses himself first blunts the edge of an adversary's accusation" (451). Representing Lovelace as "cunning" offers another perspective on the capacity for thinking that has impressed Clarissa, while the strong commitment to Anna's acknowledgment of the hopeful signs (marked by "certainly" and "must") lends little support to Clarissa's position, since both of these propositions are compatible with the statement contradicting them, the claim that he dissembles. Anna does not dispute that in general these statements are true, but she cannot believe, much as she might wish to for Clarissa's sake, that they are true of Lovelace. The women's modalized assessments of Lovelace foreground the question of whether Clarissa can trust him; a mythological allusion given Clarissa in revisions made for the third edition states an answer to that question in terms whose significance she does not fully appreciate. In the third edition Richardson added a proposal scene after the letters just discussed,21 and in it Lovelace makes one of his most extreme declarations: "Darkness, light; Light, darkness; by my Soul! - Just as you please to have it. O Charmer of my heart! ... Take me, take me to yourself: Mould me as you please: I am wax in your hands: Give me your own impression; and seal me for ever yours" (3:139). The libertine register comes into its own in such excess as this, making through imperatives and lexical items collocating

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with letters ("wax," "impression," "seal") an offer no epistolary heroine can refuse. Such deft management of passion (as it seems to her) and the offer of a control she rejects on principle leave Clarissa extremely confused and unable to respond. To forestall charges of self-contradiction in her accounts of him she therefore tells Anna, "He is a perfect Proteus. I can but write according to the shape he assumes at the time. Don't think me the changeable person, I beseech you, if in one Letter I contradict what I wrote in another; nay, if I seem to contradict what I said in the same Letter: For he is a perfect chameleon; or rather more variable than the chameleon; for that, it is said, cannot assume the red and the white; but this man can. And though black seems to be his natural colour, yet has he taken great pains to make me think him nothing but white" (y. 141-2). Richardson's use of this proposal scene to counter charges that Clarissa is over-delicate and to establish Clarissa's view of Lovelace as a reasonable one has been discussed at length by William Beatty Warner; the allusion to Proteus has often been read as a central moment in Clarissa's difficulty in separating truth from illusion.22 Terry Castle has discussed the problem of "denatured signs" and hermeneutic naivete, suggesting that "Clarissa Harlowe's 'harrowing tale' turns upon a confrontation with the arbitrariness of signs, with the failure of things to yield meaning, simply, absolutely"23 The allusion suggests even more than this, for it registers the knowledge that Lovelace has no inherent shape of his own, that being "protean" he can hold no purpose permanently and will change out of whatever shape he achieves in "reform" because incessant malleability is his only mode of being.24 This malleability is a problem for Lovelace too, and for complementary reasons. As Proteus is a figure for the malleability of language, the allusion points to a crisis of significance in which he shares as well as Clarissa. The fact that language can be used to lie is not at all the same as Saussure's celebrated "arbitrariness of the linguistic sign," and whenever the language Lovelace uses to lie threatens to fix him in roles he assumes only to deceive (Proteus does tell the truth when he is bound), the process of signification is for him not just "denatured" (as he depends on its being) but also, and in ways which repeatedly threaten his schemes, potentially "naturing." Lovelace may boast of playing freely with words, but Richardson does not imagine in him a principle of ceaseless linguistic indeterminacy. All speech is action and meaning simultaneously: by speaking Lovelace can pretend to be, but it is also by speaking that he becomes, and all action conditions future choices to act. It is a sense that he has exhausted his options, not the particular role he finds

105 Surprised by Style

himself in, that so disturbs him when he confesses to Belford, "As I hope to live, I am sorry at the present writing, that I have been such a foolish plotter as to put it, as I fear I have done, out of my own power to be honest. I hate compulsion in all forms; and cannot bear, even to be compelled to be the wretch my choice has made me! - So now, Belford, as thou hast said, I am a machine at last, and no free agent" (848). Consistently with the assumptions of his libertine register, Lovelace sees himself as suffering under the influence of an alien power, the more excruciating for its being power he has alienated from himself. Neither he nor Clarissa lives in a world of "things" arbitrarily connected with "meanings": both inhabit a world made of meanings organizing and disposing of material things. Her "harrowing tale" tells how meanings are contested and enforced; it reveals to what extent the world they constitute around her (and within her) is, in Margaret Anne Doody's title, "man-made,"25 but made in ways that men do not always control. Lovelace does achieve a great deal through his lies. By combining fields of discourse for the activities of courtship and religious reformation, he situates himself within the assumptions by which Clarissa understands the world and the principles which guide her conduct. Once he has established himself in Clarissa's language, he can praise her in it, complimenting her and assuring her of his sincerity not with stereteotyped ardour but with moral (even spiritual) earnestness. One striking example of such praise is conveyed subtly, when Clarissa is shown a letter Mrs Greme has written (under Lovelace's direction) to Mrs Sorlings. The stereotyped appeal to an "angel" is set in a religious context, where, although no less flattering, it seems more sincere than it does in other contexts. It is reported to Clarissa "that he loved me with such a purity as he had never believed himself capable of, or that a mortal creature could have inspired him with; looking upon me as all soul; as an angel sent down to save his" (453).26 Lovelace's admission of his previously limited understanding of "love" and "purity" suggests a new tentativeness in opinion such as Clarissa considers a sign of real value, and the word "mortal" rather than "sweet" or "dear" shows Lovelace choosing within the register of moral decorum rather than the register of libertinism. But he can also insert his characteristic hyperbole (saying that someone is "all" some quality or entity), and the word "angel," although referring to something sent by heaven and not something raised by an earthly lover, conveniently conflates the two registers, sounding more sincere as an item in the register of moral decorum, but no less flattering. Clarissa has admitted earlier that the "secret pleasure" of reforming Lovelace has suggested itself

106 Meanings of Style

to her (183); now, after he makes an impressively delicate piece of casuistry in favour of Mrs Norton, she wonders if there is "not room, after all, ... for hope (as he so lately led me to hope) that the example it will behoove me, for both our sakes, to endeavour to set him, may influence him to a change of manners in which both may find their account?" (461). The model of causation proposed here contrasts significantly with that assumed in the language of courtship and seduction: obliged herself, Clarissa will oblige Lovelace, not by acting directly on him but by setting an example; his grateful response, a voluntary "change of manners," will benefit both of them. This mutual action and unselfish openness to influence by a partner recalls Haywood's reflection on importunity and opportunity: by combining this mutuality with a religiously based morality, it realizes Richardson's stylistic antidote to the novels of love and seduction, an attempt to shift the formulation of erotic desire, to change what "love" could be made to mean - were Lovelace able to be sincere.27 Perhaps because she can write of a relationship with Lovelace as an obligation binding her, Clarissa is able to overlook the fact that in thinking this she accepts Lovelace's appeal in a spiritually seductive form, as a temptation proudly to include her "visible" example in "the divine grace" which, as she tells him, "must do all" (444). In spite of all she knows about the stereotyped language deployed by designing men, despite her resistance to Lovelace's offers of control in language which assumes his achieving mastery through them, these appeals affect Clarissa so strongly that she falls for a love stereotype "of three or four thousand years old" (672). Lovelace's account of Clarissa's attendance at his bedside during his selfinduced sickness reports and quotes him playing the role of generous lover nearly to perfection. Although he does address her as "charmer," he remembers his part well enough to explain (politely) that her "unkindness" (which he does not directly call, but invites her to construe as, the cause of his sickness) has so affected him only because of his concern to oblige her: "She was all goodness. ... Oh my charmer! - were I to have owed this indisposition to my late harasses, and to the uneasiness I have had for disobliging you; all is infinitely compensated by your goodness! - All the art of healing is in your smiles! - Your late displeasure was the only malady" (678). Embarrassed at finding herself susceptible to "kindness and acnowledgement of errors committed" (678), Clarissa does not recall the conceit satirized in The Rape of the Lock: When bold Sir Plume had drawn Clarissa down, Chloe stept in, and kill'd him with a Frown;

107 Surprised by Style She smil'd to see the doughty Hero slain, But at her Smile, the Beau reviv'd again.28

In her letter to Anna, she hopes that she will not "have cause to regret this surprise; which has taught me more than I knew of myself," and that she will be able "to resume distance and reserve" (679) should Lovelace give her cause. By the same "surprise of love" convention which in Pamela forces the heroine to trust a man who has justified all her suspicion of him, Clarissa is forced into a dangerous position by this self-discovery.29 By contrast with Pamela, however, who "dialogues with" her heart in journal entries which she may or may not be able to send to her parents, Clarissa's emotional state can be developed more delicately, indirectly, through comments on the process of writing and a question which cedes to Anna the position of knowing superiority she has so often archly claimed, because of their friendship and because Clarissa herself, as both know, once occupied it in relation to her: "Dissatisfied with myself, I am afraid to look back upon what I have written. And yet know not how to have done writing. I never was in such an odd frame of mind - I know not how to describe it - Was you ever so? Afraid of the censure of her I love - Yet not conscious that I deserve it" (679). This is Richardson at his most delicate, at his best. The usual way characters and critics describe what is happening in this passage is to say that a lurking, unacknowledged love has been revealed, that the desire Lovelace has searched for and Anna has claimed to detect really was "there all along." This formulation seems to me too much to accept both an unnecessarily essentialist psychology and a transparency model of language, an assumption that language "expresses" meaning which exists apart from it. Moreover, it accepts too many of Lovelace's assumptions about what male activity may "find" in "women" through sexual testing. Van Sant achieves perhaps the best analysis in these terms when she describes the novel as resting "on an investigation of desire": "As virtue means chastity, woman means a creature in whom desire is natural; virtue a product of pride. Discovering her heart means locating desire, another term for which is sensibility. ... But sensibility - psychological and physical - also accounts for the delicacy and intensity of her experience. ... Sensibility is both the delicacy that makes her modest and the susceptibility to romantic or sexual feeling that modesty conceals. Trial is a means of locating her concealed - and therefore actual nature."30 We gain critical perspective on the term "nature," and better understand Lovelace's successful deception, if we regard "nature" as

io8 Meanings of Style

constructed through social meaning-making practices, and if we conceptualize "desire" thus formed in Clarissa in semiotic terms, as a need to make meaning. As already suggested, Clarissa's "tragedy" results not from a fundamental inability to interpret meanings made by others; it dramatizes the problem that meaning cannot be made in a community of one, that our resources for meaning (and so for human existence) are most importantly available to us in language already inflected and infected with the meanings of others, meanings which no effort of individual will can entirely change, because when we draw upon language we must make meaning with others. Clarissa is well aware of this. What she "desires" and what Lovelace seems to offer when he speaks to her in the language of moral feeling is a chance to integrate her experience and to articulate relationships in language not inimical to the woman she will become in using it. Her own expressions in this style during the first visit of Captain Tomlinson (which Lovelace does not reveal as a deception until after Clarissa's account of it) mark these scenes as the high point of her hope; they indicate that what Clarissa desires most fundamentally is to realize her vision of the world as "one great family" (62). Proposed in opposition to Harlowe selfishness, and pronounced in a moral sentiment realizing, as I have argued, an elaborated code and a personal orientation opposed to the family's restricted code and positional orientation, this vision includes the Harlowes and Lovelace, anticipating neither disputes nor struggles to establish dominance and take revenge: You see me already, said she, another creature. You know not, Mr Lovelace, how near my heart this hoped-for reconciliation is. I am now willing to banish every disagreeable remembrance. You know not, sir, how much you have obliged me. And Oh, Mr Lovelace, how happy shall I be, when my heart is lightened from the all-sinking weight of a father's curse! When my dear mamma ... shall once more fold me to her indulgent bosom! When I shall again have uncles and aunts, and a brother and sister, all striving who shall show most kindness and favour to the poor outcast, then no more an outcast! - and you, Mr Lovelace, to behold all this, and to be received into a family so dear to me, with welcome - ... you, as I hope, having entered upon a new course, all will be warmer and warmer love on both sides, till everyone perhaps will wonder how they came to set themselves against you. (695)

The next chapter will analyse the kind of scene Lovelace prefers to behold, the final chapter will discuss the grammar of mental process - so like Clarissa's in this passage and the previous one, yet so different - in which he prefers to relate to her. What is remarkable here

109 Surprised by Style

is the suggestion of desire through negation, through the subject's openness to a future not known in advance.31 This is the scene Clarissa speaks of setting out to seek when she writes to Lovelace that she is going to her "father's house." The possibility is never more than a projection, a projection finally into an afterlife, because Lovelace, riven by the contradictory ideologies informing his language as libertine and the language in which he has successfully moved Clarissa, pursues a pattern offered by the former. Clarissa rushes from the room after making this speech, Lovelace writes, "as if recollecting that she had been led by her joy to an expression of it, which she had not intended I should see" (695); she leaves him "trying to check [his own] sensibility" (695). This he achieves, but not without acknowledging that he has been moved by Clarissa's vision. After his behaviour during the fire scene convinces her that his own heart has never been truly open to her, Clarissa will declare to his face, "What sensibilities ... must thou have suppressed! - what a dreadful, what a judicial hardness of heart must thine be, who canst be capable of such emotions as thou hast sometimes shown; and of such sentiments as have sometimes flowed from thy lips ... !" (852). Lovelace's fate shows the price of this suppression, the cost of not realizing possibilities of which, to his surprise, he has found himself capable. Many readers were more strongly touched by this capacity in Lovelace than Richardson thought consistent with his didactic purpose in the novel. But this effect is a consequence of the same means by which he pursues that purpose, putting in conflict the semantic resources of distinct registers for realizing romantic and sexual passion in the hope of reforming the language of love and courtship. And some of his strongest effects are achieved through Clarissa's having been moved by it. The clearest indication of this comes in the papers Clarissa scribbles during her delirium. Paper VI laments lost possibility in traditional love language stereotypes, as reformulated by terms from the register of moral decorum, thus suggesting that at some level of Clarissa's mind a desire for reverence and compliment did form as Lovelace had assumed it would: "No court now to be paid to my smiles! No encouraging compliments to inspire thee with hope of laying a mind not unworthy of thee under obligation! No elevation now for conscious merit, and applauded purity, to look down from on a prostrate adorer, and an admiring world, and up to pleased and rejoicing parents and relations!" (892). Various features of the passage suggest Clarissa scrutinizing herself in different voices. One voice, her own, indicated by first-person reference, exclaims in disappointment. Another, indicated by its use of the second-person pronoun "thee," is more distant, while a third voice

no Meanings of Style

examines the roles in which Clarissa has appeared to the world - as "conscious merit/' as "applauded purity" - with what could be thirdperson reference, and an ambiguous tone: "pleased and rejoicing relations" suggests what Clarissa has wished from her family, while "No elevation now ..." suggests Arabella's contempt for Clarissa's superiority. The grammatical logic of movement from first through second to third person realizes an ultimately theological meaning. Although she has been forced to deal with Lovelace and the stereotypes of love outside the secure hierarchy she imagines here - parents above and humble servant below - Clarissa believes she is responsible for what has happened to her and now renounces any claim to distinctions of which she has been too proud. She seeks a more secure basis for identity in relation to God, and as she articulates it she is able to place Lovelace and his knowledge of "opportunity" and "importunity," of "inclination" and "temptation," in a relation to her that at last makes sense of his behaviour. Now aware of the rake's creed, Clarissa can definitively know the man who boasted of what could be done by "a persevering lover" - "Oh Lovelace, thou art surely nearly allied to the grand deceiver in thy endeavour to suit temptations to inclinations!" (928). This religious reformulation is Clarissa's final interpretation of Lovelace as "lover," her clarification of the role he has played toward her throughout his adoption of the assumptions perpetuated in their culture's stereotyped love language. Following the logic of Clarissa's identification, we may construe a Lovelace deliberate and demonic, or we may, in a secular reading of sin, recognize a victim trapped in his will to control others. But this polarity and our entire construction of Lovelace as demon lover inadequately represent the problem of love as Richardson's text allows us to understand it. There is more to Richardson's critique of stereotyped love language than either the factitious nature of what Clarissa is invited to take for "reality" or a potentially comic structure of opening the self to an interplay with an other. Richardson's mixing of registers at some of the most erotically charged moments in Clarissa fuses a contingency of erotic impulse with the contingency of an immediate moment developing not precisely according to any one preconceived scheme or single set of meanings. So it sets in motion a dynamic which threatens the separateness and linguistic circumspection of both characters. Under the pressure of such moments - but separately - both Lovelace and Clarissa reveal a capacity to step beyond their assumptions about love and their anxious assessments of each other, to embrace undecidability in stepping into the space of "knowing not," the space Clarissa offers Lovelace when he has obliged her to admit that that

in Surprised by Style is where she stands in relation to him.32 As Clarissa is a tragedy, this space opens somewhere beyond both characters, beyond Harlowe Place and Mrs Sinclair's house, symbols for the hells of ungratified desire in which they suffer so long. Although the meaning potential available to Richardson limits him to intimating it in a grammatical motif (negation of a mental process, "knowing not") that can be contextualized according to any scheme of value, this is the space for which all criticism of the novel contends, not to conquer and to rule in lonely eminence, but to welcome its next visitor. This is the space where Warner's principled refusal to found any program of public virtue on the rape of a woman can be recognized for the feminist political act it is, not misperceived as its spectre, an excess of apolitical American deconstruction: there it can greet Kinkead-Weekes's reading of the mad papers and both praise Doody's reading of symbol, Castle's of silence. In a character's apprehension of her own "knowing not," Richardson suggests what we now theorize as a decentred self, a subject in process; thus his novel articulates a vision of eros able to challenge its own scrupulous examination of the language in which (so he claims) the erotic is too often understood. This vision does not imply a remystification of social processes that Richardson works to demystify, for it says frankly how mystery can finally be stripped of its deforming, dehumanizing power, by the only genuine opening to another, a turn away from the struggle for mastery. In a novel where mastery is so often effected through knowledge, not knowing turns Clarissa from desiring to control to hoping to trust. Clarissa and Lovelace both know that the barriers between them can be broken down, that Lovelace may choose physical violence: this is the limiting case against which all love language tries desperately to negotiate an alternative. To understand that these barriers can fall, as opposed to being broken down, to think rape a violation of Lovelace's desires as well as Clarissa's, would lead the characters beyond the certainties that limit them. To know this is to insist that an alternative is possible, to believe that the so often tragic ironies of desire can be made to confess a potentially comic irony of love.

5 Why Look at Clarissa? Physical Description and Richardson's Revision of Libertine Style

"Methinks I can't bear to be look'd upon by these Men-servants; for they seem as if they would look one thro."1 So writes Pamela of an early, unwanted sexual advance by her fellow servant, Harry, as she voices what is for many female characters in Richardson's novels a home truth. Kristina Straub has argued of Pamela that, in order to reeducate male readers, Richardson deconstructs this gaze and reconstructs it.2 Incidents in which men look at women are important in Clarissa also, and there, as one part of Richardson's more complex development of epistolary form, sharply contrasting male descriptions of the heroine explore more critically what it means for men to look at women. Through these descriptions, Richardson enlarges a critique of earlier novels of love and seduction begun in Pamela, revising a literary descriptive tradition in ways that would have important consequences for later English fiction. This chapter discusses Lovelace's and Belford's physical descriptions of Clarissa and shows just how nuanced (and problematic) is this aspect of Richardson's style. Comparison with Haywood's Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia and contemporary comment on the alleged salaciousness of certain descriptions suggest that in spite of redefining how the gaze functions in Lovelace's descriptions of Clarissa, Richardson encountered considerable difficulty when he reformed "the warm scene" for didactic purposes. Physical description serves a didactic purpose, but not unproblematically, for Richardson's further representation of Clarissa's body through Belford's accounts of her reestablishes, in the register of moral decorum, the

ii3 Why Look at Clarissa?

spectatorial apparatus that has been discredited as an instrument of control in the register of libertinism. This being so, Richardson's revision of what it means for men to look at women in Clarissa depends ultimately on the novel's offering an alternative way of visualizing and knowing Clarissa, one constructed by Clarissa herself. The main focus of this chapter is the libertine style, in particular the range of meanings likely to be made when one rake writes to another and there is enough description of a woman's body that it becomes a focus of interest. Richardson discusses this type of situation and comments on the libertine register available in it in a letter to Lady Bradshaigh, claiming that he has "every where avoided, all Rant, Horror, indecent Images, inflaming Descriptions, even when rake writes to rake."3 He characterizes the participants as rakes, thus suggesting the tenor of discourse; he specifies one aspect of the field of discourse, an activity carried on through (possibly "indecent") "Images" and (possibly "inflaming") "Descriptions"; and he specifies the mode of discourse, writing as opposed to speech.4 What is particularly interesting in this rake's register are the meanings made through these "Images" and "Descriptions," so while the passages to be analysed in this chapter have been chosen because they contain lexical items representing physical aspects of women's bodies, physical description in itself is but one component (or subfield) of the rake's field of discourse as Richardson develops it. Depending on the range of lexis drawn upon, the social activity constituting field of discourse can be more or less complex. By making it more complex, by collocating lexical items for "physical features" with lexis for representing other aspects of experience, Richardson attempts to influence what men in his culture would (typically) mean when they talked about women.5 The problem of men's looking at women and readers' relation to the ideology this looking encodes have been perennial topics in Richardson criticism, the question of voyeurism an occasion alternately for moral condemnation, for accusations of clandestine pleasure, or for charges of serious misreading.6 Feminist work in film theory, in particular Laura Mulvey's theory of a "male gaze" generated by the apparatus of narrative cinema and offering visual pleasure for men and problematic choices for women,7 makes it possible to identify in physical descriptions of Clarissa an authorial desire for change in the way men look at women and a deep resistance to the possibility that such change might disrupt fundamentally the culture's construction of gender difference through distinct, non-reciprocal male and female positions. In the essays by John Berger and Susanne Kappeler from which this chapter draws its title, the question "Why look?"

H4 Meanings of Style

asks not simply what is made of the object looked at, but also what processes of self-definition the person looking carries out through the contrast made between him/herself and the other constructed as object of the gaze.8 Physical description of Clarissa is bound to the business of defining woman, but not only conceptions of "woman" are on trial in this novel. As Lovelace acts to assert a "controlling identity"9 he associates that identity, as Clarissa will come to do, with everything he means by "man." This too is on trial. The first description of Clarissa containing a significant amount of physical detail is Lovelace's "faint sketch of her admirable person" in his account of the flight from Harlowe Place: "Her wax-like flesh (for, after all, flesh and blood I think she is!) by its delicacy and firmness, answers for the soundness of her health. Thou hast often heard me launch out in praise of her complexion. I never in my life beheld a skin so illustriously fair. The lily and the driven snow it is nonsense to talk of: her lawn and her laces one might, indeed, compare to those; but what a whited wall would a woman appear to be, who had a complexion which would justify such unnatural comparisons? But this lady is all alive, all glowing, all charming flesh and blood, yet so clear that every meandering vein is to be seen in all the lovely parts of her which custom permits to be visible" (399). As a physical description this passage is what Lovelace says it is - faint. The lexical items for parts of the body are general ("flesh," "blood," "complexion," "skin"), their modifiers no more erotic ("wax-like," "illustriously fair," "alive," "glowing," "charming"). What is remarkable about the passage is the number of activities other than simple description that are part of it. Another range of meanings, expressed by mental and behavioural processes ("think," "heard," "praise," "beheld," "talk," "compare"), is associated not with Clarissa but with Lovelace and Belford, and they are crucial to Lovelace's sense of himself as a rake.10 Lovelace fashions and sustains a rakish self as much through managing his relation to Belford (by expressing attitudes, by positioning Belford to think or, metaphorically, do one thing or another) as through actions he takes with Clarissa. In these descriptions, as elsewhere, he is performing for Belford's admiration and applause. Lovelace is particularly interested in two aspects of this description, the appropriateness of his language and his interpretation of Clarissa. A parenthesis gives his reason for using the word "flesh" and a generalization nicely satirizes the absurdities of a lexical set he rejects, those items associated exclusively with the sonnet tradition. Interpretation is strongest in the first clause, which moves from what appears ("Her wax-like flesh") to the more abstract quality it repre-

ii5 Why Look at Clarissa?

sents ("the soundness of her health"), and in the last, long nominal group, in which the scope of the adjectival Head ("clear") is limited by the Qualifier "parts ... which custom permits to be visible."11 Not just the skin is important, but the social limits to what may be shown and seen. Lovelace's interest in Clarissa is rarely confined to her physical body, and the meanings he associates with her body are often as important to him as the presence of her flesh and blood. Where his descriptions are voyeuristic, the excitement usually derives from speculation on what custom forbids him to see. In his euphemistic reference to Clarissa's bosom, for instance, sight serves at last, at the farthest stretch of the libertine imagination, the idea of further sight: "A white handkerchief, wrought by the same inimitable fingers, concealed - Oh Belford! what still more inimitable beauties did it not conceal! - And I saw, all the way we rode, the bounding heart; by its throbbing motions I saw it! dancing beneath the charming umbrage" (400).12 Lovelace does not adhere rigorously to his rejection of sonnet language. One of the overused and "unnatural" metaphors of the sonnet tradition occurs just a few sentences after this reflection, when he mentions "the fire of her starry eyes" (400); in the portrait he sketches to tell his fellow rakes what to expect when they meet his "fair prize" (541), his "GLORIANA" (542), he invites them to hear "fine sense and adages flowing through teeth of ivory, and lips of coral" (541); in his last description of her in his account of the fire scene (after a series of physical descriptions) he claims, "Never saw I such polished ivory as her arms and shoulders seemed to be; never touched I velvet so soft as her skin" (727); and finally, in accounts written shortly before and shortly after the rape, he contradicts his own principle to describe her hands as "snowy" (880 and 900). There is no obvious purpose for this inconsistency. In none of these instances does he comment on the appropriateness of his expression, and there is no factor common to all the contexts which can explain why he switches to a lexical set he has so wittily discredited. Richardson may have intended readers to notice that Lovelace breaks his own stylistic rule, perhaps even to read his doing so as an involuntary recurrence of his old passion for "sonnet, elogy, and madrigal" (143), but more likely he intended that readers should grow suspicious of Lovelace's entire repertoire of styles, rather than to fix upon one as an alternative to all others.13 The concerns associated with physical description which indicate more than a voyeuristic desire simply to gaze on Clarissa's physical person and an uncomplicated physical urge to possess her are expressed through items from different lexical sets being combined

n6 Meanings of Style

with lexis of physical description and so complicating the activity Lovelace performs. Sometimes the additional subfields of discourse express an appreciation of Clarissa's excellence which is relevant to Lovelace's pursuit only because it increases Clarissa's value and so heightens the significance of his being in a position to test her. The description quoted above, for example, is followed by an account of Clarissa's dress, motivated by Lovelace's surprisingly feminine interest (one of several) in women's clothing. Structures of modification make this account not simply an inventory of the objects Clarissa wears but an assessment of the independent intelligence she showed in creating them, as in "the cuffs and robings curiously embroidered by the fingers of this ever charming Arachne" (400). Years of selfdiscipline and her determination not to go off with him explain why she wears no hat or hood. Throughout this description of her person and of her clothing, Clarissa's appearance signifies character and it is this character Lovelace wishes to overcome.14 Whatever the lexical items he uses to represent her, Lovelace assesses and classifies Clarissa relentlessly, frequently adding psychological evaluation to his physical descriptions. This stylistic feature complicates readers' interpretive work, because the meaning of the details derives from the overall development of the passage in which they occur. The thoughts or emotions Lovelace attributes to Clarissa often indicate his own estimate of whether his scheme of the moment is succeeding, and so, although they are psychologically probable, when such sketches can be compared with Clarissa's representations of herelf they turn out to reveal much more about Lovelace and the cultural patterns Richardson calls to attention through him. To interpret the details in Lovelace's accounts is not to understand Clarissa so much as it is to understand the assumptions Lovelace brings to bear on her, the semiotic framework within which he constructs her and the set of possible meanings she will exemplify and confirm for him in his narrative. His reforming purpose leads Richardson into a delicate situation here, because the novel strives to change the style and ideology which have enabled it to be written at all. A series of brief passages in which Lovelace includes physical details in his descriptions shows both a formulaic quality in his lexis of physical description and a close correspondence between his degree of confidence and the emotions he believes Clarissa's physical features express at any given moment. He is never more excited than when he has first induced Clarissa to leave Harlowe Place with him, and the interpretations included in his account of their flight show as high a degree of confidence as any in the novel. The difficulty of .

H7 Why Look at Clarissa?

knowing the heart of another person is an important theme in moral reflections made by both of them at various points in the text, but Lovelace, who often treats the heart as a physical and emotional object (frequently referring to his own heart in concrete lexis that suggests it works literally as a physical object rather than as the immaterial essence of his moral and spiritual identity), declares exultantly, "And I saw, all the way we rode, the bounding heart; by its throbbing motions I saw it! dancing beneath the charming umbrage" (400), "charming umbrage" being one of his several euphemisms for what covers the heart, the bosom. What he claims to have seen he construes (in a significant convergence) according to one of Anna Howe's favourite conventions, the notion that a woman reluctant to admit she loves will first experience love in the discovery that her heart does not behave as she thinks it should. When Lovelace voices Anna's assumptions - "She trembled: nor knew she how to support the agitations of a heart she had never found so ungovernable" (400) - his analysis foregrounds one of the conventions Clarissa has been written out of, and constructed against. Lovelace's confidence is such that, even after an inadvertent proposal of marriage at St Albans, he imagines that Clarissa is attracted by the proposal but prevented by her modesty from responding to it. His description fragments her into a "collection of beauties," all of them communicating her feelings: "And oh how the mantled cheek, the downcast eye, the silent, yet trembling lip, and the heaving bosom, a sweet collection of heightened beauties, gave evidence that the tender was not mortally offensive!" (425). Clarissa's assessment ("that the tender was not mortally offensive") is manifested, but it is clearly not Clarissa, not a whole body in the keeping of a mind and soul, responding to him: by isolating parts of her, one appearing as it does because of her actions (the eye has been "downcast"), others acting autonomously (the cheek has "mantled," the lip is "trembling," the bosom is "heaving"), Lovelace includes his optimistic estimate of the situation in his description of each feature. His belief that these are Clarissa's feelings "heightens" her beauty in that it now reflects back to him his power over her, and because by inspiring her to feel what her principles do not allow (love for a man of errors) he has forced her to transgress the boundary separating the fit from the unfit. This construction anticipates her joining him in a space their transgression will open within the restrictions of polite behaviour (the hidden, interior rooms of the brothel to which he later takes her symbolize this transgression); that space will open in Clarissa's desiring and so reflecting Lovelace's desire back to him and end in her being reduced to desiring his desire of her, in her

n8 Meanings of Style

trying desperately and without success to hold him in a desire he will be at liberty not to feel. In Clarissa's account of this scene, not her feelings but her active consideration is dominant, especially her sense that she is constrained to say nothing: "But what could I say? I wanted somebody to speak for me: I could not, all at once, act as if I thought that all punctilio was at an end. I was unwilling to suppose it was so soon. The man saw I was not angry at his motion. I only blushed up to the ears; that I am sure I did: looked silly, and like a fool" (423). Although she mentions one of the same physical actions, blushing, and confirms that it indicated she "was not angry," Clarissa interprets it according to her own code of values, as an indication that she looked "silly" and foolish. The contrast between Lovelace's assessment of her and Clarissa's assessment of herself (which is a reading of her helplessness, expressed by her question, by negatives, and by volitional mental processes - "what could I," "I wanted," "I could not," "I was unwilling") is striking. Where it is not possible to compare accounts by Clarissa with accounts by Lovelace, it is difficult to judge to what extent Lovelace reports a scene and to what extent he projects his assumptions onto it. In these physical descriptions Lovelace assumes the omniscience of a third-person narrator, stating not just what Clarissa does but what she thinks and feels. It is difficult to allow for this stance and remember that we are (in part) assuming the truthfulness of Lovelace's accounts if we include them among the "events" we have "seen" in our reading of the novel. In one of Lovelace's later accounts, written from London in the course of experiments with various schemes, Clarissa's beauty is heightened not by inferred bashfulness but by actions she takes in defence of her dignity. Lovelace maintains his optimism, although he admits that Clarissa's features indicate that she rejects his advances and resents his encroaching desires: "With an erect mien she entered, her face averted, her lovely bosom swelling, and the more charmingly protuberant for the erecmess of her mien. Oh Jack! that sullenness and reserve should give this haughty maid new charms! But in every attitude, in every humour, in every gesture, is beauty beautiful" (641). Lovelace's language suggests that Clarissa's behaviour ("sullenness" and "reserve") increases the force of her appeal to him. The reflection on beauty, which Lovelace makes in spite of himself, reformulates the romance notion of a haughty woman taking a man captive, one which lay behind his earlier declaration that "It was her character that drew me to her: and it was her beauty and good sense that rivetted my chains" (428). Lovelace is even more threatened in a meeting the next day when she enters to take tea with him. He

119 Why Look at Clarissa?

thinks Clarissa bashful, sullen, and confused, and he interprets these feelings in the usual way: "and down she sat; a gentle palpitation in the beauty of beauties indicating mingled sullenness and resentment; her snowy handkerchief rising and falling, and a sweet flush overspreading her charming cheeks" (649). But these beauties do not inspire as once they did. Instead, her distress, her tears, and the declaration that her father's curse has been fulfilled by his treatment so move Lovelace that he hardly trusts himself not to burst into tears in front of her. He is brought to the point of balance between trying her further and giving in to an interpretation forcing itself on him, that Clarissa's behaviour toward him and even her physical features themselves manifest "a virtue, and ... a greatness of soul, that [can] not be questioned or impeached" (651). Clarissa ruptures the verbal framework in which Lovelace has confined her; increasingly, he loses control over the woman he interprets with it. As their struggle progresses and Lovelace becomes less certain of the outcome, his reading of Clarissa's emotions in passages of physical description is more restrained. When he first clasps her in the fire scene, "sighing, trembling, and ready to faint, with nothing on but an under-petticoat, her lovely bosom half-open, and her feet just slipped into her shoes" (723), his ludicrous description of her heart indicates no more than that she feels strong emotions: "Oh Jack! how her sweet bosom, as I clasped her to mine, heaved and panted! I could even distinguish her dear heart flutter, flutter, flutter, against mine; and for a few minutes, I feared she would go into fits" (723). Her bosom and the heart it covers are all of Clarissa that appear in this passage, and their actions are merely physical, heaving, panting, and fluttering. Clarissa's state of mind is presented through Lovelace's thinking, and his mental processes are consequently more prominent as the focus shifts momentarily away from action to assessment. In the scene leading up to the rape the physical detail of "her charming bosom heaving to her uplifted face" is simply one indication of extreme emotion among many, not as significant as the larger action in which it occurs. In that action, Clarissa falls at Lovelace's feet unable fully to articulate her plea for mercy, ending up "prostrate on the floor ... neither in a fit nor out of one" (880). As Clarissa's values demand Lovelace's attention by the force with which her physical body manifests them, a heroic person emerges to contest and displace the erotic framework through which Lovelace has read her. Brief though they are, we may trace over the course of these physical descriptions a shift from erotic to heroic construction which is completed after the rape. Physical details of Clarissa now occur incidentally

i2o Meanings of Style

and without being made prominent; as in erotic description, they take their significance from the larger dramatic action of the scene. In their first meeting after the rape, when Clarissa has been prevented from escaping the house, the mention of "her enchanting neck" is less important than the plea that follows - "here, here, said the soul-harrowing beauty, let thy pointed mercy enter!" (913) - and of the two modifiers defining Clarissa, "soul-harrowing" rather than "enchanting" indicates her effect on Lovelace in this encounter.15 In the penknife scene, Clarissa's bosom is mentioned only when necessary for an account of her activity: "she held forth a penknife in her hand, the point to her own bosom"; "She withdrew to the door ... holding the pointed knife to her heaving bosom" (950). The scene belongs to Clarissa and there can be no misrepresenting the emotions she has expressed in her speeches; having lost control, Lovelace cannot interpret the formulaic "heaving bosom" to his advantage.16 There is a twofold strategy in Richardson's complication of the field of discourse in the libertine register. By emphasizing the element of active interpretation in Lovelace's accounts and Lovelace's responsibility for them, he draws attention to the ideology Lovelace would impose, the assumption that, in whatever mode he engages her on a continuum from looking to physical violence, the man is sole and sovereign, absolute maker of what the woman means. By placing two characters with the power to think and feel deeply in a situation where in earlier novels of love and seduction the characters seem to him to be simple elements in a straightforward set of instructions for fantasy, Richardson develops and emphasizes the woman's resistance to that ideology. Having so increased the gravity of the erotic situation, Richardson assumed that his moral purpose in representing it would be sufficiently clear that readers could not help but orient themselves by that purpose. But within the wider literary context, the notoriety of "warm" passages in the novels of Eliza Haywood and others meant that in using physical description at all Richardson was taking the risk that readers might make their own associations and draw inferences he did not intend. After the strong criticism provoked by the warm scenes in Pamela, he was sensitive to audience response to this kind of "realism," well aware that conventionally moralistic readers would think that any description (or even mention) of Clarissa in a state of undress undercut his moral purpose. Within the novel, Lovelace is responsible for the descriptions and they serve to define his moral nature, as well as the semantic resources of the rake, but at least some early readers of Clarissa held Richardson responsible for the presumed effect of these passages on the reading public. The most

121 Why Look at Clarissa? flamboyant of those critics, Francis Plumer, admits that Richardson would have been the last writer to intend impurity but contends, "Yet so rich is his Imagination; that he cannot help being perhaps too lively and particular in some Scenes: ... Clarissa's charms are all displayed before our Eyes, her lovely naked Bosom, and fine turned Limbs, exposed in the Struggling. - We can hardly avoid being fired with the warm Description: And imagine with Lovelace, that he might hurt the tenderest and loveliest of all her Beauties."17 Plumer also admits that Richardson's purpose in writing the scene was to show Clarissa's behaviour in the most extreme trial, then makes the more pertinent criticism that Lovelace could not by his actions have "overcome an ordinary Share of Virtue" (24). The anonymous writer of Critical Remarks is also unimpressed by Lovelace's style as a lover (36) and thinks that, along with all other novels but Sarah Fielding's David Simple, Richardson's tend to inflame passions they should rather allay: "That man must have a very philosophical constitution, indeed, who does not find himself moved by several descriptions, particularly that luscious one, which Bob Lovelace gives of Clarissa's person, when he makes the attempt on her virtue, after the adventure of the fire."18 As his critics indicate, the physical descriptions that test Richardson's claim to narrative decency are those of the fire scene. Belford's belief that he must omit them from the letters he shows Clarissa (1177) suggests that they are to be understood as typical of "rake writing to rake," but even in these notorious passages differences from similar passages in earlier fiction suggest that, although Richardson wrote with reference to an important element of that fiction, he took care to shift Lovelace's descriptions away from it. What Richardson knew of earlier amatory fiction is difficult to judge, but what he thought of it we can estimate from two comments. In a letter to Mrs Chapone written in 1750, he declares that "Mrs. Pilkington, Constantia Phillips, Lady V. ... [are] a Set of Wretches ... to make the Behn's, the Manley's, and the Heywood's, look white,"19 and in his defence of the fire scene, he cites the "Bugle-bed Painting" in Delarivier Manley's The New Atalantis as more outrageous than anything in Clarissa.20 By reading Manley's scene as simply titillating and treating it simply as an instance of a pornographic genre, Richardson recontextualizes it, divesting it of the political significance (as anti-Whig satire) which it bore for Manley and her first readers. The scene in question is, interestingly, an account of a woman's approach to a man who has displayed himself for her in a state of undress on a style of bed named for the bugles embroidered in its canopy, and, as Ros Ballaster has argued, it works to destabilize gender dichotomies, so some unease may inform Richardson's

122 Meanings of Style remembering it as especially reprehensible.21 Ballaster has also noted both a debt to Manley and a shift of interest from "leading politicians" to "court figures and private individuals" in Haywood's "Tory scandal chronicles" of the 172OS,22 so if Richardson did indeed sympathize with Tory (or even Jacobite) perspectives in the late 17405, those sympathies did not prevent him from apparently sharing his contemporaries' apolitical reading of Behn, Manley, and Haywood.23 As far as we can reconstruct it, Richardson's own understanding of the warm scene in the work from which he adapted it participates in the same misreading of intention to which his own fire scene was subjected. Two examples of the warm scene from Haywood's Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia will illustrate the literary tradition. Interpreted as Richardson would presumably have interpreted them, they offer a basis for comparison with the fire scene. In the first, Windusius describes his response to Wyaria's request that he massage a cramp in her thigh: Judge now what I endur'd! stretch your Imagination to the utmost Extent, and if possible, form an Idea of the vast Temptation now open'd to me! think what I felt amidst this Scene of racking Pleasure - what infinite, unutterable, distracting Extasy invaded my whole Soul, while thus employ'd. Fancy you see the lovely Maid extended on the Grass, her shining Eyes swimming in Love, and sparkling with Desire! - her snowy Breasts panting and heaving with impatient Wishes! - her Garments thrown aside, and all the Beauties of her fine-proportioned Limbs expos'd to View! - the Legs, the Thighs, the soft, the milk-white Skin! - the plump, inviting Flesh, that quiver'd at my Touch! - the thousand, thousand nameless Charms which Words cannot express, and Thought alone can paint.24 Through his auditor in the novel, Windusius encourages readers' active participation in two stages.25 First he invites identification with himself in the scene by imperative clauses with mental processes ("Judge now what I endur'd/' "stretch your Imagination," "form an Idea," "think what I felt") and extravagant modifiers piled up before lexical items representing the feelings ("racking Pleasure," "infinite, unutterable, distracting Extasy") which invade him. Then, continuing his appeal to the senses ("Fancy you see"), he surveys Wyaria, enumerating her attributes with the compulsive repetition that runs throughout the passage. This is done partly in abstract lexis ("Beauties," "Charms") but more fully in lexis for parts of the body: "Eyes," "Breasts," "Limbs," "Legs," "Thighs," and "Skin." Windusius's description expires in the rhetorical commonplace that words are

123 Why Look at Clarissa?

inadequate to a full rendering of the scene, but not before he has characterized Wyaria, particularly through Qualifiers modifying the physical features: "her shining Eyes swimming in Love, and sparkling with Desire," "her snowy Breasts panting and heaving with impatient Wishes." This has the effect (more pronounced than in Lovelace's descriptions analysed above) of fragmenting the woman into erotically appealing pieces expressing a straightforward desire for pleasure.26 Later in the same novel, Count Riverius is led to a view of Masonia in a grotto: She was fallen asleep, and the Heat of the Day having prevented her from dressing, she was in a loose Dishabille of green Lutestring flower'd with Silver; which being as it were only carelessly thrown over her Shoulders, and quite unfastened before, discover'd Beauties 'till that ravishing moment he had never seen but in Imagination: the whole Proportion of her fine-turn'd Neck, and heaving Breasts, were now exposed to view, excepting only where here and there an unty'd Lock of the most lovely Hair in the world fell scattering down; and by seeming to endeavour to hide some part of Beauty, disclos'd another by showing of itself. - Nor were her Legs and Feet with greater Caution skreen'd ... the happy Count had a full Opportunity of feasting his Eyes with the sight of those Charms so dear to a Lover's Fancy.27

As in the earlier passage, concrete lexis for parts of the body ("Shoulders," "Neck," "Breasts," "Hair," "Legs," "Feet") is more frequent than abstract lexis ("Beauties," "Beauty," "Charms"), but there is not the same sense of frenzy, partly because the modification is more restrained (the woman is asleep) and partly because there is more emphasis on the moment in which the man gazes, achieved through lexis realizing processes by which he is enabled to see, or the act of sight itself: "unfastened," "discover'd," "seen," "exposed," "hide," "disclos'd," "showing," "skreen'd," "feasting his Eyes," and "sight." The direction of both passages is toward mutual enjoyment, with no mention of principles which might impede the swift gratification of desire. John Rkhetti has aptly characterized this style of writing as "deliberately indifferent to anything but the the reader's capacity for erotic fantasy."28 Whether sketched in a kind of erotic shorthand leaving readers to fill in details, or elaborated as in these examples, such descriptions are just a stage in a larger pattern, and the delights of amatory fiction derive from readers' expectations being raised and satisfied in terms that, however euphemistic or vague, are unambiguous. There are several important differences in Lovelace's account of the fire scene. One is a shift in the tenor of discourse, the way in

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which Belford, and through him Richardson's readers, are invited to participate. Lovelace begins his account by explicitly forbidding Belford the imaginative activity that Richardson would assume Haywood covertly encourages: "Although the subject is too hallowed for profane contemplation, yet shalt thou have the whole before thee as it passed: and this not from a spirit wantoning in description upon so rich a subject; but with a design to put a bound to thy roving thoughts - It will be iniquity greater than a Lovelace ever was guilty of, to carry them farther than I shall acknowledge" (722). Belford is directed toward Lovelace's feelings so that he will appreciate Lovelace's state of mind in the scene, not so that he can imagine himself into it, and religious lexis ("hallowed," "profane," "iniquity") indicates Lovelace's high seriousness. In a later resumption of this appeal for imaginative participation, Lovelace offers grounds for excusing his advances, even for applauding his self-restraint: "And now, Belford, reflect upon the distance the watchful charmer had hitherto kept me at. Reflect upon my love, and upon my sufferings for her: reflect upon her vigilance, and how long I had lain in wait to elude it; the awe I had stood in, because of her frozen virtue and over-niceness; and that I never before was so happy with her; and then think how ungovernable must be my transports in those happy moments!" (724). Lovelace's lexis for Clarissa's previous behaviour toward him ("distance," "watchful," "vigilance," "frozen virtue," "over-niceness") locates her securely within his assumptions about women, and the lexis he applies to himself ("sufferings," "awe," "transports") suggests a languishing lover within reach of his reward. But by contrast with Haywood's novel, where the point of the scene is that it rehearse a titillating moment in a stereotyped pattern of seduction, this scene is more important for the individual personalities active in it, even if those personalities are characterized somewhat stereotypically. There is real suspense, because the action may unfold in various ways, and the appeal through mental processes ("reflect" and "think") is finally to readers' judgment rather than to a capacity for fantasy. Lovelace describes Clarissa in physical terms several times in his account, but in all of these portraits her beauty is less important than her resistance, and each time he initiates intimacy Lovelace finds she is a match for him, as either her remarkable physical strength or her upbraiding speeches compels him to give over his purposes. The descriptions do not occur in a primarily erotic pattern of seduction or rape, and the physical action that correlates with the emotional pattern of the scene is one repeated many times in the novel Clarissa falls to the floor at Lovelace's feet, moves him as an image

125 Why Look at Clarissa?

of injured innocence, then rises to occupy a position of moral superiority. The following description begins by emphasizing her appealing vulnerability, then shifts its focus to her actions, as a potential conquest becomes a contest: But, oh the sweet discomposure! - Her bared shoulders and arms, so inimitably fair and lovely: her spread hands crossed over her charming neck; yet not half concealing its glossy beauties: the scanty coat, as she rose from me, giving the whole of her admirable shape and fine-turned limbs: her eyes running over, yet seeming to threaten future vengeance: and at last her lips uttering what every indignant look and glowing feature portended; exclaiming as if I had done the worst I could do, and vowing never to forgive me; wilt thou wonder that I could avoid resuming the incensed, the already toomuch-provoked fair one? (724-5)

Comparison of this description with those in the Haywood passages already analysed reveals significant differences. There is a slightly smaller selection of lexical items for parts of the body ("shoulders," "arms," "hands," "neck," "eyes," "lips"), with less specific items, deployed with strategic delicacy, in place of the items not included that appear in Haywood - "her admirable shape and fine-turned limbs" rather than "Breasts," "Legs," and "Thighs." The epithets associated with Clarissa are mostly innocuous ("sweet," "bared," "fair," "lovely," "charming," "glossy," "admirable"), and Clarissa's activities are just the opposite of Wyaria's. Grammatically, they occur as a series of juxtaposed, non-finite dependent clauses rather than as Qualifiers in juxtaposed nominal groups, and this suggests a series of events rather than simultaneous activity. Clarissa does not express desire, but proceeds from silence to ever more passionate declarations of the emotion Lovelace reads in her "every indignant look and glowing feature": "seeming to threaten," "uttering," "exclaiming," "vowing." Lovelace cannot resist taking further action, not because Clarissa's person is irresistible but because his reading of her mind ("indignant," "incensed," "already too-much-provoked") suggests he has nothing to lose by taking it. Significantly, the final clause in the passage, the only independent clause in it, does not narrate an action, but appeals to Belford's judgment, asking him to confirm Lovelace's assessment of the situation. Such questions direct readers to make the same kind of assessment, provoking (Richardson hoped) the same emotion Richardson felt when he considered the scene as a reader - Clarissa's sense of indignation.29 In the struggle that follows, Clarissa ends up at Lovelace's feet, and as in Haywood's descriptions, extensive use of present participles

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emphasizes activity. What the activity leads toward, however, is not inarticulate submission to a lover: And there, in the anguish of her soul, her streaming eyes lifted up to my face with supplicating softness, hands folded, dishevelled hair; for her night head-dress having fallen off in her struggling, her charming tresses fell down in naturally shining ringlets, as if officious to conceal the dazzling beauties of her neck and shoulders; her lovely bosom heaving with sighs, and broken sobs, as if to aid her quivering lips in pleading for her - in this manner, but when her grief gave way to her speech, in words pronounced with that emphatical propriety which distinguishes this admirable creature in her elocution from all the women I ever heard speak; did she implore my compassion, and my honour. (725)

The details which this passage shares with Count Riverius's portrait of Masonia in Haywood are balanced by a similarly detailed description of Clarissa's speech, in the course of which Lovelace's use of moral lexis and his reference to her as "admirable creature" mark the same shift from erotic to heroic presentation that occurs in his physical descriptions over the wider course of the novel. Absurd as it may seem that lover should at such a moment turn phonetician and dwell as long on the correctness of Clarissa's speech as on her physical beauty, the overall movement of this scene is toward a triumphant resistance effected through Clarissa's only weapon, speech, and as a demonstration of her presence of mind it is as realistic as any other aspect of the account.30 Increasingly the scene becomes a matter of argument, speech is quoted rather than reported, and Clarissa's language is the topic argued about, as Lovelace disputes her terms of execration in the scene itself and comments on them in his account of it to Belford. Activity is so far subordinated to words that actions which would have been the key points of an account as written by Haywood are mentioned in the narrative only to contextualize what is said or as an accompaniment to it: "Wicked wretch! - Insolent villain! - Yes, she called me insolent villain, although so much in my power! And for what? - only for kissing (with passion indeed) her inimitable neck, her lips, her cheeks, her forehead, and her streaming eyes, as this assemblage of beauties offered itself at once to my ravished sight; she continuing kneeling at my feet, as I sat" (725). It is customary in such scenes for the lover to dispute the woman's language while pressing his appeal in actions - as Lovelace later imagines doing in his dream (922) - but Clarissa's exclamations do not die away into sighs and murmurs, and Lovelace seems as concerned for

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her good opinion of him as he is to take action. He touches her breasts as nervously (and ineptly) as Mr B does Pamela's: "If I am a villain, madam - And then my grasping but trembling hand -1 hope I did not hurt the tenderest and loveliest of all her beauties - If I am a villain, madam -" (725). Lovelace's irresolution is marked by the contradictory modification of "hand" ("grasping but trembling"), and the action itself is made strange (and perhaps, for readers like Francis Plumer, more memorable) through two devices of foregrounding, the euphemistic reference to "the tenderest and loveliest of her beauties" and the omission of the hand's action, the word "hand" being followed by a retrospective emotion expressed in the time of writing, "I hope I did not." Eventually reduced to contemplative reassessment, Lovelace sets Clarissa once again in the angelic realm where she is proof against his attempts, then he surrenders: "I sat suspended for a moment. By my soul, thought I, thou art upon full proof an angel and no woman! ... What heart but must have been penetrated? ... I will submit to my beloved conqueress, whose power never was at so great a height with me, as now; and retire to my apartment" (725-6).31 There follows a lengthy negotiation of the terms on which they part and of how Clarissa will regard him, a debate that underlines Lovelace's weakness and gives him reason to wish he had gone farther. Once he has left Clarissa, the idea of opportunities he has missed stimulates him as much as intimate contact with her had done. In Lovelace's account of this part of the scene Richardson uses the milder options in Lovelace's descriptive language heightened only by Lovelace's indication of his emotions, as in the comment, "Oh what additional charms, as I now reflect, did her struggles give to every feature, every limb, of a person so sweetly elegant and lovely!" (726), or in the stereotyped comparisons to ivory and velvet Lovelace himself has already satirized (727). The disappointment caused by her escape makes the memory of her appearance more moving still; Lovelace says he will "advertise her in the Gazette as an eloped wife," but after describing the clothes she was wearing he admits, "The description of her person I shall take a little more pains about. My mind must be more at ease before I can undertake that!" (741). Lovelace's being aroused by the idea of Clarissa as he saw her in the fire scene is in itself a straightforward didactic presentation of a man entertaining dishonourable passions; in the larger context of that man failing to effect his purposes in the fire scene, stimulated as he was by Clarissa half-naked and terrified, yet later being able with the women's help to violate Clarissa while she is unconscious, it is part of a suggestive exploration of the psychology of violent sexuality.

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The judicious placement of euphemism, the general character of Lovelace's physical descriptions, and his cryptic report of the rape may derive from no more than Richardson's sense that a more direct and detailed account would be unacceptable even from a villain, but if this decorum (determined finally by the relation Richardson wished to maintain with his reading audience) did restrain what he could express, Richardson turns it to advantage, making some psychologically penetrating suggestions about the kind of man who can be inflamed by the memory of scenes in which he was unable to act. The obvious explanation for Lovelace's curious incapacity, which recommends Clarissa's resistance to other women, is offered in so many words elsewhere in the novel: Clarissa when conscious opposes him with such sincere resistance (in the fire scene) and convinces him of such genuine repugnance when she cannot resist (just before the rape) that she exposes Lovelace for a vicious coward, proving unexpectedly apposite a reflection Anna reports her having made and attributed to Doctor Lewin, "That vice was a coward, and would hide its head when opposed by such a virtue as had presence of mind, and a full persuasion of its own rectitude to support it" (214). Lovelace's violence is undertaken out of fear; unless she is unconscious, Clarissa will awe him into helplessness When Belford shifts from appearing mostly as reader of Lovelace's letters to take a more prominent role as writer of his own, the task of exegesis which Clarissa's resistance has forced upon Lovelace is one of his friend's primary interests also, informing both the relationship he sustains with Clarissa and his staging of himself as reforming rake in the letters he writes. Two of his many functions as reforming rake are to denounce Lovelace's practices by remorselessly demonstrating their consequences and to preach alternatives to them, tasks he performs with varying degrees of subtlety. Two descriptions of Clarissa, one made at the sheriff's officer's house and one made at Smith's, play a part in this. Like Lovelace's physical descriptions, they build a complex field of discourse, one complicated by the further activities of appealing to Lovelace's conscience and guiding the reader's response to the image of Clarissa presented. Belford combines these descriptions with a contrasting account of Mrs Sinclair's distress into a general account of women. His purpose is to make a moral point, but his language for doing it shares many assumptions with Lovelace's language of rakery. Belford's offer of his own response as interpretive guide in his account of Clarissa in the bailiff's house demonstrates a close connection between his acts of interpretation and his construction of a reforming self. Rather than infer Clarissa's state of mind from direct

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description of her person, as Lovelace has done, he first surveys her setting, paints the scene through a series of highly emotive details, then summarizes the implications of "a lady" being kept in such surroundings and brings them to bear on Lovelace in one overwrought sentence. It combines Clarissa's assessment of Lovelace and Lovelace's assessment of Clarissa: "And this, thou horrid Lovelace, was the bedchamber of the divine Clarissa!!!" (1065). His description of Clarissa picks up one detail from Lovelace's accounts and acknowledges that it does so - the motif which echoed the second passage quoted from Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia: "her charming hair, in natural ringlets, as you have heretofore described it, but a little tangled, as if not lately kembed, irregularly shading one side of the loveliest neck in the world" (1065). The qualification following emphasizes Clarissa's suffering rather than her beauty; it is as if Belford recalls Lovelace's description to underscore the contrasts in his own. As in the fire scene, Clarissa is in dishabille, but Belford's interest remains on the clothes, which here symbolize an unblemished mind rather than (also) half-revealing the body they cover: "When I surveyed the room around, and the kneeling lady, sunk with majesty too in her white, flowing robes (for she had not on a hoop), spreading the dark, though not dirty, floor, and illuminating that horrid corner; her linen beyond imagination white, considering that she had not been undressed ever since she had been here; I thought my concern would have choked me" (1065). Belford draws on lexis that can be called regal or celestial (it is used elsewhere by Lovelace) to suggest Clarissa's superlative qualities ("majesty," "illuminating," "beyond imagination"), and these items are collocated in a long dependent clause which forms the background for the activity of the following independent clause ("I thought my concern would have choked me"), an estimate not of Clarissa but of his own emotions. Grammatically, the description is subordinated to Belford's reaction to it, and this reature is important. This description is the first of several sentimental tableaux. As he takes over the narrative of Clarissa's suffering, Belford also takes over Lovelace's penchant for referring to her as an angel, but extreme as it sometimes appears the word is no mere flourish: Belford develops a new sensitivity to moral and spiritual questions, and he anchors Clarissa's radiant appearance fast to Christian doctrines of contempt for the world and resignation to the will of God. As he transforms Clarissa beautiful into Clarissa beatified, he reassesses the significance of her physical features; Lovelace's physical insult is shown to have made no permanent difference to her character and his physical descriptions are shown simply to have expressed his

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own. Belford's most extensive description occurs in his account of Colonel Morden's first sight of Clarissa: We beheld the lady in a charming attitude. Dressed, as I told you before, in her virgin white, she was sitting in her elbow-chair, Mrs Lovick close by in another chair, with her left arm round her neck, supporting it as it were; for it seems the lady had bid her do so, saying she had been a mother to her, and she would delight herself in thinking she was in her mamma's arms; for she found herself drowsy; perhaps, she said, for the last time she should ever be so. One faded cheek rested upon the good woman's bosom, the kindly warmth of which had overspread it with a faint, but charming flush; the other paler, and hollow, as if already iced over by death. Her hands, white as the lily, with her meandering veins more transparently blue than ever I had seen even hers (veins so soon, alas! to be choked up by the congealment of that purple stream, which already so languidly creeps rather than flows through them!), her hands hanging lifelessly, one before her, the other grasped by the right hand of the kind widow, whose tears bedewed the sweet face which her motherly bosom supported, though unfelt by the fair sleeper; and either insensibly to the good woman, or what she would not disturb her to wipe off, or to change her posture. Her aspect was sweetly calm and serene: and though she started now and then, yet her sleep seemed easy; her breath indeed short and quick; but tolerably free, and not like that of a dying person. In this heart-moving attitude she appeared to us when we approached her, and came to have her lovely face before us. (1351)

This portrait includes fewer lexical items for parts of the body than Lovelace's physical descriptions ("neck," "cheek," "hands," "face"), and the items Belford collocates with them are drawn principally from two lexical sets, a limited range of Lovelace's more acceptable positive epithets ("charming," "sweet," "fair") and lexis suggesting stillness, pallor, and mortality ("faded," "paler," "hollow," "iced," "death," "white," "lifelessly," "calm," "serene"). Significantly, at the end of the account Belford replaces the item "charming," one of Lovelace's favourites because as participial adjective or noun ("charming" or "charmer") it defines Clarissa's relation to him solely by his desire for her, with an epithet that Belford hopes will characterize a new relation between Clarissa and all her admirers - "heartmoving." Belford effects such redefinition more widely, acutely conscious of where the words he might use have been used before. Like Lovelace, he sees "lily" white hands, and he too notices the veins that appear

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through Clarissa's skin, but the tone is sombre rather than erotic. Possibly he feels that if he mentions this feature he should seal it within a serious implication, and so strives for poetic effect through a heavy-handed nominalization, "the congealment of that purple stream which already so languidly creeps rather than flows through them!" Although prohibited in Lovelace's early reflection on appropriate language for Clarissa, the lily has by this point been recontextualized, in effect rehabilitated, by Clarissa's choosing it for her coffin and by Lovelace himself. In his account of the scenes leading to the rape, when he thinks of her not as a beauty but as a tender innocent overwhelmed by a violent force beyond her control, Lovelace recalls that while she was begging him to pity her, "down on her bosom, like a half-broken-stalked lily, top-heavy with the overcharging dews of the morning, sunk her head with a sigh that went to my heart" (88i).32 A more extensive series of passages in the novel leads to the central image of Belford's description, Clarissa's head resting on Mrs Lovick's bosom. In an early scene, when Clarissa still hopes her mother will be able to prevail in her favour, her mother's encouraging kindness (indicating that "the bitter pill [of Solmes] wanted gilding") reduces Clarissa's appeal to a single action: "Oh my mamma! was all I could say, and I clasped my arms round her neck and my face sunk into her bosom" (88). Subsequently, Clarissa longs for the moment "when my dear mamma ... shall once more fold me to her indulgent bosom!" (695). Lovelace admits she is a "Tender blossom ... the mother's bosom only fit to receive this charming flower!" (520), and in a scene at Hampstead he describes "her charming face, as if seeking for a hiding-place (which a mother's bosom would have best supplied), sinking upon her own shoulder" (844).33 That Belford's style of physical description should share as many elements as it does with Lovelace's not only suggests that the two men sometimes coincide in their view of Clarissa, but also invites us to ask whether there is not, beyond the differences of character Richardson creates through contrasting their styles, a more fundamental similarity between their ideologies of woman. Further analysis of Belford's sleeping Clarissa supports just such a conclusion. By contrast with Lovelace's account of the fire scene, in which he explicitly forbids Belford to linger over the physical details and those details themselves emphasize Clarissa's vigorous resistance, Belford's development of this passage creates the illusion that time stands still while readers meditate the images constructed. The two female figures are immobile and there is an atmosphere of stasis, so little activity that Belford might be describing a female pieta.34 Typically, the account

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moves (as does Lovelace's in the fire scene) from physical aspects of Clarissa to interpretations of them in terms chosen to direct readers' sympathies. Sentence structure supports this purpose. The second sentence, for instance, takes Clarissa's clothes as its point of departure ("Dressed, as I told you before"), and after a grammatically central independent clause ("she was sitting in her elbow-chair") it proceeds through a series of nominal groups and dependent clauses, stating first the disposition of the figures and then the reasons why the figures appear as they do, building successively larger grammatical units, each potentially complete in itself. This sentence well exemplifies the virtues of the sentence traditionally described as "loose": it assumes readers patient to hear its explanation but does not unduly burden their patience. Unlike Lovelace's interpretations, which often attribute to Clarissa the thoughts he wishes her to have and so call attention to the assumptions he projects onto her, Belford's interpretation in this passage emphasizes Clarissa's own calm acceptance of death by reporting speech and thought reported to him by others, the implied relay of information suggesting shared responsibility for the meanings being made. In the next paragraph, Belford shifts his focus from aspects of Clarissa to the tears of the Widow Lovick, which coach readers in the sentimental response he desires. Having invited the reader's gaze and emphasized the tears to which it should lead, he now, in pointed contrast with Lovelace's demonstrably unsuccessful attempt to control the reading of his description in the fire scene, stations Colonel Morden within the scene as a model for readers' response: "The colonel sighing often, gazed upon her with his arms folded, and with the most profound and affectionate attention" (1351). At this moment of stasis, Clarissa has become, or Belford has made her, a symbol of the code of purity Belford believes she represents. Lovelace's construction of woman as erotic object and Belford's construction of woman as object of sentimental pathos contrast strongly, but both are projected onto Clarissa, and the heroic person who emerges against the grain of Lovelace's physical descriptions by resisting the desire that informs them tends not to emerge in Belford's descriptions at all. The Clarissa of this scene is not the Clarissa readers encounter in her letters and in Lovelace's accounts of her - a woman actively producing meaning, assessing, judging, assigning significance, and most of all thinking - but merely a term in discourse about Clarissa, discourse articulating a male ideology of female nature.35 Perhaps Belford's physical descriptions cannot include this Clarissa because in this phase of her life she is engaged in an interpretive activity too close to his own not to seem at times a threat to it:

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establishing the meaning of "Clarissa." Clarissa's own most significant statements about what the world means to her (and what she thinks she means to it) - the father's house letter and her coffin Belford at first finds impenetrable, obscure, or perversely female. There is even a subtle, double definition of the Smiths' house: it is a predominantly female community, the supportive context for Clarissa to construct a female-headed family as a positive alternative both to the female-headed brothel and to the Harlowes; but it is surrounded and compromised by the threat of male violence against which it is established. Mr Smith's authority is made conspicuous only when Lovelace's attempt to visit Clarissa exposes its weakness in the face of violence, and much of the writing about Clarissa in this space is done by Belford, who is granted access to Clarissa in the hope that his letters will keep Lovelace at a safe distance. By the time of Clarissa's death, Lovelace, although so largely responsible for it, has been made peripheral, reduced to reading Belford's accounts of events he cannot influence; Clarissa, able to control her life only in preparation for death, by now exemplifies all that Belford admires in women. Lovelace's distracted, helpless state will, Belford tells Mowbray, show him "the blessed effects of triumphant libertinism!" (1358). Belford shows another effect of "triumphant libertinism" in the account of his last visit to the brothel, where Mrs Sinclair faces death in a spirit that contrasts sharply with Clarissa's cheerful resignation. Belford's description of the prostitutes gathered around her exposes an appalling reality beneath the specious appearances Lovelace has used to ensnare Clarissa, while his description of "the old wretch," which includes more physical detail than any description of Clarissa and is directed unambiguously at Lovelace's (and readers') senses, takes up the language of earlier descriptions in a way that contrasts Clarissa and Mrs Sinclair while elaborating Belford's moralizing stance and the ideology of "woman" on which it rests. Mrs Sinclair's vigorous activity expresses rage and fear, while grotesque details, explicitly contrasting with aspects of Clarissa that Lovelace has read erotically, express Belford's repugnance: "heaving, puffing as if for breath, her bellowsshaped and various-coloured breasts ascending by turns to her chin and descending out of sight with the violence of her gaspings" (1388). Richardson's footnote comparing Belford's description of the prostitutes favourably with Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room" betrays an anxiety that he has overstepped the bounds of decency, a fault for which Belford's moralizing may not be a sufficient excuse. Belford's purpose in presenting this gallery of grotesques, foregrounded by

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the generalizations following his description of the anonymous prostitutes at the bedside, relates closely to his descriptions of Clarissa. He carries out the same activity of assessment and classification, notices the same correspondence between physical and mental features - "the persons of such in their retirements are as filthy as their minds" (1388) - then argues (following Lovelace) that there are extremes of good and evil of which only women are capable: "Hate them [the prostitutes] I do; and as much as I admire and next to adore a truly virtuous and elegant woman: for to me it is evident that as a neat and clean woman must be an angel of a creature, so a sluttish one is the impurest animal in nature" (i388).36 In its way, this is a less honest verdict than Lovelace might deliver. In his reflection on Sally Martin and Polly Horton making "moral reflections" on the outing to Hampstead, for instance, Lovelace at least admits that women are devils because men have made them such: "Oh Jack! what devils are women, when all tests are got over, and we have completely ruined them!" (675). Important as Richardson felt it was to deny the attractions of vice, Belford's opposition of "angel" and "impurest animal in nature" is more extreme than the opposition of "angel" and "woman" that informs Lovelace's trial of Clarissa and Belford's assessment of her. The attributes of women that have been polarized in Belford's opposition of Clarissa and the women of the brothel are projected by generalization onto all women. That Belford's language for moralizing should be so similar to Lovelace's language for narrating (attempted) seduction marks a cultural constraint on men's speaking about women: Richardson can voice an opposing attitude through Belford, but not an essentially unrelated one. Before Belford subjects readers to his description of the brothel, Clarissa's death has refuted the significance Lovelace attributed to her in his physical descriptions. The meanings Lovelace strives to impose through his readings of physical details and his erotic descriptions of her person are thought out in dichotomies: Clarissa must be proven woman or angel, she must be subjected to the order of nature so she cannot triumph as agent of reforming grace. Although these oppositions are convenient ones while he can experiment with different tactics to prove her a woman, Clarissa can, by leaving the body in death and releasing from earthly temptation the "angelic nature" to which Lovelace has amply testified, refute whatever Lovelace claims to have proven through his treatment of her. Clarissa knows that what is made of her body is important; this is one reason for the careful control she takes over herself while living at the Smiths', why she stipulates in a searching intuition that Lovelace not be allowed to see her dead. She is well aware that death will

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definitively refute Lovelace, and in a late letter to Anna she mentions the body only as an impediment: "I shall be happy. Nay, I am more so already, than of late I thought I could ever be in this life - Yet how this body clings! - How it encumbers!" (i265).37 Clarissa's final, spiritual redefinition of the body in renunciation of a man-made world suggests why it is that so many male characters write physical descriptions of her over the course of the novel: as representative (or exemplary) female body, she is the source of male anxiety, the one physical fact the novel's construction of gender must put at its centre. Lovelace's descriptions violate Clarissa's values in language which will be accused of immorality as long as there is a moral point to be made through it, but Richardson writes Lovelace's gazing on her so that Clarissa conscious and looking back as active subject can upset his plans for her and through that dislocation subvert the truths about "woman" that Lovelace presumes his trial of her will prove. The other libertines, Colonel Morden and the reforming Belford, are set gazing so that Clarissa asleep, or the idea of Clarissa after her death, can confirm the view of women Belford builds out of his experience and in opposition to Lovelace. Richardson understands this semantic rearrangement of his rakes' language as "reform," but there are good reasons for questioning what this reform entails for women, especially because for Belford (eventual editor of the book which would present her texts to the world) Clarissa becomes significant less for what she does than for what she can be made to symbolize, and because Belford's own reconstructed desire (reform is his ticket of introduction to a respectable woman) is so prominent among the values she guarantees. From the perspective offered by Laura Mulvey, whose psychoanalytic interpretation of how the spectatorial apparatus of narrative cinema structures male and female positions in relation to each other has been an important (and much debated) contribution to film theory, the various physical descriptions in Clarissa may be read in relation one to another and with respect to how they enable Lovelace and Belford to experience themselves as figures of power. By disrupting a male's planned course of action involving and subordinating her, Clarissa's resistance to Lovelace evokes male fear of loss of control, fear which Belford's physical descriptions of women work in two ways to contain. One of these strategies (undertaken in the description of Mrs Sinclair) is to investigate the source of trauma and demystify it, to gain a clear sight of the female body which will deny its power to induce anxiety; the other (undertaken in the description of Clarissa) disavows anxiety altogether by altering the threatening female into an image of purity, a figure not to be feared but adored,

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even a source of value by which the male spectator may feel himself enhanced.38 At whatever depth of individual or social psychology this pattern is interpreted, it instantiates a set of strategies for defining a male identity, a sense of what it means to be a man which is made over against all of these images of "woman," or through selective identification with one of them. It is not in the erotic but in the moral and sentimental representation of the female body that looking and writing function most clearly as instruments of control, imaginative means for men to stabilize images of themselves and interpret the images of women crucial to this stability. By formulating precisely what processes of self-definition voyeurism might work to consolidate for male characters and for readers, Mulvey's theory of visual pleasure enables a move beyond the bald statement that the text positions all readers as voyeurs: Richardson subjects the apparatus of the gaze to "fracturing and complexity,"39 so that it does not work as Lovelace intends. As Belford reassembles this apparatus in his moralizing project, the meanings he articulates through it are most importantly resisted by Clarissa's very different representation of herself through an alternative mode of visual valuation. The novel's attempt to evoke and reform a pattern of male desire perpetuated through representation of women is thus not completed by a critique of the gaze; it depends also on the alternative Clarissa offers, and it succeeds to the extent that Clarissa's selfrepresentation influences events and persuades readers to qualify their assent to Belford's assertions about women. Through the intense (and for her increasingly joyous) physical activity of her last weeks, Clarissa fully exhausts herself, emptying her physical body in fulfilling a divine purpose. Death so achieved transforms the meaning of the body, and by carefully assembling visual and verbal texts on the coffin that will contain her physical remains, Clarissa deliberately structures readers' sense that they "see" what she means. At the centre of the meaning they will construe, Clarissa places herself as active shaper of meaning, selector of the signs that will represent her. (As we have seen in the previous chapter, Lovelace's invitation to her to share this role when he approached her as reforming rake was an important part of his appeal to her.) This activity challenges Belford to reform his understanding of women, which he does not manage wholly to do, and it suggests why in Sir Charles Grandison women are the dominant writers, why the focus of their interpretive activity is both Harriet Byron in her relation to men and Sir Charles Grandison in his relations with women. There is another dimension to male gazing on women which Clarissa finally can do nothing to influence. Although it is not primarily sexual,

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it also realizes an ideology of gender. I have suggested in passing that Lovelace and Belford work to adjust their relation to each other through their descriptions of Clarissa (as well as through many other activities), and I have noted that although Clarissa can keep male violence at bay while she is in the Smiths' house she cannot escape it. There is an important sense in which Belford's representation of Colonel Morden as a model for the reverent attention readers should pay the sleeping Clarissa ignores a connection Morden himself makes in this scene. At this, his first sight of Clarissa in the novel, Colonel Morden looks on her, but also beyond her to the man he holds responsible for all she has suffered. Exceeding the sentimental pathos Belford construes from it, the colonel's gaze connects this scene to the events which frame the action of the whole narrative, violent clashes between men conducted as part of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has made familiar to us as a homosocial economy in which men use women to adjust their relations to other men.40 Belford's serene and reassuring portrait of Clarissa is framed in murderous feeling, as (to adapt words written by Edmund White in another context) there runs around it a current of "unfinished emotional business [between] men - scary, promising, troubling, absorbing business" to which women are incidental.41 From this point of reconnection, Morden threatens and finally stalks Lovelace to the outskirts of Vienna, a distant point on the Grand Tour which was the subject of Clarissa's first correspondence with her persecutor. Richardson ends the novel there, in a stranger's report of Morden's completion of a process begun with the first event Clarissa narrates in the novel, a duel Lovelace had - for her sake - refused to fight with James Harlowe and which Morden resumes for the same reason. Colonel Morden finally ends "an antipathy early begun, and so deeply-rooted" (49) between Lovelace and James, the passionate contention so unfortunately sexualized when a misunderstanding between old men (the uncles Lord M. and John Harlowe) entangled Arabella and Clarissa in it. Belford's deep feeling for Lovelace has as little influence on Colonel Morden as his deep respect for Clarissa had on Lovelace, and the speaker of definitive truths about women at last falls silent in this contest between men. Nor can Clarissa influence her cousin, as, finally, narratively symmetrical acts of male violence accomplished in a duel between libertines exceed and so mark another limit to Richardson's revision of libertine style. We can estimate what effect Richardson hoped his reform of rakes' language might have by tracing the element of physical description of a woman through to the early pages of Sir Charles Grandison, where the first letter (from Lucy Selby) introduces Mr Greville's

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account of Harriet Byron's person in the second. Greville is very much a literary rake, a character formulated from aspects of Lovelace made safe for circulation by their treatment in Clarissa and acting always in (flawed) memorial reconstruction of his model. Two pieces of his letter indicate striking similarity, his claim that while gazing on Miss Byron in church he has imagined the devil triumphing could he "raise up a man that could lower this Angel into Woman," which combines Lovelace's project with Clarissa's attribution of its origin, and his admission to having doubted women had souls because of the "temporary purposes" for which they are "given us."42 Greville is not writing as one rake to another, however, and the shift in tenor of discourse, the complex mediation of his description through intended female readers which has delivered it to the woman described, suggests that the libertine elements of his language have been absorbed into a wider register no longer gender-specific. Despite its egregious breaches in decorum, this is a letter which women may read, and women are intended to pay close attention. Not surprisingly, the range of parts of the body referred to in concrete lexis is more restricted than in Lovelace's account of the fire scene (face, forehead, neck, shoulders, cheek, mouth, nose, chin, eyes, hair, arm, hands, and fingers), and they are associated with other lexis which orients the passage to female character and conduct rather than appearance.43 Greville's mention of seeing blood beneath skin strikes a mean between the extremes of Lovelace's salacious and Belford's sentimental readings, and he declares that all the external beauties together count for less than Harriet's internal qualities: Her Complexion is admirably fair and clear. I have sat admiring her complexion, till I have imagined I have seen the life-blood flowing with equal course through her translucent veins. Her forehead, so nobly free and open, shews dignity and modesty, and strikes into one a kind of awe, singly contemplated, that (from the delight which accompanies the awe) I know not how to describe. Every single feature, in short, will bear the nicest examination; and her whole Face, and her Neck, so admirably set on her finely-proportioned Shoulders - let me perish, if, taking her all together, I do not hold her to be the most unexceptionable Beauty I ever beheld. But what still is her particular excellence ... is, the grace ... we may call Expression: Had not her features and her complexion been so fine as they are, that grace alone, that Soul shining out in her lovely aspect, joined with the ease and gracefulness of her Motion, would have made her as many admirers as beholders.44

Men's language has been adjusted so that women's physicality is handled in an almost clinical way, and the moral lexis associated

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with physical description is said to indicate the most important aspects of the description. But the moral values Greville draws upon are nonetheless inequitably distributed between male and female and realize distinctly (if subtly) gendered sets of possibilities. The grammatical relations into which the word "forehead" enters illustrate this succinctly, setting out a paradigm of female excellence and influence. The word is given two epithets ("free" and "open"), it manifests two abstract qualities ("dignity" and "modesty"), and as agent assigning attributes to others it can effect a certain change in its surroundings ("strik[ing] into [generic male] one a kind of awe" attended by "delight"). The way that charms of mind displace those of person in Greville's description of Harriet Byron exemplifies clearly a process which Nancy Armstrong has traced from Pamela - novels encouraging men to value women for internal qualities that conduct books have encouraged women to develop.45 The system of evaluation which men are being taught may decorously restrict the range of meanings to be made through their looking at women and so strive to reformulate male desire, but it functions also as a mode of discipline for women, maintaining the male as a point of reference and teaching the qualities by which his admiration is to be won. The full significance of the change Richardson hopes to effect becomes fully apparent only in the work of others. Katherine Sobba Green has argued persuasively that in changing the rake's register as he does in this description and elsewhere in Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson makes room for another style of commodification, "the blazon - the taxonomy of beauty, fortune, family, education and character," one whose later revision, undertaken largely by women novelists, makes possible "a representation of woman as a subject, whose prerogative it [is], within the new nuptialization ethic, to choose her own marriage partner."46 Green cites Harriet Byron's rejection of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen because he does not "hit [her] fancy"47 as a model for the heroines of later courtship novels. This power to act is slight, but it is significant, and by comparison with Clarissa's not being allowed to reject Solmes on the much more serious grounds of insuperable aversion, it marks a decided shift in the possibilities open to a marriageable woman. The differences in Clarissa Harlowe's and Harriet Byron's respective power to act correspond to the changes in how men are allowed to look at them. The next chapter will argue that they relate also to Richardson's reformulation of what men should desire in women.

6 Sentimental Libertinism: Richardson's Reform of Libertine Desire

In giving Harriet Byron's "fancy" a decisive role in her rejection of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, Richardson participates in a widespread pattern which has been studied from various perspectives. For many years, concepts of "sentimentalism" and "sensibility" have organized this discussion; as scholars have focused more pointedly on gender issues, they have added the concept of "feminization." By contrast with sentimentalism and sensibility (which are considered to have arisen from developments underway from the late seventeenth century but to be most significant from the mid-eighteenth century), feminization is evident earlier, by the first decade of the eighteenth century. It has also been discerned in a wider range of cultural practices, by students of intellectual and political history, as well as by students of literature and the arts. As I am invoking it here, the feminization of eighteenth-century English culture spreads outward from the use of images of women to explain the workings of credit, and in the continuing debate over the presumed social and political consequences, good or bad, of dealings in credit, trade and land being dominated (so contemporaries thought) by "fantasy, opinion, and passion."1 Broad social analyses have located feminization in numerous developments: in the emphasis on virtue, in the social processes by which manners were produced through a softening of passion, in the production (through commerce) of new modes of social relation, and in an increasingly self-confident middle class's use of manners as a code in which to challenge the refinement of the aristocracy.2 All such studies agree with studies of sentimentalism that where it is considered positively, feminization involves a higher

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valuation of features conventionally associated with women. Where this feminization of culture is related specifically to gender issues, especially by feminist scholars, there is critical reflection on whether these developments were beneficial to women, and whether the oppressive practices which may have been challenged and changed were not reconstituted through other means.3 This chapter will analyse the feminization of one aspect of discourse in Clarissa. It will argue that through Lovelace's analysis of seduction, especially of the pleasures he anticipates taking with Clarissa, Richardson reformulates libertine desire, shifting its orientation from physical acts to mental and emotional ones. This shift enables women to resist men (as Clarissa does Lovelace) on more equal terms, even to avoid the domination regularly enforced through physical conquest. Richardson's "feminization" of libertine style, effected when elements from the register of moral decorum infiltrate and rearrange the values of Lovelace's libertine register, will be contextualized with reference to recent studies of eighteenth-century English sexuality, and I will suggest, as I have done in the discussion of Richardson's reform of physical description in the previous chapter, that the novel manifests not simply a desire for changes beneficial to women but also an anxiety about changes underway which seemed to threaten what were for Richardson fundamental principles of social order. Lovelace's trial of Clarissa is deeply contradictory. He is at once serenely confident that their story will demonstrate his knowledge of the world, especially of women, and deeply haunted by a fear that everything he knows can be proven false by this singular woman. His satiric commentary on human nature populates the world with rakes - even women are rakes in their hearts - yet he declares repeatedly that he will establish definitive preeminence in "rakish annals" through a glorious mastery of Clarissa. As he frames it, everything his society can mean by "woman" rides on this trial, yet so do his own prospects for happiness should he accept "the hymeneal shackles" (412-13), and these two burdens are incompatible, as incompatible as his idea of all-surpassing originality is with his obsessive citation of mythology, of earlier literature, and of figures in history to elaborate this originality to himself and his libertine companions.4 Rather than keeping him at a safe distance from them, Lovelace's penchant for generalization involves him deeper in these contradictions, for should he achieve what his own reflections on women predict, the achievement will be commonplace, merely one insignificant instance of what happens everywhere and always.5 In every sense of the word "sentimental" that has been relevant to this study, what Lovelace theorizes and seeks to practise can be called "sentimental libertinism." He laces his narrative with moral

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sentiments, he prefers the pleasures of reflection to those of sensation, and (most important) he desires a mental and emotional rather than a physical conquest of Clarissa. Richardson fashions these desires from a cluster of current stereotypes, so they are hardly unprecedented in English libertinism,6 but along with the changes discussed in previous chapters (a shift from positional to personal orientation as a mode of interpersonal control in social groups and a shift from physical features to moral and spiritual qualities in the definition of women's sexuality), Lovelace's sentimental libertinism models, recommends, and explores modes of inwardness that would become widely significant. Richardson carries the torch to the depths of the cavern on behalf not just of an English but of a European culture increasingly interested in knowing what is hidden, forbidden, or repressed, increasingly skilled at deploying that knowledge in structures of social control and political oppression. Most significantly for a theme touched on several times in this study, Lovelace's rewriting of sexual pleasure eroticizes acts of speech and the state of silence, makes them modes of sexual practice significant across the whole of an individual's experience. Richardson nowhere more trenchantly analyses the struggle to dominate than when he enacts it in uses of language. The testing and disproof of the propositions central to Lovelace's libertinism explode the rake's creed around which he has consolidated his "confraternity" (416) of fellow rakes. While Lovelace writes fully within the libertine register, however, his language exhibits features which can be interpreted with reference to Halliday's concept of "antilanguage." An antilanguage is a distinct coding orientation within a register of the standard language. Arguably an extreme form of a restricted code, it is a "meaning style" which projects an alternative society in conscious opposition (or resistance) to the norms of the dominant social structure. What is most significant in the relation between the dominant norms and those asserted in opposition to them is "not the distance between the two realities but the tension between them." (Lovelace's schemes for gendered churches and annual marriages, which sketch two institutions for such an alternative society, well illustrate this principle.) The most typical feature of antilanguages is over-lexicalization, a proliferating verbal display undertaken for its own sake and for establishing dominance within the antisociety the antilanguage serves to symbolize and to develop. As Halliday puts it, "The simplest form taken by an antilanguage is that of new words for old; it is a language relexicalized. ... The principle is that of same grammar, different vocabulary; but different vocabulary only in certain areas, typically those that are

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central to the activities of the subculture and that set it off most sharply from the established society."7 The aim is to relexicalize areas of experience central to the antisociety's value structure, and for Lovelace, who both exhibits his artistry and masters his companions through antilanguage, these areas are women and sexuality. Euphemisms for sexual intercourse abound - "fruition" (163), "the last favour," "the ultimatum" (413), "the act of yielding" (465), "the crowning act" (616), "the blessing" (435, 920) - and the range of alternatives for addressing and for referring to Clarissa goes far enough beyond the amount of variation necessary for enacting customary social rituals that it also serves the purposes of antilanguage. Terms of address to Clarissa include "my fair one," "my best love," "my dearest life," "my dearest soul," "my angel"; terms of reference to Clarissa include "this dear/sweet/charming/excellent/admirable/ divine creature," "my charmer," "my beloved," "my empress," "my goddess."8 Lovelace's penchant for adjectival modification is one of the distinctive features of his personal style, expressing a manic temperament and a passion for excess. But the pattern is also important for its interpersonal significance, and his use of a wider range of terms of reference to Clarissa (with more extreme options) in letters to Belford than in interaction with her claims preeminence in a homosocial contest with other men. This flamboyance asserts that sense (or illusion) of dominance over other men which is crucial to Lovelace's constitution of himself as a libertine and which his interests in Clarissa and in sexual conquest equally serve. Antilanguages may also make extensive use of metaphor, and some of Lovelace's recurrent metaphors draw upon the lexis of blood sports. Two striking examples state a value derived from the libertine tradition which is central to Richardson's sentimental reorientation of libertinism, a preference for the chase rather than the consumption of the prey: "Does not the keen foxhunter endanger his neck and his bones in pursuit of a vermin which, when killed, is neither fit food for men nor dogs? Do not the hunters of the nobler game value the venison less than the sport?" (557-8); "Thou knowest that I always illustrated my eagleship by aiming at the noblest quarries; and by disdaining to make a stoop at wrens, phil-tits, and wagtails" (559); "And what a vulture of a man must he be who souses upon his prey, and in the same moment trusses and devours?" (574). Lovelace's own preference for "the nobler game," women of family, especially ladies who are (to quote Clarissa, describing the ladies of Lovelace's family in another register) "as eminent for their virtue as for their descent" (984), expresses another important aspect of his libertinism, its social and moral exclusiveness. Lovelace's periphrasis "nobler game" allows

144 Meanings of Style explicit reference to the social group (aristocracy) allowed to hunt deer, and it implies hunter and hunted mutually defining one another's social significance - women, like animals, being valued according to which men pursue them. Lovelace's libertine antisociety is small and its ranks are depleted over the course of the novel, but one of his most insidious ploys is to associate as many others with his activities as he can, to claim that the values which inform his trial of Clarissa are widely shared. His preference for eminent quarry and his delight in a difficult chase, for instance, associate him with figures in the world of literature. He has been "always of Montaigne's taste, thou knowest - thought it a glory to subdue a girl of family" (6i6);9 he challenges Belford to tell him "what is there ... in all [women] can do for us" but "what the learned bishop [Gilbert Burnet], in his letter from Italy, calls the delicacy of intrigue" (534);10 and by his "worthy friend Mandeville's rule, That private vices are public benefits," he demands whether, "the more eminent the lady, in the graces of person, mind, and fortune, is not the example likely to be the more efficacious?" (847)." These are not precisely instances of antilanguage, although subtle use of interpersonal features in the presentation of these three figures to Belford the intimacy tag "thou knowest," the introduction of "learned bishop" with a definite article implying shared knowledge such that which learned bishop need not be stated, and representation of Mandeville as a "worthy friend" - all hint that beyond Lovelace's fictional confraternity hovers a cloud of learned witness able to defend its practices with rational argument. When Lovelace engages in argumentation, a grammatical feature present in all registers, adversative conjunctions, foregrounds the contradictions of his libertinism, the incompatible alternatives he holds in unstable tension. If Lovelace has a strategy to deal with these paradoxes, it is to contain them, even when doing so strains him to the limit, as in the following passage. When he explains why he is no longer as innocent as the young couple at the alehouse, a "but," "yet," or "nevertheless" appears in every sentence: But the devil's in this sex! Eternal misguiders! Who that has once trespassed ever recovered his integrity? And yet where there is not virtue, which nevertheless we free-livers are continually plotting to destroy, what is there even in the ultimate of our wishes with them? - Preparation and expectation are, in a manner, everything: reflection, indeed, may be something, if the mind be hardened above feeling the guilt of a past trespass: but the fruition, what is there in that? And yet, that being the end, nature will not be satisfied without it. (163)

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There are several kinds of contradiction here. This is an early indication that the category "women" is a malleable one with Lovelace, open to whatever interpretation the exigencies of his thinking at the moment require: women must be "devilish" if he is to blame them for the loss of his "integrity," virtuous if he is to find them worth seducing. The task Lovelace proposes is emotionally demanding "reflection" can be pleasurable only under carefully controlled conditions - and it is not clear whether the satisfaction of "nature" is simply irrelevant or whether it might threaten those conditions. Significantly, in the final stage of this argument, "satisfied" (a mental process) has as Processor (the entity satisfied) not "we free-livers" but "nature," an abstract force acting through libertines and usurping their enjoyment. In such passages, Lovelace's writing suggests a mind in process, thought turning back upon itself and winding itself into a knot of contradictions. (Clarissa's writing also does this when she is exploring the intricacies of a situation or an ethical position.) Lovelace projects a manic energy in part through the rhetorical acrobatics he must perform to keep contrary inclinations and lines of thought going simultaneously, a result of his rapid switching between alternatives and his surprising openness to undesirable ones. Lovelace's use of the libertine register amounts to antilanguage only sporadically because Richardson intends that use to evoke an older style being displaced by a new, more fashionably polite discourse conducted in the register of moral decorum in which alone Clarissa can be approached successfully. But the less restricted aspects of Lovelace's libertine style still exert considerable influence. I have discussed in an earlier chapter Belford's initial willingness to argue with Lovelace on shared libertine principles, and when he is not using his version of antilanguage Lovelace uses other subfields of libertine discourse to subvert Belford's attempts to turn libertine assumptions to Clarissa's benefit. At one point Belford picks up on Lovelace's declaration, "More truly delightful to me the seduction progress than the crowning act - for that's a vapour, a bubble!" (616), and attempts to graft the concept of "soul" onto it: "With regard to the passion itself, the less of soul in either man or woman, the more sensual are they. Thou, Lovelace, hast a soul, though a corrupted one; and art more intent (as thou even gloriest) upon the preparative stratagem, than upon the end of conquering" (713). Belford selects "gloriest" and "conquering" to appeal to Lovelace's erotic heroism, but otherwise he misses the point. He knows that it is no use appealing to "gratitude" and "honour" on behalf of a woman, because, as he has already emphasized (for Richardson), "our honour, and honour in the general acceptation of the word, are two things" (500); but he

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forgets that with Lovelace the word "soul" is no less relative to the person who uses it. Lovelace acts out his own sense of the word, which is not a simple inversion of the customary religious one, but shares some of the word's usual ranges of meaning in an instance of the semantic overlap that makes him so well able to work through the customary practices of his society. Lexically, this shows up as alteration in usual patterns of collocation: Lovelace's "soul" may be "corrupted" and concern for it still motivate him, because he can say with Othello, "Perdition catch my soul, but I do love her" (146). An appeal to his soul will not dissuade Lovelace from seduction, because it is through seduction that he strives to establish his soul's greatness. The opposition of body and soul (by which Clarissa is able, through death, to escape from and triumphantly refute Lovelace's libertine construction of her) cannot when offered to Lovelace preclude the desire to seduce. Belford words his statement to appeal to Lovelace's ruling passion, but he cannot persuade Lovelace out of his purposes because he has no words Lovelace cannot adapt to express or to justify those purposes. Belford is doubly compromised until he becomes Clarissa's open ally and friend. Not only does he know Lovelace's intentions from letters and yet do no more than plead in letters of his own; more important, he has no language to oppose to Lovelace's construction of the situation, and by continuing to correspond he tacitly accepts the rhetorical use Lovelace makes of him. To sustain a relation to Lovelace is to submit to his revoicing of words and thus to be made complicit with him. Literary allusion and quotation are another aspect of his culture which Lovelace enlists in his service, drawing upon attitudes from such sources as Dryden's heroic plays to strike his own postures and through this posturing invite readers to understand his sources differently. Quotation is a favourite libertine mode, virtually another instance of restricted code within the libertine register, so Belford hopes lines from Aureng-Zebe ("sweet are the joys that come with willingness" [556]) will persuade Lovelace, but Lovelace can later return the Emperor's response to this (Indamora's) line to explain another of the delicacies that make intrigue delightful: It is resistance that inflames desire Sharpens the darts of love, and blows its fire. Love is disarm'd that meets with too much ease; He languishes, and does not care to please. The women know this as well as the men. They love to be addressed with spirit:

147 Sentimental Libertinism And therefore 'tis their golden fruit they guard With so much care, to make possession hard. (609)

The words "golden fruit" raise an interesting question about Richardson's use of quotations. As we have seen, Lovelace refers to sexual intercourse as "fruition" as early as his second letter (163), and in a revision added to the third edition he mentions in passing that the women of the brothel "used always to oblige me with the flower and first fruits of their garden!" (3: 285), but two other uses of "fruit" occur close enough to this quotation (in the reference to Montaigne [616], and in a suggestion that he might have to "[tear] up the tree by the roots to come at the fruit" [601]) that it is reasonable to wonder whether the metaphor occurred to Richardson and brought the quotation to mind, or whether the quotation, chosen to express Lovelace's meaning, was tied into the text by additional uses of the metaphor. Despite Belford's earlier reference to Aureng-Zebe, neither of these possibilities need involve Dryden's play directly; Belford's and Lovelace's quotations from it both appear in Bysshe's Art of English Poetry under the subject heading "Rape." This does not mean that quotation in Clarissa is insignificant, just that Richardson's intertextuality works in two directions: he draws on the resonances of a literary (here a libertine literary) tradition not only to make connections within Clarissa and between Clarissa and other texts, but also to expose how "literature" functions as a social institution, as words which can be deployed in action. Quotation and allusion in Clarissa are a strategy of fragments, the citation of works of literature as memorable instances of language that Richardson wishes to call to attention, for introducing or supporting styles he wishes to assess, answer, or reaccent. It is a means to anatomize certain meanings of style and sensitize readers to them. Richardson's appropriation and revision of texts takes up a possibility realized more or less in all allusion, which is a rereading of the source, often a challenge to the meanings typically construed from it. Readers are henceforth to remember Clarissa when they read the text or encounter the style quoted, and they are to judge that text or style according to the moral orientation Richardson has given it.12 Although it is part of his libertine mode, Lovelace claims through his quotation from Aureng-Zebe that women understand and approve the libertine mentality, that their resistance is deliberate participation in the sexual game. His insinuation of libertine assumptions into the register of moral decorum - and the threat to which this translation exposes them - can be appreciated through the way he models this

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participation in the lexis of polite exchange. When "resistance" takes the form of delicate (but not prudish) observance of social decorum, physical contact is given profound sentimental resonance; the erotic is suffused with an awareness of the delicacy of the occasion and so pleases equally the mind and the senses. Lovelace puts the point nicely when he defines "modesty" (giving his preferred sense of the word) while defending "the sex I so dearly love" (717) against the indelicacy of other libertines: "She must be an abandoned woman, who will not shrink as a snail into its shell, at a gross and sudden attempt. A modest woman must be naturally cold, reserved, and shy. She cannot be so much and so soon affected as libertines are apt to imagine; and must, at least, have some confidence in the honour and silence of a man, before desire can put forth in her, to encourage and meet his flame. For my own part, I have always been decent in the company of women, till I was sure of them" (717).13 The process Lovelace describes here (what he strives to reinterpret "modesty" as meaning) could be called "negotiation," were it not for the extremely restricted limits within which the "modest" woman may act. It seems from Lovelace's grammar that the modest woman takes few actions - she simply "is" (grammatically "a modest woman" is Carrier of the Attributes "cold," "reserved," and "shy"), and the actions she takes are to "shrink" and to credit ("have confidence"). Otherwise, she is Goal in a process ("affected") with a man as implied Actor, and rather than being encoded as Senser in the mental process "desire," she is represented as peripheral, a mere circumstance of place ("in her") associated with the abstraction "desire" acting on its own as Subject of an intransitive process. Lovelace claims to have achieved the delicate delight he seeks and at the same time to have encouraged desire to "put forth" in Clarissa when he first kisses her, sealing a promise he has made to show that he is not an "encroacher." Calling the kiss a "favour" but pointing out that he has taken rather than been given it, he describes the sensation: She gave me her word: but I besought her excuse for sealing it: and in the same moment (since to have waited for consent would have been asking for a denial) saluted her. And, believe me or not, but, as I hope to live, it was the first time I had the courage to touch her charming lips with mine. And this I tell thee, Belford, that that single pressure (as modestly put too, as if I were as much a virgin as herself, that she might not be afraid of me another time) delighted me more than ever I was delighted by the ultimatum with any other woman - so precious does awe, reverence, and apprehended prohibition make a favour! (413)

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Few of his physical contacts with Clarissa are as rewarding as this kiss, because Richardson uses their physical contact to sound various warnings rather than to suggest what might be possible should they let down their defences against each other and act on what they feel. In order to achieve this kiss, Lovelace has had to imitate Clarissa, and in doing so he has experienced in himself (as he does on other occasions) something of the passivity of the "modest woman": his action is the immediate cause of his being "delighted," but this "favour" has been assigned the value it bears by abstract qualities of "awe," "reverence," and "apprehended prohibition," mental inhibitions on his own scope of action. Because his physical advances, on the rare occasions when he is able to make them, are calculated (and often reflected upon) as part of a strategy of encroachment, and because Clarissa does not feel, or keeps well controlled, the "sensibility" necessary for encroachment to work, Lovelace only rarely touches Clarissa intimately, and when he does the result is, predictably, that he alienates her from him. (Her allowing him to kiss her hand as often as he likes while he lies ill in bed [678] is foregrounded against this pattern and is thus highly significant.) At the early stage at which this kiss occurs, Lovelace feels more than "awe," "reverence," and "apprehension": he feels vulnerable to Clarissa in a way that threatens his scheme to seduce her. In his confession to Belford that "my success, and the joy I have because of the jewel I am half in possession of has not only unlocked my bosom, but left the door quite open" (414), the reductively physical lexis suggests that he is struggling to control himself by ridiculing his emotions and so establishing distance from them. The factors that sweeten the joy of this kiss, "awe," "reverence," and "apprehended prohibition," although all emotions in Lovelace, depend as much on Clarissa's having established her character for virtue as they do on him. This local allegory, created through abstract lexis of decorum occurring in the grammatical role of Agent, translates Dryden's more concrete but more obviously metaphoric "therefore 'tis their golden fruit they guard" into one of the important registers of the novel. By this tactic, meanings made in exalted styles appropriate to heroic drama may be accommodated to the requirements of novelistic prose, to which the heroic is available only for brief stretches (often only through quotation and allusion) and in which the heroic appears always as a highly marked style. The same insinuation that women participate in seduction covertly through their resistance informs the redefinition of terms by which Lovelace explains his motivation: "Difficulty is a stimulus with such a spirit as mine" (866), and "Her virtue, her resistance, which are her merits,

150 Meanings of Style are my stimulatives" (716). Given this persistent realignment of moral categories through Lovelace's insertion of elements of the libertine register into the register of moral decorum, Belford is right to doubt his early belief that "the unequalled perfections and fine qualities of this lady would always be her protection and security" (500). Lovelace's strange valuation of "resistance" makes such assertions as "how must all this distance stimulate" (619) tantamount to claims that Clarissa (directly or indirectly) provokes his attempts on her, tainting other reflections intended as advice on how women may protect themselves - for example, "full dress creates dignity, augments consciousness, and compels distance" (619) - and making Clarissa responsible for what happens to her. Whatever the state of her will, once she is in his power, Clarissa's very innocence becomes a liability.14 Lovelace pretends to be as inexperienced as she is when he first kisses her, claiming that he does this so as not to frighten her. But the idea of virtue is so powerfully attractive to him - he is as fascinated by the idea of Hickman's virginity (802) as Colley Gibber would be by Sir Charles Grandison's - that it is plausible to read into this account a desire to imitate Clarissa's innocence and so recreate the situation in which he was jilted, hoping this time for a happier conclusion. This chapter's textual analysis is concerned primarily with how the register of libertinism is infiltrated by meanings central to the register of moral decorum through Lovelace's account of what gives him pleasure in seduction, but, as suggested, Richardson's mixing of these registers also involves infiltration in the other direction. As we have seen in a previous chapter, Anna Howe's thinking about love parallels Lovelace's thinking about seduction, and as she formulates her own theory of sexuality in a satiric account of Hickman's courtship, it becomes clear that more than just male libertinism depends on the stimulus of opposition. One of the aspects of Anna's character constructed to dramatize assumptions which would have made women other than Clarissa easy conquests for Lovelace is her wish for more difficulty in her relationship with Hickman. As Lovelace discovers from one of her letters, she approves of "ardours" (636) because "love delights in taming the lion-hearted" (209). When she characterizes the kind of lover she would prefer, she uses lexis of heroism also associated with Lovelace's libertinism to explain that women want lovers who are heroes to others but humble to them, because "A woman has some glory in subduing a heart no man living can appall" (209). Lovelace agrees it is "a glory to subdue." In a later letter in which she responds to the hypothetical question of whether she would treat Lovelace as she has treated Hickman,

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Anna suggests that women's participation in the mutual "passion" she desires depends, like Lovelace's passion for women, on the stimulus of difficulty: I have concluded that politeness, even to excess, is necessary on the men's part, to bring us to listen to their first address, in order to induce us to bow our necks to a yoke so unequal. But upon my conscience, I very much doubt whether a little intermingled insolence is not requisite from them, to keep up that interest, when once it has got footing. Men must not let us see that we can make fools of them. And I think that smooth love, that is to say, a passion without rubs; in other words, a passion without passion, is like a sleepy stream that is hardly seen to give motion to a straw. So that, sometimes to make us fear, and even, for a short space, to hate the wretch, is productive of the contrary extreme. (466) There are several connections between this reflection and opinions or feelings expressed by Lovelace. Anna affirms her statement with a milder expletive ("upon my conscience") than Lovelace's customary "by my soul," but Clarissa never uses even this strong an expression. Like Lovelace, Anna speaks as if counselling men, assessing the obligations on a man who would be successful with women, although she leaves the source of these obligations implicit ("politeness ... is necessary," "Men must not ... ") or expresses it indirectly ("I very much doubt whether ... insolence ... is not requisite") when the required action is one a conventionally modest woman might be thought not to understand. The assumptions expressed by choices in ergativity are similar also. As the assessments of obligation imply, men are the causes of processes, often acting on women and determining women's actions. Here those actions are realized in mental processes and behaviour: "to bring us to listen," "to induce us to bow our necks," "to make us fear, and even ... to hate." In Anna's opinion, as in Lovelace's, neither inactivity ("a sleepy stream") nor women's assertions of easy superiority (proving "that we can make fools of them") will bring on "love." Lovelace agrees that women are best dealt with by a judicious alternation between extremes of politeness and insult - "the amorous see-saw" (424) and "the lover's warfare" (922), as he calls it. In the letter preceding Anna's just quoted, he has declared that this treatment will soon soften Clarissa: "I have just carried wn-politeness far enough to make her afraid of me; and to show her that I am no whiner. Every instance of politeness, now, will give me double credit with her!" (465). His resentment at how often Clarissa makes him appear foolish, especially before other women, fuels his desire for revenge.

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That Clarissa does not fall victim to these tactics is in part due to her reluctance to express outright hatred, as opposed to detestation. (Detestation, contempt based on judgment, begins in an exercise of reason and leads to distant behaviour; hatred, also an act of rejection, begins in passion but proceeds to active engagement, and so a woman is less able to keep control of it.) Lovelace feels confident that he can manipulate hatred to his advantage - for the reasons Anna indicates - so Clarissa's reluctance is an important aspect of the control of passion Richardson is recommending to women.15 It is no accident that in this letter Lovelace has also boasted that Anna is, like the Harlowes, "a puppet danced upon my wires" (464), for in the juxtaposition of the two letters Richardson fully exploits the dramatic possiblities offered by epistolary form, putting the reader in a role cherished by Anna herself, that of the bystander who sees more of a game than those who play (407). Richardson's use of Anna is complicated: she realizes that Lovelace's behaviour to Clarissa meets precisely her own desire for a stimulating lover, and by exposing her similarity to Lovelace she is able to warn Clarissa to be on her guard against such manipulation, in this instance acting less as a puppet than Lovelace supposes. But at the same time, because her knowledge is limited to what she has read in Clarissa's letters, Anna does not see as clearly as she might how often her witty analysis of courtship endorses Lovelace's behaviour, and only gradually does she change her tune. Ironically, Lovelace himself teaches her to distinguish sincerity in a lover: when she considers Clarissa's account of "his teasing ways" (Anna's description of his attempts to enjoy the helplessness and confusion his deliberate irresolution causes Clarissa), she decides that "wretches of his cast, between you and me, my dear, have not, I fancy, the ardours that honest men have" (603). Lovelace is upset by this statement (638) but he does not suspect why he has inspired it. To keep her notion of "ardours," Anna needs to retrieve the notion of "honest men" to contrast with "wretches": Lovelace has unwittingly forced her to distinguish within a category in which she formerly lumped all men, thus preparing the way for Hickman, who shows significant "honest ardour" when he defends Anna in his interview with Lovelace.16 This association of Anna and Lovelace suggests that Richardson wished to foreground similarities between some women and some libertines, to explore the extent to which the registers of libertinism and moral decorum might overlap in sentimental libertines and libertine sentimentalists.17 In not proposing a simple displacement of libertinism by moral decorum, Clarissa participates in a literary historical context in which one register was emerging, one receding,

153 Sentimental Libertinism and the two merging in sometimes strange ways. Two of the key components in sentimental rakery, the problem of novelty and the superiority of reflection to sensation, can be contextualized in literary tradition in both registers so as to demonstrate how permeable were the boundaries between them. One of the specious arguments Lovelace uses to convince himself that he must try Clarissa's virtue for the sake of his own peace of mind should he at last marry is that he must have nothing to regret "when novelty has lost its charms, and she is mind and person all my own" (426).18 When he insists on "novelty" in his love, when he claims that "variety has irresistible charms" (897), Lovelace repeats a commonplace from earlier fiction, one of the fixed principles motivating men in Eliza Haywood's novels. In Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, the Duchess upbraids Windusius: "Is it, - ay, too sure 'tis that, - like all your Sex you are fond of Variety! - Novelty is the only Charm to please you!"19 A similar reflection in The Rash Resolve attributes to variety a host of psychological pleasures which parallel what Lovelace claims are the delights of the chase: O the Enchantments of Novelty, the Delights there are in having something to subdue - the pleasing Fears - the sweet Hopes, the tender Anxieties - the thousand nameless, soft Perplexities which fill the roving Soul of Man when in pursuit of a new Conquest; but after Possession are no more remembred Then cold Civility succeeds tumultuous Transport - When present, forc'd Compliments supply the place of Ardor; when absent, curs'd Indiffrence that of impatient Longings - and dull insipid Gratitude is all the yielding Fair can hope for, even from the best of Men.20

The predilection for adjectival modification and some of the adjectives ("pleasing," "sweet," "curs'd") also appear in Lovelace's libertine register, as does the implied valuation of women: the object of male desire is never a woman in herself, but a woman in relation to other women as part of a pattern of male experience. Although it is collocated with "charm" in both Haywood and Richardson, and with "enchantment" in Haywood, "novelty" is a property of men's thinking, a mark of significance they assign and reassign.21 What distinguishes Richardson's use of novelty from Haywood's is Lovelace's willingness to locate the quality in Clarissa, which deploys the stereotype to new purpose by suggesting that a virtuous woman will delight a constant lover with infinite variety. This is stated in Lovelace's belief, developed in confrontation with Clarissa, that her intelligent passion and strength of mind must make her perpetually new to him. The fire scene convinces him both that some

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women are virtuous - "A man has trouble enough with these truly pious, and truly virtuous girls (now I believe there are such)" (728) - and that "Now is my reformation secured; for I never shall love any other woman! - Oh she is all variety! She must be ever new to me!" (722). Even when Clarissa resists him after the rape, Lovelace claims to have given over his hopes of subduing her to cohabitation because "The consent of such a lady must make her ever new, ever charming" (907). Stylistically, Richardson resolves the problem of novelty by substituting one field of discourse (morality, from the register of moral decorum) for another (seduction, from the libertine register); he replaces perplexity with piety, "possession" with "reformation," and "conquest" with "consent." But whether offering it to Clarissa as a reason why he might reform, or developing it spontaneously in his letters to Belford, Lovelace never reconciles this possibility to his rake's code, never works out the consequences of applying it to all women and not just to Clarissa. Significantly, two earlier texts which might have been sources for one of Lovelace's declarations offer the possibility of including "variety" within either register. In Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus's statement about Cleopatra situates a woman as "all variety" squarely within the libertine tradition: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies; for vildest things Become themselves in her, that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish.22

But a woman may equally satisfy the demands of novelty in language from Paradise Lost, the central source for the eighteenth-century English intertwining of sex and sensibility which is such an important context for Richardson's sentimental rakery. When at the beginning of book 5 Adam wakens Eve, who has been troubled by a dream, he says to her, "Awake / My fairest, my espous'd, my latest found, / Heav'n's last best gift, my ever new delight."23 Similarly, Lovelace's valuing reflection more highly than sensation can be contextualized in the libertine tradition, by comparison with (for example) the shrewd psychosocial claim of Lord Halifax, that men value amorous relations with women most highly as moves in competition with other men: "Most men are in one sense platonic lovers, though they are not willing to own that character. They are so far philosophers as to allow that the greatest part of pleasure lieth in the mind;

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and in pursuance of that maxim there are few who do not place the felicity more in the opinion of the world of their being prosperous lovers than in the blessing itself, how much soever they appear to value it."24 But it can equally stand beside Bevil Junior's declaration to Indiana in The Conscious Lovers: "Your hero, madam, ... is only one who takes more delight in reflections than in sensations. He is more pleased with thinking than eating."25 Given these semiotic resources, Lovelace can project an antisensual libertinism within the libertine register through which he relates to Belford, and do so without departing significantly from an established libertine style, but whenever he moves from theory to practice and describes the joys that do please him, the real pleasures to be taken in "subduing one of these watchful beauties," he draws on mental or psychological lexis which opens him to the meanings of the register of moral decorum. The following reflection exemplifies this borrowing: What, as I have often contemplated, is the enjoyment of the finest woman in the world, to the contrivance, the bustle, the surprises, and at last the happy conclusion of a well-laid plot? - The charming roundabouts, to come the nearest way home - the doubts; the apprehensions; the heartachings, the meditated triumphs - These are the joys that make the blessing dear - For all the rest, what is it? - What but to find an angel in imagination dwindled down to a woman in fact? (920)

The actions and mental processes catalogued in these series of appositions imply one another; "contrivance," "bustle," "surprises," and "happy conclusion" derive their value from the "doubts," "apprehensions," "heartachings," and "meditated triumphs" that accompany them. The sentence concluding this part of the reflection summarizes them as "These," setting them up as Token in a relational identifying process with "the joys that make the blessing dear" as Value; the mental processes and corresponding actions are the signs by which the joys may be recognized. The nominal group functioning as Value is itself a nominalization of a relational attributive process: "the blessing" is Carrier of the Attribute "dear," with "the joys" in the additional (and causative) role of Attributor. Although the word "blessing" suggests an action women perform for men's benefit, the actual source of value here is, when we read the grammar, not women at all but the thinking of men. It is small wonder that in the next sentence "the rest" amounts only to an abstract process rather than a physical one ("to find"), one in which the Actor is male. The only process worth mentioning with women explicitly involved in it

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is their losing value, their "dwindling down" from "an angel in imagination ... to a woman in fact." Carried to an extreme, Lovelace's statements on the joys of expectation and reflection might suggest, strangely, that the greatest pleasures of libertinism are to be experienced apart from the presence of women altogether, but there are moments when he does expect to "enjoy" Clarissa while in her company. This enjoyment, the practical fruition of his sentimental rakery, will be taken in situations where Clarissa has no alternative to timid supplication, in scenes where, confused and guilty, she will acknowledge her dependence on his will, or, as he once phrases it, "her haughtiness shall be brought down to own both love and obligation to me" (601-2) and he will have defined her forever by their shared knowledge of his mastery. Lovelace never achieves quite what he expects in such scenes, and it is no accident that he describes the process fully only in his imagination, in generalizations to which he cannot make experience conform, or in fantasies such as that of himself as Turkish sultan with Clarissa and Anna before him: "How sweetly pretty to see the two lovely friends, when humbled and tame, both sitting in the darkest corner of a room, arm in arm, weeping and sobbing for each other! - And I their emperor, their then acknowledged emperor, reclined on a sophee, in the same room, Grand Signor-like, uncertain to which I should first throw out my handkerchief" (637). The important lexical items in this passage refer to mental states and their expression "humbled," "tame," "weeping," "sobbing," even "uncertain" - and the most important of all, "acknowledged," is foregrounded because the women's consent is the medium through which their emperor rules. This fantasy recalls Macheath's final air in The Beggar's Opera: Thus I stand like the Turk, with his Doxies around; From all Sides their Glances his Passion confound: For black, brown, and fair, his Inconstancy burns, And the different Beauties subdue him by turns: Each calls forth her Charms, to provoke his Desires: Though willing to all; with but one he retires.26

Comparison of the process types and participants associated with them in the two passages suggests that Lovelace focuses on mental processes suspended in a static situation. In Macheath's air, Macheath or his attributes perform intransitive processes ("stand," "burns") while the women perform processes with him or his attributes as Goals - "their Glances" (Actor) "his Passion" (Goal) "confound" (process); "the different Beauties" (Actor) "subdue" (process) "him"

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(Goal) - until finally he performs a process ("retires") with "but one." In Lovelace's fantasy, by contrast, the women perform behavioural processes ("sitting," "sobbing," "weeping," "sobbing") which do not extend to Goals. Only mental processes connect male and female, Lovelace's "to see" and the women's "acknowledged," while Lovelace's position is a state ("reclined" and "uncertain"), not an action (the "throw" is only potential). The essence of Lovelace's pleasure is to experience the ticklish uncertainty of his impulse, not to act on it, and this enforces a separation of subject and object such as develops in the situations in which he gazes on Clarissa discussed in the previous chapter. One of the salient features of sentimental libertinism is that it projects an enjoying gaze into situations where that gaze will not be threatened by its object. The focus on emotions and understanding in such fantasies is one indication among many that, in the terms that matter most to Richardson, Lovelace's desire to gaze on a helpless Clarissa is more sinister than the derivative voyeurism which informs his physical descriptions of her.27 This desire is not simple lust for an object but a will to control Clarissa through her estimation of herself, through the processes of thinking and reflection that distinguish her as a person and entitle her to respect. Lovelace assumes that to triumph over a woman as delicate as Clarissa will be to triumph over virtue itself, for in turning her conscience against her, forcing her to act in full consciousness of her weakness and accept him in spite of her assessment of him, he will have turned against her good principles the very mental processes through which they have hitherto guided her behaviour. Virtue is not a condition or state but a deliberate activity, and if Clarissa can be made to sue meanly for his favour she will in that supplication repudiate it. Richardson suggests that libertinism can begin for a number of reasons: as an immature male response to the experience of desire, as a bid for the admiration of other males, or out of a profound dislike of women, a dislike perhaps augmented by the experience of love, when physical and emotional drives have thrown a man against a woman as proud and passionate as himself. Through a series of scenes in which Lovelace attempts to savour Clarissa's distress, Richardson argues that even a libertine who eroticizes acts of dominance and aims to secure his ego by controlling a woman's thinking and will can be resisted. Richardson's development and resolution of these scenes set limits beyond which a man cannot go in controlling a woman, for it is when Lovelace expects to luxuriate in the sentimental and behavioural delicacies which surround Clarissa helpless before him that he is at greatest risk from his own desires.

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Only under pressure of events does he recognize that there is more to his character than his will to mastery. Speech is a particularly important index of power in these situations, and, as the analysis of Clarissa's forceful speaking in chapter i might suggest, it is arguably the distinguishing excellence of the female virtue Richardson wishes to inculcate. The first of these scenes, and the only one in which Lovelace experiences much pleasure, is that in which he proposes marriage after telling Clarissa of James Harlowe's supposed scheme to abduct her and carry her to one of his estates. Uncharacteristically for the first edition, Richardson includes both characters' accounts (488-94), carefully matching them so as to stress Lovelace's cruel "teasing" and create several ironies. Both accounts concentrate on Clarissa's state of mind. Clarissa's does because it is her thinking, her full consideration of circumstances and implications, that she must submit for judgment and correction if she is to meet Anna's requirement that "Nothing less than the knowledge of the inmost recesses of your heart can satisfy my love and my friendship" (174); Lovelace's does because he believes he will complete his triumph in telling Belford of her distress.28 Clarissa guesses correctly (that is to say, Richardson wishes to emphasize) that Lovelace gazes on her voyeuristically, but she does not guess that when he finally proposes explicitly he does so because he has been moved by her helplessness. Lovelace describes his actions and speeches more than he does his thinking, and because there is less access to his thinking than in some other scenes, readers are as surprised as Lovelace is when he loses control and proposes marriage. At his first, "recriminating" and "reproachful" mention of marriage, Clarissa is confused, unable to reconcile Anna's advice that she should marry with the forbidding tone in which Lovelace has (once again) proposed. She thinks that, because he "gazed upon me as if he would have looked me through" (489), he enjoys her confusion, and, while resenting his treating her so, she also feels ashamed "to be thus teased by one who seemed to have all his passions at command, at a time when I had very little over mine" (489). She bursts into tears. Lovelace attempts to comfort her by hesitantly proposing again, then apologizes "with his half-sentences" (490), and although she is reluctant to describe this as deliberate teasing, she does understand that the point of his speech was to encourage her to pursue the possiblity of marriage herself, in her words, "to speak what became me not to speak" (490). This knowledge troubles her so much that she cries again, then, realizing "how like a tame fool I stood, with his arms about me" (490), she flings from him indignantly. Lovelace

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kneels and proposes in explicit and tender terms, but this throws Clarissa into even greater confusion as she considers her situation: But what could I say to this? - Extorted from him, as it seemed to me, rather as the effect of his compassion, than of his love? What could I say? -1 paused, I looked silly! I am sure I looked very silly. He suffered me to pause and look silly; waiting for me to say something: and at last, ashamed of my confusion, and aiming to make an excuse for it, I told him that I desired that he would avoid such measures as might add to an uneasiness which was so visible upon reflecting on the irreconcilableness of my friends, and what unhappy consequences might follow from this unaccountable project of my brother. (490)

Clarissa's plight is realized through a number of features. Having refused to take control in the situation, she underscores the weakness of her position and the limited possibilities open to her, rather than her inclinations, repeatedly choosing and sometimes emphasizing modalities, challenging Anna (by repeated questions) to agree with her: "What could I say ... What could I say? ... I am sure I looked very silly." She assesses herself with lexical items realizing mental processes, nouns and adjectives functioning as Heads of nominal groups and adjectives functioning as Modifiers ("silly," "ashamed," "confusion," "uneasiness," "unhappy," "unaccountable") to show that the weight of her circumstances pressed heavily on her thinking. When she appeals to Lovelace not to increase that pressure by his actions and he seems to agree not to do so, she is unaware that he will spare her further "uneasiness" only because, having proposed explicitly, he is in a difficult position himself. In fact, he is outraged that she has been moved by concern for her family as much as by love for him (493): it indicates that he has made no progress in her affections since she met him at the garden gate, or indeed since she continued corresponding with him to protect her family from the threat of his violence. Clarissa says she tried to palliate her confusion as unavailing, but it has served her better than she knows, for in his account of the scene, Lovelace explains that it overturned his dominance and ended his pleasure abruptly. (The Editor claims that Lovelace's account is included because he could describe her confusion more fully, but on this point her account could not be fuller; Lovelace's version is included for details of his response, to confirm her suppositions and reveal his motives, which she could not mention in her account.) In the first stage of the scene, when he gazes upon her brazenly, Lovelace savours his triumph, using lexical items ("sweet," "charming,"

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"silly/' and "lovely") which he deploys as antilanguage and which often connote a sense of secure mastery: "I never beheld so sweet a confusion. ... She hemmed twice or thrice: her look, now so charmingly silly, then so sweetly significant; till at last, the lovely teaser, teased by my hesitating expectation out of all power of articulate speech, burst into tears" (492). Clarissa is called "the lovely teaser" here because Lovelace wishes to foreground the fulfilment of one of his deepest desires, the turning back of women's behaviour upon them.29 The way he develops the second sentence, interrupting the narrative of her actions to elaborate his description of her appearance and state of mind, and thus positioning the climactic action ("burst into tears") at the end, suggests Lovelace savouring her helplessness again in writing about it. But his position was precarious: Lovelace confesses that, when awareness of her plight moved Clarissa finally to refuse to be an object any longer, he was "absolutely overcome by so charming a display of innocent confusion" (492), and after quoting his proposal he exclaims to Belford, "I no more intended all this ecstatic nonsense than I thought the same moment of flying in the air! - All power is with this charming creature!" (493). The adjective "charming" persists, becoming steadily less a feature of antilanguage expressing Lovelace's sense of mastery over Clarissa than an indication of Clarissa's mastery over him.30 The process of Lovelace being "overcome" is somewhat obscure in this scene. One of the reasons for this is that he does not fully explain the pleasures of triumphing as a sentimental libertine until later in the novel, in one of several excerpts from four letters giving his account of a series of scenes in which he has proposed marriage, given Clarissa written settlements, and discussed them with her. An editorial note characterizes this passage as "triumphing in ... unpolite cruelty" (601), but "unpolite cruelty" is too weak an expression for the delight he seeks in her suffering: There are a thousand beauties to be discovered in the face, in the accent, in the bush-beating hesitations of a woman that is earnest about a subject which she wants to introduce, yet knows not how. Silly rogues, calling themselves generous ones, would value themselves for sparing a lady's confusion: but they are silly rogues indeed; and rob themselves of prodigious pleasure by their forwardness; and at the same time deprive her of displaying a world of charms, which only can be manifested on these occasions. Hard-heartedness, as it is called/is an essential of the libertine's character. Familiarized to the distresses he occasions, he is seldom betrayed by tenderness into a complaisant weakness unworthy of himself. How have I enjoyed

161 Sentimental Libertinism a charming creature's confusion, as I have sat over-against her; her eyes lost in admiration of my shoebuckles, or meditating some uncouth figure in the carpet! (601)

Richardson's desire to "expose" libertinism is much in evidence. Rather than present these ideas wholly in terms of his experience, Lovelace chooses to express all but the last sentence as a generalization, then to cite his own experience as proof of it. And rather than refer to "libertines" as "we" (which he does occasionally), he refers to "the libertine," as if reflecting on a known type. Richardson addresses readers through him so that this crucial point, which consolidates Clarissa's supposition that Lovelace deliberately hardens his heart toward her, will be made as authoritatively as possible. Lovelace shows that he understands the terms of polite behaviour but values them according to a private scheme, recognizing realities of power and innocence others choose squeamishly to ignore: "tenderness" may "betray," complaisance may be "unworthy," and the usually pejorative quality "hard-heartedness" he boldly identifies as "an essential of the libertine's character." (Lovelace distances himself from the commonplace view of this quality by "as it is called," but he does not propose a more accurate name for what he means. His object is to luxuriate in feelings others believe it is "insensitive" or "unfeeling" to indulge.) Familiarity with distress is "essential" because, like Clarissa, Lovelace is under considerable pressure in these scenes, and, whether taken in physical or sentimental form, libertine pleasure is more secure in expectation or reflection than in fruition. This statement confirms Clarissa's suspicion (voiced several times) that he has steeled himself to behave toward her so as to feel but not give way to feeling, as if he has no heart or has deliberately hardened it. As Lovelace sees it, a role must be performed, at whatever personal cost, for the sake of his philosophy.31 Not surprisingly in view of his penchant for evaluating Clarissa and inferring her state of mind from her appearance, Lovelace describes this sentimental pleasure as a process of interpreting female behaviour. He suggests first that "beauties" are simply there "to be discovered"; then, in a characteristically outrageous reversal of agency, he claims they are "displayed" or "manifested" by the woman. While his comparison of "silly rogues" and libertines is stated in somewhat abstract lexis ("charms," "distresses," "tenderness," "weakness"), his description of the "beauties" pays close attention to details of actual behaviour and the mental states and processes they enact: "face," "accent," and "bush-beating hesitations" indicate earnestness and "confusion"; the woman who "wants ... yet knows not"

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feels simultaneous desire and constraint. The moment of stasis in which the passage ends makes telling use of concrete details, irrelevant aspects of the situation ("shoebuckles" and "some uncouth figure in the carpet") which have become significant as objects of helpless, directionless female behaviour (admiration and meditation), itself the object of male enjoyment. One of Lovelace's proudest boasts, as rake and writer, is that he always has something to say for himself, and Richardson's expansion of this passage in revision makes clear that as Lovelace imagines it the essence of Clarissa's distress will be that she has nothing to say for herself. After "these occasions" Richardson added: I'll tell thee beforehand, how it will be with my Charmer in this case - She will be about it, and about it, several times: But I will not understand her: at last, after half a dozen hem-ings, she will be obliged to speak out: 7 think, Mr. Lovelace - I think, Sir - I think you were saying some days ago - ... I think you said that Mrs. Fretchville - Then a crystal tear trickles down each crimson cheek, vexed to have her virgin pride so little assisted. But, come, my meaning dear, cry I to myself, remember what I have suffered for thee, and what I have suffered by thee! Thy tearful pausings shall not be helped out by me. Speak out, Love! O the sweet confusion! Can I rob myself of so many conflicting beauties by the precipitate charmer-pitying folly, by which a politer man [Thou knowest, Lovely, that I am no polite man!] betrayed by his own tenderness, and unused to female tears, would have been overcome? I will feign an irresolution of mind on the occasion, that she may not quite abhor me - that her reflections on the scene in my absence may bring to her remembrance some beauties in my part of it; An irresolution that will be owing to awe, to reverence, to profound veneration; and that will have more eloquence in it, than words can have. Speak out then, Love, and spare not. (4: 108-9)

Lovelace's excitement at the prospect is suggested by rapid switches between narrative modes. He shifts from quotation of Clarissa's speech (as Free Direct Speech), to an account of the (anticipated) event in the present tense, to quotation of his thought (as Direct Thought), itself a series of commands and exclamations addressed to Clarissa, then to an exclamation addressed (in the time of writing) to Belford, "O the sweet confusion!" In the next sentence he asks a rhetorical question in the time of writing ("Can I rob myself") and through it projects himself into the scene, addressing Clarissa ("Thou knowest, Lovely, that I am no polite man!") in an act of writing not merely to one moment, but to two different moments successively. His quotation of Clarissa's (imagined) speech dramatizes her confu-

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sion, and together with the introductory description of her actions, it suggests that she will be able only to inch beyond her starting point in short, repeated stages, that she will finally fail to complete a sentence. Lovelace's apostrophes to her - which include several imperatives - focus on the actions of mind and speech by which, in actual situations, she holds him at bay: "remember," "Thou knowest," "Speak out," "Speak out ... and spare not." Incredibly, he expects that in recollecting (and, characteristically, assessing) his behaviour, Clarissa will misread it as the kind of humble, sincere expression of love she considers more trustworthy than speech and that she will credit him with sparing her feelings out of tenderness! Lovelace never achieves such a scene as he projects; nonetheless, Clarissa is well aware that she has been "cast upon a man, that is not a generous man! - that is, indeed, a cruel man! - that is capable of creating a distress to a young creature ... and then of enjoying it, as I may say!" (589). Despite Anna's encouragement, she will not put herself in the way of this insult. She ends her letter with a determination not to see Lovelace, but not before she feels such deep anguish that she is forced to stop writing after she expresses it. Her cry of distress is addressed to Lovelace (as hardly any of Clarissa's other apostrophes are) but ironically, although primed for it, he never sees it. It is seen by readers of the novel, who are more likely to be shocked and saddened by it than to savour it for Lovelace's reasons: "Oh Lovelace! why comest thou not just now, while these black prospects are before me? For now, couldst thou look into my heart, wouldst thou see a distress worthy of thy barbarous triumph!" (590). Clarissa is aware of more than Lovelace's desire to exploit the delicacy of her positon: she knows also that language will be crucial to his maltreatment. She expects that "possibly, he is to be mighty stately, mighty mannish, mighty coy, if you please! And then must I be very humble, very submissive, and try to whine myself into his good graces; with downcast eye, if not by speech, beg his forgiveness for the distance I have so perversely kept him at!" (590).32 After she refuses once to see him, Lovelace sends to her again, promising to "enter upon no subjects of conversation but what [she] should lead to," by which Clarissa understands him to intend an inversion of lovers' roles: "I should have been at liberty, you see, to court himl" (591). It is not surprising that Clarissa's apprehension of being forced to speak on a topic which she must betray her values even to mention corresponds precisely to Lovelace's hopes. Richardson establishes this agreement because control over language - especially control over speech - is how he believes power is manifested in critical

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situations. In a novel where the central activities are acting and making assessments through language, control over language is effectively control over action and thought. As in the previous scene, not being able to speak implies not being able to act, being denied full participation in the making of meaning, in the construction and confirmation of self in discourse. The resulting semantic confusion implies both moral and ontological insecurity, not because, as in some eighteenth-century texts, semantic confusion expresses defective character (it is in any case a socially induced semantic confusion) but rather because meaning is made in shared, social situations, and being able to speak is, like being able to be virtuous, never entirely in a person's own control. Although oriented to values which she can express in general statements detachable from the contexts where she pronounces them, even a model character needs affirmation by those with whom she is most closely involved, because the qualities for which she is esteemed, and the processes by which she esteems herself, are inextricable from that involvement. In other words, meaning, even what Clarissa can mean to herself, is a function of interaction in social contexts, not a property of individuals.33 In many studies of Richardson, biographical information given in an introductory chapter constructs continuity between the writer's life and his novels. The selection of anecdotes is not neutral - it introduces the interpretation to be developed in a reading of the novels - but some anecdotes are much less frequently cited than others. This interpretation of sentimental libertinism brings two such anecdotes into focus; in both, Richardson the celebrated writer undergoes experiences similar to those just analysed. Richardson is reported as regularly directing conversation to subjects with which he felt comfortable - his novels. A biography approved by his daughters, published in the Universal Magazine in 1786, quotes "A gentleman, who was very intimate with Mr. Richardson" explaining how he relished (and sometimes provoked) verbal conflict with women: "[The ladies] would often attack some part or other of his writings, which he always defended so well, as to convince his fair opponents that they were wrong. If the ladies did not begin with him, he would artfully lead them to the subject himself; for female opposition animated him most, and seemed a greater cordial to his spirits than any flattery which they could bestow upon him and his works."34 The other anecdote is from Boswell, who (perhaps on the authority of Johnson) reports one occasion when Richardson's strategy of "leading to" a subject was exploded in his face: A gentleman just returned from Paris told Richardson that he had seen a copy of Clarissa lying on the table of the king's brother. "Richardson observing

165 Sentimental Libertinism that part of the company were engaged in talking to each other, affected then not to attend to it. But by and by, when there was a general silence, and he thought that the flattery might be fully heard, he addressed himself to the gentleman, 'I think, Sir, you were saying something about, -' pausing in a high flutter of expectation. The gentleman provoked at his inordinate vanity, resolved not to indulge it, and with an exquisitely sly air of indifference answered, 'A mere trifle, Sir, not worth repeating.'"35

It is significant that one of these anecdotes shows Richardson "animated" by "female opposition" as Lovelace is, while the other places him in the supplicatory position Lovelace projects for Clarissa. Whatever personal feelings they might suggest Richardson invested in Clarissa, they show the resonance in Richardson's own experience of the central principle of sentimental libertinism - that the greatest humiliation is for one's power to speak to be controlled by someone else. To a spirit priding itself on being free of obligation to others, there can be mortification even in superiority, if he needs others to acknowledge and confirm it, if he will stoop to beg for praise. For Richardson's moral purpose in the novel, what is most significant about Lovelace's desire for this degree of control over Clarissa is his never achieving it. Although he contends that, since he was "moved by prayers and tears" in the fire scene, he should not be accused of hard-heartedness (727), he brushes this sensitivity aside and fondly hopes to triumph over a submissive Clarissa when next they meet: "What pleasure did I propose to take, how to enjoy the sweet confusion I expected to find her in, while all was so recent!" (733). But Clarissa refuses to meet him, and, in a parallel to Milton's Satan having to demean himself to view Adam and Eve in the garden, Lovelace is reduced to looking at her through a keyhole. What he describes is a picture not of guilty dejection but of injured innocence, one with sentimental power to bring him almost to abandon his purposes. Clarissa subsequently escapes Mrs Sinclair's house, and in his exultation at having, as he thinks, outwitted her in finding her so quickly in Hampstead, Lovelace again anticipates that she will passively submit to his emotional manipulation at their first meeting: "it delights me to think how she will start and tremble, when I first pop upon her! How she will look with conscious guilt, that will more than wipe off my guilt of Wednesday night, when she sees her injured lover, and acknowledged husband, from whom, the greatest of felonies, she would have stolen herself" (757). Lovelace deliberately confuses the terms of "husband" and "wife" he has imposed on their situation with the truth of it so that he can salve his conscience, applying moral and legal lexis to Clarissa's actions ("injury," "felony," "stolen") and thereby balancing her "conscious guilt" against

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his "guilt of Wednesday night." Although the guilt he projects onto her depends entirely on a lie she can reject, his hope is encouraged by lines in the letter she wrote to him to take Will out of her way at the time of her escape: "I cannot look you in the face without equal confusion and indignation" (759). When they do meet, however, Lovelace's delight proves to have been only by way of anticipation, for when he first sees Clarissa it is he who is overwhelmed, startled into throwing off his disguise by a power he acknowledges in high language and Miltonic allusion. Despite Clarissa's triumph on this occasion, there is one more scene in which Lovelace's sentimental libertinism is significantly overthrown. One of the more curious (and to readers who find the novel too long, most exasperating) features of Clarissa must be Lovelace's blithe resumption of discredited positions, his irrational reliance on assumptions his experience has exploded. This leads to there being series of closely related scenes which develop a significant theme through successive variations. It might seem gratuitous that Lovelace should look forward to their first meeting after the rape as yet another opportunity to indulge his lust to enjoy a suffering woman: "What advantage will the confidence of our sex give me over the modesty of hers, if she be recovered! -1, the most confident of men: she, the most delicate of women. Sweet soul! methinks I have her before me: her face averted: speech lost in sighs - abashed conscious - What a triumphant aspect will this give me, when I gaze in her downcast countenance!" (898). But Clarissa's triumph in this meeting is central to Richardson's construction of sentimental libertinism, the lesson-laden culmination of such scenes.36 Lovelace's expectations could not be disappointed more thoroughly. Clarissa enters "with such dignity in her manner, as struck me with great awe," showing not the "sweet confusion" he anticipates, but "a fixed sedateness in her whole aspect, which seemed to be the effect of deep contemplation" (899). She speaks "with an air and action" Lovelace claims are unequalled, but her behaviour and speech are not all that surprises him in this scene, for it is he who is startled, abashed, and self-conscious. Convinced that he looks like a fool, he speaks, when he can, "in broken sentences, and confusion" (900), fumbling for words as he had hoped Clarissa would: "What what-a - what - has been done - I, I, I - cannot but say - must own - must confess - hem - hem - is not right - is not what should have been - But-a - but - but - I am truly - truly - sorry for it - Upon my soul I am - And - and - will do all - do everything - do what whatever is incumbent upon me - all that you - that you - that you shall require, to make you amends!" (901). The places at which he

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stutters or states alternatives before being able to go on foreground the key points at issue between them: his past actions ("What... has been done")/ his assessment of them (he reiterates his obligation to declare they were wrong), the sincerity of his regret (indicated by "truly - truly" and "upon my soul"), and his future action, the most difficult to formulate of all. Instead of being unable to speak for sighs, Clarissa speaks frankly and directly, not avoiding entirely the somewhat hyperbolic rhetoric of execration for which Lovelace is prepared, but by no means merely ranting in imitation of wronged stage heroines. The pattern of their speeches is different from that in previous situations where she has seized control, not short, quick exchanges from both, but longer statements by Clarissa to which Lovelace cannot respond except by exclamation. Clarissa uses her control of the situation to put sharp questions to Lovelace, as through careful modification and qualification she expresses an unbroken will in dignified resentment of his "amends": "Oh wretch! wringing her uplifted hands, had I not been robbed of my senses, and that in the basest manner - you best know how - had I been able to account for myself, and your proceedings, or to have known but how the days passed; a whole week should not have gone over my head, as I find it has done, before I had told you what I now tell you - That the man who has been the villain to me you have been, shall never make me his wife" (901). The final, italicized section of this long, climactic sentence - it is the high point of the scene achieves a striking effect although none of the words is extraordinary in itself. In formal, distanced address to Lovelace, Clarissa speaks as if about a third person, moving between grammatical persons in the course of the sentence (first to second to third) as she has done selfcritically in her delirium, and this makes the final proposition less an expression of personal feeling than a commitment to an ideal of conduct. Embedding Lovelace's actions toward her as a dependent clause characterizing this "man," she sets those actions up as a role ("being a villain") and declares that by playing it Lovelace has destroyed any possibility of assuming any other with her. Rather than admit to shared knowledge and so consent to humiliation, Clarissa emphasizes that she does not know "how the days passed," and rather than a mutual "knowing not" intimating a future opening beyond the control of either, their unequal knowledge of "what has been done" here confirms that they can never relate except in a struggle for control. Clarissa adopts the strategy of passivity to which she has long been encouraged, expressing her resolve indirectly, not as an intention to act herself but as a limitation on Lovelace's power of action, indicating that she now construes whatever he might do as an attempt

i68 Meanings of Style to regain control over her. She rejects the choice he offers her as an illusion, because she realizes that by "requiring" him to "make amends" she will give him ultimate earthly influence over her, a vicious husband's power to demean her for life. This shows why so little good can be expected of marriage in this novel. The ideal exercise of power is not to hold and exercise it as a personal attribute, as Lovelace would, recirculating it endlessly in mutual recrimination until it is released in death; it is, rather, to let energy flow through a relation, to let it flow out from a self opened to interplay and on to benefit others.37 With good reason, previous studies of Lovelace's libertinism have related him to rakes of the Restoration court and stage - to the Earl of Rochester, Etherege's Dorimant, Shadwell's Don John, and Wycherley's Horner.38 It is a striking indication of Richardson's revision of libertinism, however, that Lovelace should imagine taunting a humbled and speechless Clarissa in one of his sauciest acts of verbal transvestism, an allusion to Millamant's words to Mirabell as they negotiate a marriage contract in The Way of the World: "You have free leave; propose your utmost, speak and spare not."39 What Tassie Gwilliam has written of the dream in which Lovelace's illegitimate son and daughter by Clarissa and Anna marry and change names by Act of Parliament so they can enjoy his estate is no less true of this passage: "The critical moment for him may not be the rape, but the moment of transformation and recognition - when he most powerfully explores the possibility of combining in himself male and female in sexual union. Clarissa's presence is only vestigially necessary."40 Lovelace takes up a female character's voice to dominate Clarissa as both male and female, and he does so only in fantasy. When he actually faces her, the woman to whom he would speak these words so awes him that his bashfulness cannot now imply the Tiresian intuition of women's thinking by which he claims to know (and so to master) "the sex," but suggests rather an identification wholly with the feminine, a self-feminization against which Clarissa appears to him masculine, as she does when after the rape she confronts and humbles him precisely as he has imagined humbling her.41 Across many of Lovelace's representations of conflict, the opposed gender categories of masculine and feminine figure dominance and submission, even when women dominate, even in relations which others may not consider inherently conflictual. In crucial experiences of his own weakness, he projects a masculine "heroism" onto women. Pointing to Dorcas's having "blistered" with tears her transcription of Clarissa's letter to him after the rape - he was too distressed to copy it himself - he declares (perversely, unrepentantly)

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that "Mrs Sinclair is a true heroine and, I think, shames us all. And she is a woman too!" (896). Similarly, when Clarissa triumphs in the penknife scene, he calls her "the truly heroic lady" (950). The idea of friendship between women seems to him merely a flight of female fancy, but he grants of Clarissa and Anna "that the active spirit of the one, and the meek disposition of the other, may make their friendship more durable than it would otherwise be; for this is certain, that in every friendship, whether male or female, there must be a man and a woman spirit (that is to say, one of them a forbearing one) to make it permanent" (863-4). Lovelace's insistence on this gender opposition points to an ambivalence in sentimental libertinism. His refashioned masculine desire includes traditionally feminine features and so represents, perhaps recommends, changes in gender relations, and Richardson offers women wider scope for resistance to libertine men to secure a moral point - that virtue can triumph in every situation. But this intervention in his culture's practice of gender cannot be called wholly feminist, for her strict adherence to conventions of feminine delicacy is at the core of Clarissa's strength. Together with the deep assumption of sexual difference in Lovelace's use of gender categories - the opposition itself matters more to him than whether men express masculinity and women femininity in all situations - it indicates that for Richardson social life can be organized on no other basis than secure gender dichotomy. However it is manifested in his fiction, whether maliciously by Lovelace or magnanimously by Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson's feminized masculinity never threatens to subvert men's dominance over women in marriage. Another rarely cited anecdote offers an intriguing parallel between Lovelace and Richardson, and it strikingly contextualizes sentimental libertinism within Richardson's extensive, many-sided account of himself as an observer of women. In the course of their extended debate on the question whether any degree of fear could enter into a wife's love of her husband, Richardson reminded Lady Bradshaigh that the law allowed husbands to administer "moderate correction" to their wives. He recalled hearing this point debated in 1721, when Lady Moore appealed unsuccessfully to the House of Lords to overturn a decision in the Court of Chancery upholding the legitimacy of a contract granting the sum of one thousand pounds and two hundred pounds per annum to her estranged husband, Sir Cleeve Moore, who had forced her to sign it after abducting her in his coach (when they met by chance after a long separation) and threatening to hold her prisoner the rest of her life if she did not comply with his wishes. Richardson does not mention these circumstances in his account:

170 Meanings of Style in a cause that I once heard argued in the House of Lords, between Sir Cleeve Moore and his lady, who, in resentment of his cruelty, had run away from him, and whom he had forced back, with farther instances of cruelty, I heard a very edifying debate ... in which the [Attorney-General] declaimed very powerfully against Sir Cleeve for his ill usage of his wife. The [SolicitorGeneral], allowing part of the charge, justified Sir Cleeve by the law of England, which allows a man to give his wife moderate correction. The house was crowded with ladies, who, some of them, shrugged their shoulders, as if they felt the correction; and all of them who could look from behind their fans, leered, consciously, I thought, at one another. A pretty doctrine, thought I! Take it among you, ladies; and make your best courtesies when you come home to your emperors.42

When he wrote this passage (in a letter of 24 June 1752), Richardson was echoing Lovelace, not anticipating him, yet the surreptitious observation and internal speech admonishing the ladies - which he attributes to himself in the same year as he married his first wife, Martha Wilde, and printed his first book, half his lifetime ago at the time of writing43 - draw upon the meaning potential developed as sentimental libertinism in Clarissa. Richardson's final flourish quotes Lovelace's triumphant declaration during his account of the flight from Harlowe Place - "And so I became her emperor!" (400) - and extends Lovelace's assumption that gender categories can describe all power relations into an even harsher assumption that lexis for expressing political dominance can be drawn upon (uncritically, unapologetically) to express gender relations. At once sheepish and sly (epithets Richardson liked to apply ironically to himself and which Lovelace applies to the "modest Hickman" when recalling the bashful modesty which has given him his privileged, Tiresian knowledge of women [802]), Richardson's gleeful analysis of his social superiors enacts an interconnection of gender and social status which appears also in his novels. A socially inferior male consoles himself with a gloating projection of "emperor" husbands' dominance over "conscious" wives across the higher rank of society as a typical instance of universal masculine dominance of what is feminine. The most appropriate interpretation of this anecdote is the feminist observation that, as in Pamela after the heroine's wedding, where gender inequity secured in marriage underwrites stiffly hierarchical social relations and recontextualizes Pamela's earlier defiance of the social order, here too a lower-ranking male (Richardson) enjoys the consolation that in relation to women he shares the privileges of his (male) social superiors. Similarly in Lovelace's sentimental libertinism, for all that Richardson may (as a moralist) desire the change

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in libertine practice it implies, feminization is turned against women and turned against itself, lest the changes in social relations it implies become permanent. The possibility that changing gender relations might destabilize such a central institution as marriage troubles both Lovelace and Richardson.44 As a reactionary figure, Lovelace is aristocratic and antifeminist, yet just as an identification with women both guides his plots to dominate and prevents him from dominating Clarissa, so too is his sentimental libertinism made possible, I would argue, by the very social changes against which he directs it. Richardson emphasizes that Lovelace's libertinism includes none of the religious scepticism of some Restoration libertines; he does not mention (nor have scholars remarked on) the quiet omission of a libertine practice represented in the poetry of Rochester, where the rake may penetrate a woman or an adolescent male servant, a page. In both these respects Lovelace is a different kind of libertine from Rochester, and however original it may be to Richardson, his libertine mimicry of women's voices and indulgence in feminine emotions and behaviour can be understood in relation to this difference. Although the male homosocial continuum in Clarissa is unruffled by even an intimation of same-sex relations between men, in its emotional transvestism Lovelace's sentimental libertinism resembles (albeit distantly) the practices of men in the mollie subculture of Richardson's London.45 Mollies were adult males who met in back rooms of certain public houses, adopting women's dress, taking women's names, imitating women's speech and gesture, and describing what they did when they went upstairs in couples as "going to be married."46 In a series of important studies of Restoration and eighteenth-century sexual culture, Randolph Trumbach has argued that the mollie culture and its dominant figure, the adult effeminate male, emerged when they did (around 1700) because of changes in family structure, sexual behaviour, and gender roles, what he has discussed as the rise of the egalitarian family and Lawrence Stone as affective individualism and companionate marriage. These changes have been referred to in previous chapters as part of the context for Richardson's revision of physical description of women, and Trumbach's analysis of their relevance for the mollie role suggests succinctly what it is that sentimental libertinism reacts against: the beginning of a major cultural shift, which is still far from complete, in which a patriarchal morality that allowed adult men to own and dominate their wives, children, servants and slaves, was gradually challenged and partially replaced by an egalitarian morality which proposed that all men were created equal, that slavery must therefore be abolished, democracy

172 Meanings of Style achieved, women made equal with men, and children with their parents ... The degree of equality between men and women, and parents and children, that resulted from companionate marriage and a closer attachment to one's children, raised profound anxiety in both men and women. The anxiety resulted in a compromise with full equality that historians have called domesticity. Men and women were equal, but they were supposed to live in separate spheres, he dominant in the economy, she in the home. Women were no longer supposed to have bodies which were inferior copies of men's; instead, as Thomas Laqueur has shown, their bodies were now seen to be biologically different; and of course, on those differences could be founded supposedly inescapable differences in gender role, despite the morality of equality.47

The mollie role reassures a society anxious that masculine and feminine genders, now believed to be based in two biologically distinct sexes, male and female, be kept separate and distinct, despite the pressure of social changes tending to make them equal. Separation, as Trumbach explains, was maintained so that the inequality inherent in separation might be too. The mollie and his cousin the sentimental libertine perform the same cultural work as domesticity and separate spheres, the mollie by guaranteeing that most men will know their masculinity as the capacity to desire only women, the sentimental libertine (who both promotes this equality and resists its socially disruptive implications) by striving to guarantee that, however feminized men, social relations, and discourse may become, the principle of rigid gender difference will remain as a resource to structure power relations in all the fields of sexual and social practice.48 In a longer historical perspective, Richardson's sentimental libertinism can be related to developments whose significance Michel Foucault and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have discussed as reaching into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Not only is a claim to knowledge the ground on which Lovelace would organize sexuality, but also the sexual practice he would organize culminates in an act of mutual - and inequitable - knowing. In the moments of supreme humiliation that Lovelace imagines but can never enact (except when he suffers them himself!), Richardson dramatizes the interconnection of sexuality and knowledge about which Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality as the insistence that sex be made to speak because it can speak the deep truth of our lives.49 Such moments also model the interconnection of power and knowledge which Foucault considered characteristic of modern states and which he sought repeatedly to demystify. Lovelace's fantasies project and analyse the moment when a mechanism of (male) power produces (and takes pleasure in

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producing) a "truth" which will renew and perpetuate it, the moment when a man and a woman experience their subjectivity as a process of subjugation, one subjugating, one subjugated.50 In such a moment, to quote Sedgwick, "Cognition ... sexuality ... and transgression ... [are] magnetized into an unyielding though not an unfissured alignment with one another."51 Sedgwick considers this disposition to have become widely diffused through institutions and practices only in the nineteenth century, although she does cite Diderot's La Religieuse (written in 1760 - not long before the "Eloge de Richardson" of January 1762) as one of the earliest texts to be influential in its formation. Sentimental libertinism aims to disclose such alignments in powerful moments of revelation, but such a knotting together of knowledge, sexuality, and transgression occurs throughout Clarissa; any two of these terms together imply the third, especially when oppositions of knowledge and ignorance articulate sexuality - and sexual politics. Whenever Clarissa's "knowing not" evokes a desire beyond our necessary, our inevitable knowledge, Richardson's text touches and interprets us to ourselves. This close study of Lovelace's thinking about the pleasures of seduction confirms the patterns analysed in the study of his style as a seducer. It suggests that Richardson's investigation of the meanings of erotic style aimed to expose libertinism as deliberate, perversely elaborated cruelty toward women. By transposing libertinism into the realm of emotional and psychological experience, however, by translating its core processes into fields of discourse which appear also in the register of moral decorum, he creates cultural space in which women could engage with men on more equal terms, offering decorum, significantly revised by Clarissa's confrontation with sentimental libertinism, as a style for women to resist and repulse their tormentors. Lovelace's libertine style suggests both mental limitations, an inability to think of Clarissa in other than stereotyped ways, and a deliberate refusal to open himself to new meanings when his experience explodes old assumptions. It also shows a penchant for novelty that pushes him beyond the very boundaries he hopes his libertinism will confirm. Ironically, by seeking to control Clarissa through the processes of thinking and reflection which ideals of feminine conduct and prevailing social practices have trained her to use in relating to others, Lovelace proves his own vulnerability to those practices and to that pleasure he so values, the emotional and mental stimulation to be enjoyed in gazing on a suffering woman. Readers' contextualizations of Clarissa - in further reading, in writing, in behaviour, in exchanges with Samuel Richardson - all suggest that Richardson played a significant part in an inward turn in English

174 Meanings of Style fiction, encouraging a shift toward the sentimental, in all senses of the word. Stylistic examination of Richardson's use of earlier literature and literary traditions shows that he persistently foregrounds styles he wishes readers to reassess: his intertextuality is intended to change - once and for all - how readers respond to established literary images and cultural stereotypes; he hopes they will begin to question the assumptions they have inherited through them. Richardson's imaginative and didactic impulses work complexly, through an increase of inwardness in which the styles of meaning he models and the meanings of style he explores come together, as rhetorical genres for influencing others through statement of general truth, as the potential meanings most at risk in the critical situations where women and men engage, negotiate, and struggle with desire. In accordance with his moral purpose, Richardson shows that no woman, however confident and strong in her practice of virtue, can be safe once in the power of a libertine, especially one who can fashion convenient and persuasive rhetoric from what she may think are the secure meanings of her culture. But he also suggests that any man who uses language to mislead and abuse finally misleads and endangers himself. In this, his central achievement, Richardson suggests there are limits beyond which one person cannot go in controlling another. He does this not through rigid prescription, but by discovering undecidability in whatever limit one character would impose on another. Experience tests principle, and whenever characters rely uncritically on limits, on a rigid code of decorum or libertinism, events challenge those limits. Beyond them, Clarissa discovers that she is more than the simple model of virtue she aspires to be; Lovelace that he is more than the libertine he prides himself on being. Their knowledge of themselves grows through their styles of reflection, through their reflections on style. If Clarissa now moves readers more than many other eighteenth-century texts, Richardson's passion for language is no small part of the reason why. In their wary circling and their struggles in silence and in speech, his characters teach readers to pay attention to language, to weigh the perils of speaking against the costs of remaining silent.

Notes

A N O T E ON THE T E X T

1 Tom Keymer, "Clarissa's Death, Clarissa's Sale," 394. 2 Late in his life Richardson asked his friend Lady Bradshaigh to lend him her annotated copy of the first edition so that he could take advantage of her suggestions for revision. Janine Barchas, with whom I have collaborated on the text and notes of an edition of these annotations, argues in her introduction that this copy had already been exchanged before the publication of the third edition and that Richardson's marginal responses to Lady Bradshaigh are important evidence for Richardson's development of the editorial apparatus for it. See Barchas, The Annotations in Lady Bradshaigh's Copy of Clarissa. I take the view that Richardson had not seen any of Lady Bradshaigh's annotations when he requested her copy in March 1761. In any case, it is clear that late in his life Richardson was working closely with a copy of the first edition, and any critical edition of the novel must take account of some changes (mostly in wording) apparently approved in that copy but which do not appear in any published edition. 3 Quotation is from Kinkead-Weekes's recapitulation of the argument in Samuel Richardson, 195. 4 Florian Stuber, "On Original and Final Intentions, or Can There Be an Authoritative Clarissa?," 240, 241. See also his "Introduction: Text, Writer, Reader, World." Jim Springer Borck, "Composed in Tears," describes the Clarissa Project and plans for a CD-ROM version of the third edition. CD-ROM versions of both the first and third editions were published by Chadwyck-Healey in 1996, but will be available only in libraries which can afford the substantial cost. 5 Lois A. Chaber, review of the AMS Clarissa, 286.

176 Notes to pages xiii-4 6 Although the Clarissa Project is publishing a large selection of published commentary on the novel, an essential part of the evidence for the novel's reception will remain inaccessible until there is a complete edition of Richardson's correspondence. By comparison with editions of novels by Defoe, Henry Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Burney, and Austen, there has been relatively little attempt to advance the understanding of the relation of Richardson's novels to their literary and historical context through extensive annotation. Angus Ross is the only editor of Clarissa to publish any amount of annotation, and Jocelyn Harris's 1972 edition of Sir Charles Grandison remains the most thoroughly annotated of any edition of a Richardson novel. 7 Margaret Anne Doody and Florian Stuber, "Clarissa Censored," 86m. 8 Tom Keymer, Richardson's "Clarissa" and the Eighteenth-Century Reader, 247. I regard the relative openness of the first edition as opposed to the third, which for Keymer constitutes a difference of kind (see, for instance, his characterization of the different roles of the footnotes in each), as a difference of degree. As chapter 3 will show in its discussion of the collection of moral sentiments included in the third edition, readers are responsible even there for distinguishing among a surprising number of voices with remarkable degrees of autonomy. In a review of Tassie Gwilliam's Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender, Keymer makes the point that the choice of the third edition precludes a number of important interpretive questions relevant to the discussion of Clarissa, as well as sitting oddly with quotation from the first editions of Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison. CHAPTER ONE

1 Anonymous, Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa and Pamela, 4. 2 The dreaded event soon happened. See William R. Keast, "The Two Clarissas in Johnson's Dictionary." 3 Lord Chesterfield, letter to David Mallet, 5 November 1753, quoted in Alan Dugald McKillop, Samuel Richardson, 2.2.0. 4 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter to the Countess of Bute, 20 October 1755, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, y. 97. 5 Lord Chesterfield, letter to David Mallet, in McKillop, Samuel Richardson, 220. 6 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter to the Countess of Bute, in Complete Letters, 3: 97. It is another question whether this is actually Clarissa's practice. 7 "This Richardson is a strange Fellow. I heartily despise him and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner. The 2

177 Notes to pages 5-8 first Tomes of Clarissa touch'd me as being very ressembling to my Maiden Days. I find in the pictures of Sir Thomas Grandison and his Lady, what I have heard of my Mother and seen of my Father." Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter to the Countess of Bute, 22 September 1755, Complete Letters, y. 90. 8 Denis Diderot, "Eloge de Richardson," CEuvres Completes, 5: 136. 9 Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson, 433-47. A.R. Humphreys has written perceptively on the qualities of Richardson's style that impressed Lord Chesterfield in "Richardson's Novels." 10 Letter to Lady Bradshaigh, 14 February 1754, in Samuel Richardson, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, 286. 11 Letter to Lady Echlin, 10 October 1754, Selected Letters, 316. 12 Ibid. 13 Robert Markley, "The Dialogics of Style" (chapter i in Two-Edg'd Weapons), discusses the difficulties of working toward this goal through definitions of "style." 14 Some of these critiques would be merely risible had they not gained such wide influence. Stanley Fish played jesting Pilate, asking large questions but not staying for answers, in a witty but too often underinformed and unreflective polemic, "What Is Stylistics and Why Are People Saying Such Terrible Things About It?" (Is There a Text in This Class?). Through a combination of insight and ignorance, Barbara Herrnstein Smith's "Surfacing from the Deep" in On the Margins of Discourse, despite praising Fish's essay (in language worthy of the Nixon White House) as "a saturation bombing of stylistics," made many cogent criticisms of stylistics without realizing that there were stylisticians who might have agreed with her; and Mary Louise Pratt's spectacularly mistaken criticisms of Prague School poetics in the first chapter of Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse were granted instant authority as a definitive refutation. Pratt's book is still routinely cited, usually without mention of "The Ideology of Speech Act Theory," her subsequent critique of the theory on which it is based. Mistaken statements that stylistics claims scientific objectivity for itself appear regularly. For a more measured discussion of criticisms of stylistics and of the often problematic relation between stylistics and literary theory, see Michael J. Toolan, The Stylistics of Fiction. 15 Collections of essays moving "beyond the traditional concern of stylistics with aesthetic values towards concern with the social and political ideologies encoded in texts" (Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson, eds., Language, Discourse and Literature, 16) include Willie van Peer, ed., The Taming of the Text; Michael Toolan, ed., Language, Text and Context; and Katie Wales, ed., Feminist Linguistics in Literary Criticism. See also Sara Mills, Feminist Stylistics.

178 Notes to page 8 16 Roger Fowler, "Halliday's Linguistic Model for Criticism/' argues the merits of systemic-functional linguistics for literary criticism. I have suggested that it can prove valuable for literary history in "Systemic Linguistics and Literary History." 17 In Style and Fiction, Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short make a place for the second of these approaches within a broadly functional treatment of prose style, arguing that "there is no one model of prose style which is applicable to all texts," and including a dualistic notion of style as "those aspects of linguistic choice which concern alternative ways of rendering the same subject matter" (39, their italics). Examples of the former approach range from "authorship stylistics," where strict statistical methodology is essential for linguistic discussion of attribution problems, to studies in which sampling techniques and formal grammars are used to study individuality against the background of norms of a whole language. These will be known to students of eighteenthcentury literature through attribution studies of the Junius letters and the Federalist papers and the work of Louis T. Milic, especially A Quantitative Approach to the Style of Jonathan Swift. 18 The various senses in which systemic linguists use the term "function" can be confusing. The key to understanding them is to consider first the organization of the linguistic system into levels or strata. The linguistic system is seen as organized in three strata: the semantic level (the meanings), the formal level of grammar and lexis (the wordings, also known as the lexicogrammar), and the level of phonology (if the text is spoken) or graphology (if the text is written). The relation between the levels is one of "realization" or expression: choices in meaning are expressed by choices in wording and these are expressed in turn by choices in sound. There is in addition another important pattern in the system, a functional one, and it may be seen on each level. (Since the semantic and lexicogrammatical levels are most important to this study, this explanation will be confined to them.) All texts can be said to function as part of an exchange of meaning, by teaching, persuading, inspiring, and so on. In order to perform this wide variety of extrinsic functions, the uses to which it is put, the linguistic system is organized internally into intrinsic functional components, referred to as the ideational, interpersonal, and textual "macrofunctions." The ideational function is language as representation, as a means to represent patterns of experience in configurations of processes, participants, and circumstances. The main grammatical system for this ideational function is transitivity. The interpersonal function is language as exchange or interaction, and it involves principally the system of mood, through which a speaker takes up the role of giver or seeker of information, or offerer or demander of goods and services, and the system of modality,

179 Notes to page 8 through which a speaker expresses an attitude to a proposition, assessing the degree of probability, usuality, inclination, or obligation involved in it. The textual function is language as message, language as a stream of units of various sizes sent one after another from sender to receiver(s). It involves the ways in which parts of a message are structured (within clauses and between them) to hang together as a unit. The other important use of "function" is to refer to descriptive categories in a systemic-functional grammar, those which realize ideational meanings (the transitivity functions of Actor, Process, Goal, and so on), those which realize interpersonal meanings (the interpersonal functions of Subject, Predicator, Complement, and Adjunct), and those which realize textual meanings (the textual functions of Theme/Rheme and Given/New within the clause, and patterns of cohesion between clauses). Briefly, these three key senses of the word "function" relate as follows: the macrofunctions describe the internal organization of a language, the way its semantics and the functional categories of its lexicogrammar are organized to perform the variety of tasks described (from an extrinsic point of view) as the wider functions of texts. Choices in each of the three macrofunctions are realized simultaneously in all clauses of a text, and every clause can be given three complementary structural descriptions showing how the meanings chosen in each macrofunction have been expressed. The macrofunctions are also known as "metafunctions": in contrast to the "microfunctions," the functional categories of the grammar, such as (for instance) Agent, Subject, and Theme, the functional components of a language (ideational, interpersonal, and textual) are "macro"; in contrast to the functions language serves in life, they are "meta." Perhaps the most important assumption of systemic functionalism is that the language system - the meaning potential which can be activated in contexts - is considered to have been built up through use and to have evolved in resonance with the contexts in which it has been used, so that, as Halliday puts it, "Language has evolved to satisfy human needs; and the way it is organized is functional with respect to these needs - it is not arbitrary." (Introduction to Functional Grammar, second edition, xiii.) Conversely, the uses to which we put it, the meanings we make with it, are as they are because it is language we use to do them. The use of language develops the contexts of a culture, so that "ways of saying" are "ways of meaning" which develop differently for different languages and cultures. This point, which shows the influence of the Whorfian hypothesis, has the important consequence that, although a Saussurean line of arbitrariness runs between the levels of lexicogrammar and phonology or graphology, the connections between the lexicogrammar (the wordings) and the semantics (the meanings) are non-arbitrary, so that the

180 Notes to page 9

19

20

21

22

"meanings" which may be made derive not from any reality external to language but through the meaning-making practices which have evolved the language system. Systemic-functional theory stands apart from many other linguistic theories in holding that, as poststructuralists say, "There is no outside to language" - and, more important, in being able to show in work on problems in the real world what it means that we can say this. These themes are well treated in Ruqaiya Hasan, "What Kind of Resource is Language?" in her Ways of Saying: Ways of Meaning. In addition to the work cited elsewhere in this study, see (for a good overview of the theory) Suzanne Eggins, An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics and (for the fullest published account of the system networks which lie behind the structural descriptions in Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar) Christian Matthiessen, Lexicogrammatical Cartography. See for example M.A.K. Halliday, "Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into the Language of William Golding's The Inheritors," in his Explorations in the Functions of Language, 103-43; Michael Gregory, "Marvell's To His Coy Mistress"'; Roger Fowler, Linguistics and the Novel and Linguistic Criticism; and Ruqaiya Hasan, Linguistics, Language and Verbal Art. In his study of the Prague Linguistic Circle's semiotic theory of literature, F.W. Galan argues that this was more sophisticated than its critics have assumed and fully able to deal with historical aspects of literature. See Galan, Historic Structures. Galan's account of Roman Jakobson's contribution to this movement deserves to be better known, for it reveals that before he became famous (in the United States in the 19503 and 19605) as a formalist stylistician passionately pursuing universals in poetics Jakobson was (in Czeckoslovakia in the 19305) an eloquent analyst of the social function of poetry. The studies in David Birch and L.M. O'Toole, eds., Functions of Style, show in various ways the influence of developments in literary and semiotic theory. Paul J. Thibault, Social Semiotics as Praxis, studies a literary text (Nabokov's Ada) to develop a more general account of social semiotic theory, often at a formidable level of abstraction. In a series of studies culminating in Feminist Poetics, Terry Threadgold has been especially concerned to make connections between systemic linguistics and other work in semiotics, critical theory, and feminism. "Foregrounding" is Paul L. Garvin's translation of the Czech term aktualisace, which Jan Mukafovsky and others in the Prague Linguistic Circle used to describe the property of language in literature, that which gives a literary text its specific character as an instance of verbal art. See Garvin, ed. and trans., A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style. The concept is also used by systemic linguists,

181 Notes to pages 9-10 and a good introduction to the practice is Ruqaiya Hasan, Linguistics, Language, and Verbal Art. 23 Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Language and Literature, 69. 24 This discussion draws on Halliday, "Linguistic Function and Literary Style" in Explorations in the Functions of Language; Leech and Short, Style in Fiction; and Willie van Peer, Stylistics and Psychology. 25 Aktualisace is also translated as "deautomatization," which points to the effect foregrounding has on readers' responses to literary text. In systemic stylistics, Halliday has used "foregrounding" to refer to patterns of features being made prominent for any reason, and "deautomatization" to describe the way in which the patterns of lexicogrammatical features can not only function to realize individual choices of meaning made at the semantic level, but also "take on a life of their own as engenderers of meaning. It is in this sense that 'de-automatization' is more than prominence: prominence is achieved through an untypical distribution of symbols in their typical function in the text, whereas here we are referring to their appearance in a transcendent function, whereby a grammatical system as a whole directly encodes some higher-level semiotic, bypassing the semantic organization of the text" ("The De-Automatization of Grammar," 149). The earliest English translations of Prague work were developed into a theory of style and applied to Clarissa in Irwin Gopnik, A Theory of Style and Richardson's "Clarissa." Gopnik's dialectic of "automatization" and "manipulation" (foregrounding) enables some interesting analysis, but he limits his study largely to lexis, considering grammatical features only briefly. More seriously, he sets his concept of foregrounding within Joseph Frank's theory of "spatial form" in modern literature, embracing the atemporality for which structuralism has been criticized. Gopnik suggests that if Frank is correct in contending "that modern man has recently abandoned in the plastic arts 'the objective visual imagination (the ability to portray space)/ and in the literary arts 'the objective historical imagination (the ability to apprehend chronological time)'" (115), then "we can confidently say that it started in Richardson's Clarissa" (116). His study of the novel as a network of verbal motifs leads Gopnik to "argue from [his] stylistic analysis that Clarissa is a static or mimetic work of art rather than a kinetic or didactic one" (57). My own analysis, undertaken within different theoretical assumptions, persuades me of just the opposite. 26 Terry Threadgold, "What Did Milton Say Belial Said and Why Don't the Critics Believe Him?," in James D. Benson, Michael J. Cummings, and William S. Greaves, eds., Linguistics in a Systemic Perspective, 337. 27 Ruqaiya Hasan, Linguistics, Language, and Verbal Art, 99.

182 Notes to pages 11-16 28 Threadgold, "What Did Milton Say ..." in Benson, Cummings, and Greaves, eds., Linguistics in a Systemic Perspective, 337-8. 29 J.R. Martin, "Process and Text: Two Aspects of Human Semiosis," in Benson and Greaves, eds., Systemic Perspectives on Discourse, i: 250. 30 This account draws upon Suzanne Eggins, An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics, and J.R. Martin, English Text. As will be explained in note 33 below, there are two views concerning the relation of register and genre, and this study will use each one as appropriate. 31 John Frow, "Reading as System and as Practice," Comparative Criticism 5 (1983): 87-105, quoted in Helen Leckie-Tarry, Language and Context, 14. 32 See, for example, Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change, 127, where register theory is introduced as a framework for describing "styles." Literary critics use the word "register" informally in this sense, and the word "foregrounding" (although not the theory!) has become widespread. 33 I follow Halliday, Hasan, and Gregory in treating genre as part of the mode of discourse and so an aspect of register, rather than as Martin, Threadgold, and many Australian systemicists treat it (and as I have introduced it above) as a category at a higher level constraining choices in register. In chapter 3 I will use it in both senses, as an option within register when I discuss the micro-genres of proverb, moral sentiment, and maxim, but as a higher semiotic level when I discuss the "collection" and "novel" as macro-genres. Leckie-Tarry's discussion of the differences in "Register or Genre?" in Language and Context, 12-15 is characteristically clear and insightful. 34 Michael Gregory and Susanne Carroll, Language and Situation, 75-6. 35 M.A.K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic, 109. 36 Ibid., 111. Halliday discusses register briefly at several points in Language as Social Semiotic. Connections between text and context are further investigated in M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Language, Context, and Text. Other discussions which have shaped the view of register taken here include Michael Gregory, "Aspects of Varieties Differentiation"; Gregory and Carroll, Language and Situation; Gregory, "Generic Situation and Register"; and Helen Leckie-Tarry, Language and Context. One further aspect of register theory, a close connection postulated between the functional organization of the lexicogrammar of languages and the linguistic expression of values of field, tenor, and mode, is assumed in this study. Halliday's An Introduction to Functional Grammar offers the most detailed grammar of English developed for discourse analysis within the systemic linguistic framework and will accordingly be used here. Unless otherwise noted, reference will be to the second edition. Unfamiliar terms will be glossed where necessary.

183 Notes to pages 16-20 37 These examples are taken from essays by Michael Toolan, Jonathan Webster, and Michael Halliday in Mohsen Ghadessy, ed., Registers of Written English. For an example of register analysis at a degree of delicacy appropriate to literary text, see Halliday's analysis of two lines from Ben Jonson's "To Celia" in Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Language, Context, and Text, 16-26. Register studies aim to achieve the kind of typology of styles against which Louis T. Milic argues in "Against the Typology of Styles." 38 A.R. Bex, "Genre as Context," 7. While I do not accept all of Bex's criticisms of register theory, it is because I agree strongly with his conclusion - "Literature clearly does have a function within society in that it simultaneously constructs alternative realities ... while drawing attention to the medium in which these alternatives are constructed" (13) that I use register theory to discuss the social function of language in Clarissa. 39 When speaking to Clarissa, Lovelace has referred to Mr Harlowe's concern with "his prerogative, or his authority" and "the imaginary prerogative he was so unprecedentedly fond of asserting" (168), both standard usages. He does not know that Clarissa has already, in an agonized recognition of her father's failures, exclaimed to Anna, "But oh! this prerogative of manhood!" (82), or that Anna has referred to Mr Harlowe as "Old AUTHORITY" (331). 40 Richardson's coining of new words in Clarissa has been discussed by Donald L. Ball, "Richardson's Resourceful Wordmaking." 41 The largest domain of language in the novel which will not be discussed is religious language. 42 Speech is regularly this far removed from the immediate situation in the novel (here, Anna writing to Clarissa), a feature which complicates reading more than is usually acknowledged. The importance of such recycling of speech to linguistics was first pointed out in V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (a study singled out for praise by Roman Jakobson), and its importance for novels was raised by Bakhtin. In their preface to this paperback reissue of their translation, Matejka and Titunik list published discussions of the work's authorship (which others have attributed to Bakhtin, or divided between Bakhtin and Volosinov). This passage in Clarissa, incidentally, makes the first association of "Lovelace" and "how far he can go"; that it is made by Hickman is a strategy readers might consider, as Anna does Hickman here, "either very moral or very cunning" (213), or perhaps both. 43 When Lovelace asks that Belford return a letter in which, although raving through much of it, he has begun to reflect seriously on his

184 Notes to pages 21-3

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47 48 49 50

treatment of Clarissa, Belford tells him not to destroy the letter, because "the same dialect may one day come in fashion with you again" (1434). In the register of moral decorum I include the ranges of meanings Carey Mclntosh and Elizabeth McAndrew have discussed as "courtlygenteel" and "moral didactic" language respectively. See Carey Mclntosh, Common and Courtly Language, 123-30 and "Quantities of Qualities"; Elizabeth McAndrew, "Courtly-Genteel or Moral-Didactic? A Response to Carey Mclntosh," 155-9. As their terms suggest, Mclntosh interprets the style as a social dialect, McAndrew interprets it as a register. The first paragraph of Clarissa's first letter in the novel (41) is a good example of this register. Studies of style in Clarissa (and studies with substantial comment on it) other than those mentioned in previous notes include William J. Farrell, "The Style and the Action in Clarissa"; A.M. Kearney, Samuel Richardson, 52-62; Samia Fahmy Ishak, "A Stylistic Study of the Language of Richardson's Clarissa"; and Ira Konigsberg, Narrative Technique in the English Novel, 62-78. Gopnik makes this point as follows: "The brilliance of Richardson's handling of style lies in the fact that ... it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the 'real' Lovelace from his poses merely by observing the styles associated with his action because these styles are in a tense, ironic relationship with one another. This applies to Clarissa's language as well ... Much of the artistic significance of the stylistic complexities of Clarissa lies in the fact that they prevent the different roles of the principal characters from being separated and polarized in the action" (A Theory of Style and Richardson's "Clarissa," 77). This phenomenon is interpreted in more extreme terms by Terry Castle, who asks, "For what is Richardson's fiction itself if not a great, dizzyingly recursive structure, where opposites mingle and the truth is always double? ... Invariably appallingly, antitheses collapse in the fictional world: escape and entrapment, life and death, body and soul, black and white, angels and women - all become curiously indistinguishable" ("Lovelace's Dream," 39). Ruqaiya Hasan, "The Ontogenesis of Ideology: An Interpretation of Mother-Child Talk," in Ways of Saying: Ways of Meaning, 133. Ruqaiya Hasan, "What Kind of Resource Is Language?" in Ways of Seeing: Ways of Meaning, 33. M.A.K. Halliday, Foreword in David Birch and L.M. O'Toole, eds., Functions of Style, ix. William Beatty Warner, Reading "Clarissa." Tom Keymer reminds us that it was apparently Sarah Fielding who first pointed out that most critical responses to the novel have been anticipated in it. Richardson's "Clarissa" and the Eighteenth-Century Reader, 218.

185 Notes to pages 23-6 51 See Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers, and Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa, for criticism from other theoretical perspectives, and Patricia McKee, Heroic Commitment in Richardson, Eliot and James, for a significantly different deconstructive reading. 52 Terry Eagleton's argument that "Clarissa's writing is 'masculine' whereas Lovelace's is 'feminine'" (The Rape of Clarissa, 35) and the paragraphs developing it provide a good example. I take April London's (understandable) exasperation with this kind of discussion as representative: "novels are cultural artefacts as well as linguistic exercises" ("Enclosing Clarissa," 280). 53 The tenor of such discussions can be judged from the essays in Murray Brown, ed., Refiguring Richardson's "Clarissa," and Albert J. Rivero, ed., New Essays on Samuel Richardson. 54 Charlotte Sussman, "T Wonder Whether Poor Miss Sally Godfrey Be Living or Dead/" 89. 55 Reasons for developing this historicism and methods for pursuing it are offered in Robert D. Hume, "Texts within Contexts." Because Hume's methods of textual analysis - "New Criticism or close reading" (92) and its "converse," "Deconstructive reading," which aims "to locate [a text's] omissions, suppressions, and contradictions" (93) - are not integrated with "the application of context" through "Historicist reading" (93), there is a risk of circling (Hume's term) between complementary but unhelpfully incompatible perspectives. 56 Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers, 62-3; 63^. 57 Janet E. Aikins, "The Power of Clarissa," 198-9. 58 That we do not have access to "actual" eighteenth-century conversations, as opposed to fictional dialogue, does not mean, despite the acknowledged differences between "conversation" and "dialogue" (as surveyed, for instance, with extreme conclusions in Lennard J. Davis, "Conversation and Dialogue"), that twentieth-century research is irrelevant. 59 The description of modes of speech and thought presentation used here follows that of Leech and Short, Style in Fiction, 318-51. Leech and Short's distinction of presenting and reporting divides the range of options differently from Halliday's distinction of quoting and reporting; I have used it here because it illustrates clearly the way in which relative prominence or freedom of speech in Lovelace's account expresses his sense of the different degrees of power in the scene. (Because Dorcas's speeches, although in the freest form, are responses to Clarissa's questions, they express Clarissa's power rather than suggesting that Dorcas has any authority of her own.) Halliday's account (in An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 227-51) does not go into the same degree of detail as that by Leech and Short and does not analyse

186 Notes to pages 27-34 instances from literary texts, but it could be used to argue the same point. Because it has so often been discussed with reference to the representation of consciousness, the main form of free indirect style (widely recognized in eighteenth-century English texts) is free indirect thought, which Margaret Anne Doody and John Bender see emerging as a narrative technique late in the eighteenth century (Doody, "George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel," and Bender, "Prison Reform and the Sentence of Narration"). Following the lead of Alfred McDowell ("Fielding's Rendering of Speech in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones") and Anne Waldron Neumann ("Free Indirect Discourse in the Eighteenth-Century Novel"), I use the category "free indirect discourse" to include free indirect thought and free indirect speech, and I consider both as significant largely in relation to other options for presenting speech and thought, not as narrative techniques in themselves. In Neumann's essay, the category of free indirect discourse is expanded to include all language which can, through its association with more than one character, be read as Bakhtin's "doubly-voiced speech." An essential point of departure for future work on this topic is Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction. 60 Clarissa uses the familiar (and, for educated speakers in the 17405, increasingly archaic, vulgar, or speaker-specific) "thee" when, indignantly, she addresses Lovelace as a distant inferior, rejecting his advances and indicating her own moral superiority. It is better regarded as one aspect of Clarissa's similarity to (or borrowing from) earlier tragic heroines than as an indication that the practice was typical of speakers of her social standing and education. In Lovelace's letters to Belford, use of "thee" and "thou" in theory follows their agreement not to resent whatever is said in this style, which for its ideal of noble plain dealing Richardson calls "Roman" (142). (I do not know of any other texts in which such a notion is used.) In practice, Lovelace addresses Belford as "thou" when treating him with contempt, and while Belford uses it in some appeals to Lovelace, this can be because he writes in frank libertine familiarity, or because he claims moral superiority. The classic study of the interpersonal significance of the choice of you/thou and their analogues in other languages is R. Brown and A. Gillman, "The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity." 61 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1660-1740, 380, quoted in Sussman, "The Married Woman and the Rise of the Novel," 88. CHAPTER TWO

1 M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Cohesion in English, 22. 2 J.R. Martin, English Text, 521.

187 Notes to pages 34-7 3 Ibid., 509. 4 This philosophy of language is discussed in Nicholas Hudson, "The Individual and the Collective in Eighteenth-Century Language Theory." 5 Anthony Winner, "Richardson's Lovelace," 58^. 6 Proverbs are considered as instances of restricted code in Roger D. Abrahams, "A Rhetoric of Everyday Life," esp. 59. Bernstein's work is frequently misunderstood and misrepresented in sociolinguistics (on this, see Paul Atkinson, Language, Structure and Reproduction), his theory of code rarely cited in the subdiscipline now settling on the name "historical sociolinguistics." There is a brief discussion in Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Suzanne Romaine, "Some Questions for the Definition of 'Style' in Socio-Historical Linguistics," 17-18; one brief, dismissive mention in Tim William Machan and Charles T. Scott, eds., English in Its Social Contexts, 174; and one mention only in Carey Mclntosh, Common and Courtly Language, una. I will introduce and apply the earliest version of code theory, developed in the 19603, because it is both accessible and sufficient for my purposes. For the later, more complex development of the theory, see Bernstein's vols. 3 and 4 of Class, Codes and Control. 7 James Obelkevich, "Proverbs and Social History," esp. 55-9. 8 The Guardian, edited with an introduction and notes by James Calhoun Stephens, 112. 9 Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, 4: 1407. The letter is dated 27 September 1749. J.H. Neumann has shown that Chesterfield himself occasionally uses proverbs without commenting on their appropriateness, in "Chesterfield and the Standard of Usage," 474-5. 10 Jonathan Swift, A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 4: 102. 11 Ibid. Swift's use of proverbs and his attitude toward the genre are discussed in Mackie L. Jarrell, "The Proverbs in Swift's Polite Conversation," and W.B. Carnochan, "Notes on Swift's Proverb Lore." The false grounds on which Wagstaff claims that the proverb should be "resumed out of vulgar hands" at once allow the genre a merit Swift believed it really had and satirize the vacuous but "polite" speakers on whose behalf the claim is made. This reading of Swift's attitude toward proverbs is consistent with Obelkevich's suggestion that "when the bias of learned culture passed from wisdom to knowledge and from the Ancients to the Moderns, proverbs were left stranded" ("Proverbs and Social History," 58). 12 John Hughes, "Of Style," in Poems on Several Occasions, i: 253. 13 The Tatler, edited with an introduction and notes by Donald F. Bond, 2:97.

18 Notes to pages 37-41 14 The Spectator, edited with an introduction and notes by Donald F. Bond, 4: 306. It is worth noting in this context that Daniel Defoe uses proverbs quite unselfconsciously in The Complete English Tradesman (1726). 15 This is probably the liberty that Lady Mary considered so shocking and strange. 16 Basil Bernstein, "Postscript," Class, Codes and Control, 264. Except for the postscript, this collection (to which all future reference will be made) reprints the papers in Bernstein's Class, Codes and Control, vol. i (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). 17 Bernstein, "A Socio-linguistic Approach to Socialization: With Some Reference to Educability," Class, Codes and Control, 175. For an introduction to Ruqaiya Hasan's research into mother-child interaction, see "The Ontogenesis of Ideology: An Interpretation of Mother-Child Talk," in her Ways of Saying: Ways of Meaning, 133-51. 18 Bernstein, "A Socio-linguistic Approach to Social Learning," Class, Codes and Control, 150. The evidence presented above that proverbs persisted among tradesmen in the early eighteenth century suggests that they performed just such a role, defining, reinforcing, and symbolizing group solidarity. 19 Terry Threadgold, "Changing the Subject," in Ross Steele and Terry Threadgold, eds., Language Topics, 2: 559.1 have passed over several complexities in Threadgold's discussion which are not strictly relevant to my argument. As two of the most frequent users of restricted coding are the aristocratic Lord M. and his presumptive heir - who prefers social relations in which inferiors, such as Joseph Leman, implicitly defer to him - it is tempting to read the novel as opposing middle-class elaboration to the more restricted styles of their social superiors and inferiors, who in traditional societies understand one another better than either understands the urban middle class. 20 In Bernstein, restricted and elaborated code and positional and personal orientation are independent variables: the present discussion simplifies for reasons of length. There is a brief introduction to elaborated and restricted code in their relation to person-oriented and positionoriented families in Jenny Cook-Gumperz, Social Control and Socialization, 8-18. The relevance of the personal/positional distinction to Clarissa has been suggested briefly by Ramona Denton, who refers to Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols - itself inspired by the work of Bernstein - in "Anna Howe and Richardson's Ambivalent Artistry in Clarissa," 58. With the exception of Terry Threadgold's study of Chaucer and Pope (referred to below) and Roger Fowler's use of Bernstein (with reservations) in a brief reading of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers in his Linguistics and the Novel, 115-22, there have been few other

189 Notes to pages 41-3 analyses of code in literary texts. If the categories of the theory are used to understand relations between speakers and the processes by which social groups are constituted, rather than in reductive characterization of individuals and groups (a misuse of the theory wherever it is done), and if we remember that the precise linguistic markers of "restriction" and "elaboration" and the meanings made through them vary from text to text, they should prove illuminating. 21 Proverbs or turns of expression attributed to Lord M. appear on pp. 416, 449, 633, 700, 701, 814, 863, 973, 1025, 1027, 1032, 1431, and 1436. Lovelace's own citations of proverbs appear on pp. 676, 678, 687, 731, 761, and 912. 22 The term "usuality" is Halliday's. Mood and modality are important systems of choice in the interpersonal function of language. Mood is a resource for structuring texts as exchanges. It sets up the roles of giving and demanding information or goods and services through the options of statement and question (giving and demanding information, in the form of a proposition) and offer and command (giving and demanding goods and services, in the form of a proposal). See Halliday, Introduction to Functional Grammar, chapter 4, esp. 68-71. These options are realized through clause types traditionally referred to as declarative, interrogative, and imperative: these terms will be used in this study. Modality, realized through the presence or absence of modal auxiliaries ("might," "may," "can," "could"), expresses "the speaker's judgement of the probabilities, or the obligations, involved in what he is saying" (Halliday, Introduction to Functional Grammar, 75). Modalized clauses express degrees of commitment between simple positive and simple negative, and "modality" is often used in clauses giving or demanding information (declaratives and interrogatives). The modal auxiliaries and related modal adjuncts (such as "perhaps," "probably," and "indeed") also enable a similar scale of choices (referred to as "modulation") for expressing degrees of inclination or obligation in clauses offering or demanding goods and services. For Halliday's further discussion of modality, see An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 88-92, 354-63 and "Functional Diversity in Language, As Seen from a Consideration of Modality and Mood in English." 23 M.A.K. Halliday, in "The De-Automatization of Grammar," analyses foregrounding in the interpersonal metafunction, interpreting it as raising the issue of social obligation "as something that has to be accepted, but that also is associated with opinions, interpretations and conflicts." "But what is foregrounded [in the passage analysed] is not simply the issue of obligations and their central role as the focus of negotiation and dispute. It is also the nature of dialogue itself, the interactive process whereby such obligations are acted out and defined. They are not

190 Notes to pages 44-8

24

25

26

27

28

and cannot be functions of the individual, but come into being only in the course of, and as a necessary concomitant of, the exchange of symbols; because the symbols themselves have a dual semiotic role, functioning both as instrument (mediating in the exchange of goods-&services) and as object (constituting the exchange of information), the speaker's commitment to his part in the exchange is at the same time a commitment to the modes of validity enshrined in the social semiotic, the kinds of yes and no on which the social order ultimately rests" (148-9). James Grantham Turner, "Lovelace and the Paradoxes of Libertinism," 73-4. As will be discussed more fully in chapter 6, Lovelace strives for a mental and emotional, rather than a physical, mastery of Clarissa because he believes victory in that mode will be less at risk of being prevented or undone by physical contingencies. Mr Harlowe also uses elaborated code in this interview, although because the clearest example is reported rather than quoted - "he was pleased to withdraw, ... saying that he would not hear me thus by subtlety and cunning aiming to distinguish away my duty, repeating that he would be obeyed" (65) - the strongest impression is of restriction. Another of Mr Harlowe's genres for control, the curse, which Abrahams associates with proverbs, taunts, and boasts as attempts "to induce future action through the establishment of the speaker as arbiter of values" ("A Rhetoric of Everyday Life," 56), is discussed in Peter Hynes, "Curses, Oaths, and Narrative in Richardson's Clarissa." Because the exercise of personal judgment is being carried out through elaborated code, there is a cruel appropriateness to Arabella mocking Clarissa's "judgement" of which clothes and jewels will best adorn her in marriage to Solmes (203-4). We understand this only when we supplement the passage from her grandfather's will that Clarissa quotes at Anna's request early in the novel (53) with Anna's comment that he knew "the family-failing," which he shared (128), and Belford's comment on Clarissa's being enabled to make a will of her own because her grandfather hoped "to create respect to her; as he apprehended that she would be envied" (1191). In King Lear, act i, scene i, Lear's sudden demand for explicit declarations of love by his daughters draws profuse elaboration from Goneril and Regan, but from Cordelia "nothing." When Cordelia is forced to speak, she can only invoke obligations inherent in her relationship to Lear by simply stating the terms of relationship (father and daughter) and depending on everyone present to retrieve from the context (which includes their memory of the past) the meaning which she is oriented to expressing only implicitly. Like Clarissa, Cordelia remains loyal to a

191 Notes to pages 48-50 form of family organization that has suddenly vanished; she is even more strongly attached than Clarissa to the style of meaning that has vanished with it. 29 Compare Cordelia's insistence that Lear not kneel to her: "O, look upon me, sir, / And hold your hand in benediction o'er me. / [No, sir,] you must not kneel" (4.7.56-8). 30 Clarissa's reaction to the news of her father's curse well illustrates that not all the most important ideologies in the novel are expressed through generalization. Nowhere is there a statement indicating the importance of filial duty and affective relations between parents and children as clearly as David Hume does in book j of A Treatise of Human Nature. In the course of discussion in part i, section i, Hume gives an instance "wherein this character of moral good or evil is the most universally acknowledged. Of all crimes that human creatures are capable of committing, the most horrid and unnatural is ingratitude, especially when it is committed against parents, and appears in the more flagrant instances of wounds and death. This is acknowledg'd by all mankind, philosophers as well as the people" (A Treatise of Human Nature, 518). Clarissa is not, of course, a parricide, but her sense of the enormity of what she has done in allowing Lovelace to persuade her to leave Harlowe Place indicates that she shares Hume's view and that we should not interpret remorse at her filial ingratitude (which is a factor in her rejection of Lovelace's proposals of marriage) as caused by extreme punctilio or a defect in her character. 31 Clarissa has no problem with sexuality: her physical location through much of the novel expresses solidarity with sexually exploited women. In his discussion of the remarkably consistent and surprisingly distinct patterns in Lovelace's and Clarissa's habitation of London, Edward Copeland points out that after the rape she lives and writes and dies in Covent Garden, centre of prostitution and site of her ruin ("Remapping London"). 32 Janet Todd has written perceptively on the limitations to Anna and Clarissa's friendship in the chapter on Clarissa in her Women's Friendship in Literature, 6-68. 33 Restricted code is thus the mode of language in which to appeal to the Harlowes, as Parson Brand does through a high-prestige version, prolix, highly implicit (and thus restricted-code) Latin quotation which he assumes they will read as a sign of intellectual distinction; and it is the mode in which to resist them. 34 Threadgold, "Changing the Subject," 557. 35 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 199; John Richetti, "Popular Narrative in the Early Eighteenth Century: Formats and Formulas," in J.M. Armistead, ed., The First English Novelists, 33 (the point is made of earlier

192 Notes to pages 51-2 heroines, but applies equally to Clarissa); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800; Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family; Katherine Sobba Green, The Courtship Novel 17401820; Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction. 36 Bernstein, "Education, Symbolic Control, and Social Practices," in The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse, 133-64. The discussion is highly schematic and draws upon Durkheim's account of medieval education. CHAPTER THREE

i The complex semantic history of the word "sentiment" presents special difficulties. Although many of the instances of "sentiments" cited in this study can be read as including the sense "expression of feeling," it seems reasonable to assume that when Richardson's characters make "moral sentiments" (pronounce reflections) they are setting out what they consider to be leading truths on a topic (expressing the results of their thinking on it) rather than expressing what they "feel," which would be to declare their "sentiments" in the twentieth-century sense of the term. Later in the eighteenth century the senses of "judgment" and "feeling" that for Richardson were still intertwined in "sentiment" drifted apart, and "sentiment" came to be associated only with the latter. In his study of Hume's use of the word "sentiment," R.F. Brissenden quotes a passage in which Thomas Reid seems to be resisting this development: "Authors who place moral approbation in feeling only, very often use the word sentiment, to express feeling without judgment. This I take ... to be an abuse of a word. Our moral determinations may, with propriety, be called moral sentiments. For the word sentiment, in the English Language, never, as I conceive, signifies mere feeling, but judgment accompanied by feeling" (Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man [1788], 7; quoted in Brissenden, "'Sentiment,'" 106). For other studies of the word "sentiment" in the eighteenth century, see Erik Erametsa, A Study of the Word "Sentimental" and of Other Linguistic Characteristics of Eighteenth Century Sentimentalism in England; R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress; Jean Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility; John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability; and Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel. The following selections from Johnson's definitions of "sentiment," "sentence," "maxim," and "reflection" set out what one acute observer considered to be involved in the activity. A "sentiment" is defined as (i) "Thought; notion; opinion" or (2) "The sense considered distinctly from the language or things; a striking sentence in a composition." Various forms of "sentence" contain the notions of morality, brevity, and force: "sententious" is defined as (i) "Abounding with short sentences, axioms, and maxims, short and energetick"; "sententiously" is "hi short

193 Notes to pages 52-3 sentences; with striking brevity"; "sententiousness" is "Pithiness of sentences; brevity with strength"; and the two relevant senses of "sentence" are (3) "A maxim; an axiom, generally moral" and (4) "A short paragraph; a period in writing," the one definition in all of these that would describe Richardson's longer sentiments. The definition of "maxim" adds explicit mention of generality: "An axiom; a general principle; a leading truth." Several of the senses of "reflection" are relevant, suggesting the process by which "reflections" are produced, their quality, and their function: (4) "Thought thrown back upon the past, or the absent, on itself," (5) "The action of the mind upon itself" (with a citation from Locke), (6) "Attentive consideration," and (7) "Censure." The similarity of all these definitions suggests an aspect of experience realized through closely related items of what can be treated as a single lexical set. The subsequent discussion will explain its use of the terms "moral sentiment" and "maxim." "Maxim" and "moral sentiment" were used interchangably as late as Theodore Buckley's "literal" translation in 1850 of Aristotle's Rhetoric, where in chapter 21 of book 2 "maxim" translates the Greek "gnome" and "Of Moral Sentiments" is the chapter heading (169-74). 2 Compare, for instance: "The high moral character of these books [the novels], and the admirable observations on every possible social duty and virtue poured out in the letters of the unfortunate Pamela and Clarissa, certainly offer a splendid field for such a collection. The sentiments are unexceptionable, the moral tone is commendable, and the straightforwardness and absence of satire are entirely characteristic" (John Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making, 201-2); "even in unified novels like Clarissa Harlowe and Tom Jones, brilliant works of the imagination though they are, the author's shadow keeps intruding itself between the reader and the imaginative world of the novel" (Irma Z. Sherwood, "The Novelists as Commentators," 124-5); and "A narrow stultifying conventional morality is projected by a language of proverbs and moral and instructive sentiments ... [which] pervade the novel and give it its moral and didactic impact" (Irwin Gopnik, A Theory of Style and Richardson's "Clarissa," 68-9). 3 See J. Paul Hunter, "Didacticism: The Biases of Presentism and the Question of Pleasure," in Before Novels. 4 Its full title is "A Collection Of Such of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Contained In The Preceding History, As are presumed to be of General Use and Service. Digested under Proper Heads. With References to the Volume, and Page, where each Sentiment, Caution, Aphorism, Reflection, or Observation, is to be found" (8: 309). 5 Samuel Richardson, A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, in vol. 3 of Samuel Richardson's Published Commentary on "Clarissa," 1747-65. For clarity in subsequent discussion I shall refer to this

194 Notes to pages 53-4 volume as the Collection and to the table included in the third edition as the "Collection." I shall refer to non-proverb generalizations in the novel as "moral sentiments" and I shall refer to the generalizations included in the Collection as "maxims." 6 There is a surprising instance of this attitude in the conclusion to Eaves and Kimpel's biography: "For anyone interested in literature, the apparently complete divorce between the author of Clarissa and the kindly but slightly ridiculous printer who collected The Moral and Instructive Sentiments makes Richardson an especially good example of the creative mind at work, unsupported by learning, analytic intelligence, or even much experience, and thus thrown back upon its own native strength" (Samuel Richardson, 618). 7 When he proposed the idea in an essay first published in 1951, Alan Dugald McKillop was almost alone in thinking that "when Richardson is at his best there is an organic connection" between the reporting of conflict and the offering of comment (in "Epistolary Technique in Richardson's Novels," in John Carroll, ed., Samuel Richardson, 146). Michael Bell points out that "the remarks of Clarissa's family reflect the response of many readers to parts of this novel, and to sentimentalist literature more generally, that we are being subjected to an overwhelming moral pressure against which there is no appeal" ("Richardson: Sentiment as Principle," in The Sentiment of Reality, 36). John A. Dussinger, "Masters and Servants," and his Introduction and Ann Jessie Van Sant's Afterword to the Clarissa Project facsimile reprint of the Collection (in Samuel Richarson's Published Commentary on "Clarissa," 1747-65) have begun serious critical discussion. The extent to which attitudes have changed is suggested by Angus Ross, who, in the introduction to his edition, calls the separated and collected general statements the static side of Richardson's fiction and points to "a contrasting, dynamic side ... where all the sentiments, the arrangements, the objects of contemplation are qualified and further complicated by the movement of the story, the languages of the correspondents, the process of reading. It is perhaps here that Richardson's supreme genius as a novelist lies" (24). 8 This was remembered by Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi and is cited in William R. Keast, "The Two Clarissas in Johnson's Dictionary," 43 ing. Richardson presented Johnson with a copy of the 1751 octavo edition, and Keast has shown that Johnson used the "Collection" as his source for many of the citations from Clarissa in the Dictionary. Johnson's critical praise may, therefore, be tinged with a lexicographer's gratitude, but Johnson hoped that the citations in the Dictionary might "give pleasure or instruction, by conveying some elegance of language, or some precept of prudence, or piety" ("The Plan of an English Dictionary," The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 10: 27) while they illustrated mean-

195 Notes to pages 54-6 ings, so he must have been interested in the collection of sentiments for itself and used it (according to Keast, from the letter D) because he approved of its contents. Johnson's reasons for selecting citations are discussed in Gwin J. Kolb and Ruth A. Kolb, "The Selection of Illustrative Quotations in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary," and in Robert de Maria, Jr, Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning. 9 This sphere is what Hugh Blair describes as the particular province of the new novels that succeeded the familiar novels of the time of Charles II and Louis XIV: "Relations have been professed to be given of the behaviour of persons in particular interesting situations, such as may actually occur in life, by means of which, what is laudable or defective in character and in conduct, may be pointed out, and placed in an useful light." Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2: 308. 10 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2: 132-3. 11 Sarah Fielding, Remarks on "Clarissa," 8. 12 Ibid., 32. 13 Aaron Hill, letter of 6 January 1741, quoted in Eaves and Kimpel's edition of Pamela, 15. Eaves and Kimpel note that Richardson "abridged" Pamela's piety in his revision of the novel. 14 "The heroes of [Clarissa] being almost all persons of distinction whose minds may be supposed to have received much greater improvements from education that that of a country girl, [Richardson] has had an opportunity to intersperse, in the course of the work, a great number of reflexions arising from an extensive knowledge of life, and a polite and cultivated taste, which renders it more elegant, and at the same time greatly more useful." [Albrecht Von Haller], review of Clarissa. 15 Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, 140. 16 Ibid., 7. Henry Fielding's own inclusion of generalization (as reflection by the narrator) in Tom Jones is discussed in Thomas Lockwood, "Matter and Reflection in Tom Jones." Lockwood takes the periodical essay as a model for "the relationship between its matter and its reflection" (227) and, suggesting that Fielding has revitalized "the essayist's role within what amounts to a new kind of essay" (227), goes on to praise "the energy of Fielding's comic and moral imagination that is constantly pressuring the plot to resolve itself into abstract meaning" (230). 17 In the preface to the third edition, he called the descriptions and reflections "proper to be brought home to the breast of the youthful reader" (i: viii; my italics) - a significantly stronger emphasis on moral instruction. 18 There is a brief discussion of casuistry in Hunter, Before Novels, 289-94 and a longer introduction in G.A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry. Ann Jessie Van Sant has suggested how readers of the Collection might apply its maxims in her Afterword to the Clarissa Project facsimile.

196 Notes to pages 56-60 19 Richardson, Clarissa: Prefaces, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript, 4. 20 Selected Letters, 2.2.2. In "The Fragmentation of Originals and Clarissa," 451, Jonathan Lamb has cited this passage as evidence that Simplicity the True Sublime was the book of Clarissa's meditations, but since Richardson does not mention the book of Job or the Psalms as sources for it, and since it is unlikely that he would have referred to it in these terms in a letter to Lady Bradshaigh, to whom he had presumably given a copy of his limited printing of Clarissa's Meditations in 1750, Lamb's claim must be regarded as unproven. 21 Selected Letters, 223-4. Prevost's editorial work must have been especially dismaying for its contradicting what Charlotte Grandison believes about the French. She concludes part of her account of Charles's and Harriet's wedding with "I am too sentimental. The French only are proud of sentiments at this day; the English cannot bear them: Story, story, story, is what they hunt after, whether sense or nonsense, probable or improbable" (Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, 3: 228). 22 The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, edited with an introduction by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, i, 98-9. Barbauld does not date this letter; Eaves and Kimpel date it November-December 1745 on the basis of a note on it in Richardson's hand. Hill's attempt to "lop" in the first stages is discussed in Eaves and Kimpel, "The Composition of Clarissa and Its Revision before Publication," 422-5. 23 Johnson made the recommendation in a letter of 9 March 1751, cited in William R. Keast, "The Two Clarissas in Johnson's Dictionary." 24 Selected Letters, 174-5. 25 Letter to Mark Hildesley, 21 February 1755, Correspondence, 5: 132. 26 Peter Sabor, "Richardson and His Readers," 170. 27 Letter of 26 November 1754, quoted in McKillop, Samuel Richardson, 218. McKillop also quotes an advertisement for a game which appeared five years after the Collection was published. This project (in which Richardson seems not to have been involved) printed "moral and diverting Sentiments" from the three novels on a set of cards "designed, while they amuse and entertain, to establish Principles of Virtue and Morality in the Minds of both Sexes" (218). The format seems intended to provoke discussion and debate outside the framework of a book altogether, a far remove from Clarissa but not from Richardson's purposes in writing it. 28 Ruqaiya Hasan, "Ways of Saying: Ways of Meaning," reprinted in her Ways of Saying: Ways of Meaning. 29 Hasan, "Ways of Saying, Ways of Meaning," 109. 30 Ibid., no. 31 For the higher semiotic plane of genre - what I have been calling "macro-genre" to distinguish it from the kinds of genres which are

197 Notes to pages 61-4 available as choices within the mode of discourse in registers - the styles of reading are institutionally established as styles of literary criticism. Implicit reading, assuming that essential meaning is to be sought in context, or in the immediate relation of text to the context of its production, produces modes of contextual or historicist criticism. Explicit reading, assuming that all essential meaning can be read in the language of the text and then the whole text contextualized directly at a higher semiotic level, produces allegorical modes of reading. The two styles of reading correspond to Northrop Frye's centrifugal and centripetal reading: centripetal reading treats the text as both a literary text (in Frye's sense) and a restricted code (in Bernstein's sense.) 32 But these possibilities are not infinite! There can be many readings, and many misreadings, but they all arise from the same sets of culturally constructed possibilities and so their number is in practice limited. 33 Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," in Mythologies, 154-5.I shall ignore aspects of this passage not relevant to the present argument. The opposition between proverb and maxim was important in eighteenthcentury France as well as England. There is an excellent discussion of this tradition and its importance for French novels, and much detailed criticism of narratological and formal linguistic studies of sententiousness, in a book from which this one has benefited greatly, Geoffrey Bennington's Sententiousness and the Novel. 34 Helen Leckie-Tarry, Language and Context, 14. Leckie-Tarry summarizes and quotes from Norman Fairclough, "Critical Descriptive Goals in Discourse Analysis," 744. 35 Hasan, "Ways of Saying, Ways of Meaning," 130. 36 John Guillory, Cultural Capital, 121, 132. Guillory builds on work by John Barrell. 37 Guillory, Cultural Capital, 38-133. Guillory paraphrases Bernstein's code theory in a passage quoted from Pierre Bourdieu (354^3), from whom Guillory draws the concept of cultural capital. 38 Quoted in Robert Preyer, "Victorian Wisdom Literature," 259. 39 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, book 7, ch. 2, quoted in Isobel Grundy, "Samuel Johnson," 15. Grundy also discusses attitudes to maxims in Goldsmith, Sheridan, Blake, and Hazlitt. W.A. Trotter, "Richardson and the 'New Lights,'" discusses Eliot's view of Richardson. Main's title does not name a form of generalization, just the qualities of the "sayings." 40 Virginia Woolf, "The Mark on the Wall," quoted in Grundy, "Samuel Johnson," 15. 41 Ibid., 28-9. 42 Because Lovelace's reflections will be heavily represented in later chapters, more attention will be paid to reflections by Clarissa in this chapter.

198 Notes to page 66 43 The following analyses of ergativity, and all later analyses of ergativity and transitivity, are based on the account of transitivity and ergativity in Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar, ch. 5, 106-75. Transitivity is the general term for how a language represents experience as processes, participants in processes and circumstances associated with processes. In English this organization of experience is realized most centrally in the clause. Material processes (processes of doing) are expressed by configurations of Actor, Process, Goal, and (optionally) circumstances. For example: I Anna

I copied

I the letter I in her closet. I

I Actor I Process I Goal

I circumstance I

Some material processes (intransitive ones) involve one participant, an Actor; others (transitive ones) involve two participants, Actor and Goal. Mental processes (processes of sensing) are expressed by configurations of Senser, Process, and Phenomenon (again with optional Circumstances). "The Senser is the conscious being that is feeling, thinking or seeing. The Phenomenon is that which is 'sensed' - felt, thought or seen" (Halliday, Introduction to Functional Grammar, 117). For example: I The letter

I pleased

I Phenomenon I Process

I Clarissa. I I Senser

I

Relational processes (processes of being) are more complicated, the most important distinction being the two modes of "attribution" and "identification." Attributive relational process clauses are analysed as structures of Carrier, Process, and Attribute (with optional circumstances), as in: I His intentions

I were

I honourable. I

I Carrier

I Process I Attribute

I

Identifying relational process clauses are analysed as structures of Token, Process, and Value (with optional circumstances), as in:

I The rakes' leader I was I Lovelace. I I Value

I Process I Token

I

199 Notes to page 66 (The functions of Identified and Identifier, which conflate in various ways with those of Value and Token, are expressed by patterns of intonation and will not be discussed in this study.) Halliday's glosses on Token and Value are a rough guide to the meaning they express Token he glosses as "sign, name, form, holder," Value as "meaning, referent, function, status, role" (Halliday, Introduction to Functional Grammar, first edition, 115). A less frequent clause type, behavioural, "processes of (typically human) physiological and psychological behaviour, like breathing, coughing, smiling, dreaming and staring" (Halliday, Introduction to Functional Grammar, 139), lies between material and mental processes. Like mental processes, it includes a conscious participant, but this is usually the only participant, and the process is often one of doing, as in material processes. Transitivity analysis requires different kinds of structures for the different kinds of process recognized in the language; ergativity analysis views all types of process as similar enough that one kind of structure can describe all of them. This structure is a configuration of Agent, Process and Medium, as in: I Anna

I sealed

I all her letters. I

I Agent I Process I Medium

I

There may also be more than one Agent involved, as in: I Clarissa

I makes

I Lovelace I abandon I his stratagem. I

I Agent (2) I Process I Agent (i) I Process

I Medium

I

The participant labelled "Agent (2)" is the effective or the "real" causer of the process; this function will be referred to as "external Agent." All of these examples have been independent clauses, but transitivity and ergativity structures also occur elsewhere, in dependent clauses, in embedded clauses, and in nominal groups. The two patterns of transitivity and ergativity are complementary; all clauses may be analysed in terms of both of them. Transitivity patterns concern extension - "The Actor [in material process clauses] is engaged in a process; does the process extend beyond the Actor, to some other entity, or not?" - while ergativity patterns concern causation - "Some participant is engaged in a process; is the process brought about by that participant, or by some other entity?" (Halliday, Introduction to

2oo Notes to pages 67-77

44

45

46

47 48

Functional Grammar, 162-3). The choice of analysing for transitivity or ergativity patterns will be determined by a consideration of which offers the more significant insight into the passages studied, and further distinctions will be introduced when necessary. As Halliday has shown for The Inheritors, the analysis of these patterns in a novel can reveal in a particularly clear form a writer's or a character's interpretation of experience and assumptions about the world. The one circumstance in which Clarissa allows that all of this might be bearable, "for such a man as she can approve," is consistent with the grammatical pattern of the woman being particularly associated with mental process; in the third edition the process is not one of judgment, but of affection, "love" (i: 207). Both "approve" and "love" connect, but do so in different ways, with Clarissa's declaration to Solmes four days later (also through a moral sentiment) that she cannot "esteem" him (159). Compare Hasan's comments on the cultural setting of middle-class English explicit style: "The assumption of shared knowledge and reliance upon it, which is a logical necessity for the successful operation of implicit style, is not encouraged in the majority of interactive environments. Ambiguity is an ever-present threat, therefore; explicitization is an imperative. There are few contexts in which the middle-class English speaker is free to assume complete rapport with others of his kind ... So, to put it sentimentally, the universe is a lonely place, where each one of us is an island unto himself" ("Ways of Saying, Ways of Meaning," 133). Richardson has been described as an "organic intellectual" of the (rising) English middle class (Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa, 3), yet this stylistic study of generalization in Clarissa suggests that a distinction can (and should) be drawn between a middle-class subject - isolated, tentative as often as tendentious, anxious - making the moral sentiments as they appear in the novels, and the bourgeois subject (in Barthes's sense) - confident, even aggressive in its claim that the truths it declares (not "has found," because that would imply historical contingency) are eternal and unchanging - toward which the Collection aims, even if, internally contradictory and tied to a living author, it stops short of it. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 3, in Complete Writings, 149. In the postscript to his study of reader response to Clarissa, Keymer argues that Richardson imposed the strenuous work he did on readers (especially in the first edition) so as to instruct them in "the art of life," and that he was able fully to develop "his aesthetic of authorial reticence" (Richardson's "Clarissa," 248) only when speaking of Sir Charles

2oi Notes to pages 77-9 Grandison, a work in which much less complex and contradictory meanings are at stake. 49 Jay Lemke, "Discourses in Conflict: Heteroglossia and Text Semantics," in James D. Benson and William S. Greaves, eds., Systemic functional Approaches to Discourse, 29-50, and Paul J. Thibault, "Narrative Discourse as a Multi-Level System of Communication" show something of Bakhtin's influence on social semiotics. His influence on stylistics is discussed in Katie Wales, "Back to the Future: Bakhtin, Stylistics and Discourse," in Willie van Peer, ed., The Taming of the Text, 176-92. 50 Donald R. Wehrs, "Irony, Storytelling, and the Conflict of Interpretations in Clarissa," 763. 51 M.M. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," 337. 52 Compare, for example, the potential audience for a heroic epistle in 1747 with the potential audience for Clarissa. Bakhtin discusses sentimental pathos near the end of "Discourse in the Novel," 394-9. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson point out that although the Russian and English words pafos/pateticheskoe and pathos/pathetic derive from the same Greek root, their meanings are not the same: "Whereas the English terms carry overtones of sadness and suggest a quality that arouses pity, sorrow, or compassion, common translations of Russian pafos include 'enthusiasm,' 'inspiration/ 'animation/ 'passionate ardor or fervor'" (Mikhail Bakhtin, 355). Several instances of "sentimental pathos" in the English sense, Belford's physical descriptions of women, will be discussed in chapter 5. 53 My aim here is to suggest the helpfulness of a Bakhtinian perspective •on Richardson: Bakhtin's stylistic history of the novel is not my concern, nor is the question of whether Richardson's novels might arguably fit Bakhtin's "second line" of development rather than his first, or even challenge that distinction. The statement that Pushkin's Eugene Onegin includes "the Richardsonian language and world of the provincial Tatiana" ("Discourse in the Novel," 329; see also 398n6i) suggests that Bakhtin reads Richardson through an early nineteenth-century perspective in which Sir Charles Grandison is mentioned most often and the stylistic image of his novels has been considerably simplified. Bakhtinian reading of Clarissa must rescue Richardson from Bakhtin's own over-schematic history of prose fiction, but the intricacies of Bakhtin's styles of argument and expression - which may explain why studies of Richardson usually invoke Bakhtin by brief citation of one or two favourite terms - make that a topic for another study. 54 Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," 398. 55 John Frow, "Voice and Register in Little Dorrit," 264. 56 Roger Fowler, "Polyphony and Problematic in Hard Times," 93.

202 Notes to pages 83-91 CHAPTER

FOUR

1 Anonymous, Critical Remarks, 38. 2 Eliza Haywood, Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, 151. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu presents a variant at the end of a discussion of Richardson, saying that she is not like those women who, lacking only "opportunity and impunity" to act on their desires, would be great rakes if they were men (Complete Letters, 3: 97). The three maxims of the rake's code are discussed by Mark KinkeadWeekes, Samuel Richardson, 179-82. 3 Harriet Byron touches on the idea in her own style, when she asks Mrs Shirley whether Lucy has overcome a first love in rejecting Mr Greville: "I half-mistrust the girls who have been disappointed of a first Love" (3: 389). 4 The lines he quotes, from Tyrannic Love, appear in Bysshe's anthology under the heading "Love" (ii: 21). The passage has an interesting history in its own right, seeming to take issue with a passage in Richard Flecknoe's Love's Kingdom: "Now Children, in a word to tell, / what noble Love is, (mark me well) / it is the counterpoise that mindes / to fair and vertuous things inclines; / it is the gust we have, and sence, / of every noble excellence; / it is the pulse, by which we know / whether our souls have life or no; / and such a soft and gentle fire, / as kindles and inflames desire, / until it all like Incense burns, / and unto melting sweetness turns." Richard Flecknoe, Loves Kingdom, a Trage-comedi/, with a Short Treatise on the English Stage, 17. Johnson suggests in his life of Dryden that the lines may partly describe his character: "Dryden's was not one of the 'gentle bosoms': Love, as it subsists in itself, with no tendency but to the person loved and wishing only for correspondent kindness, such Love as shuts out all other interest, the Love of the Golden Age, was too soft and subtle to put his faculties in motion" ("Life of Dryden," in Lives of the English Poets, i: 458). Johnson's analysis is an excellent gloss on what Clarissa understands by "love." 5 Halliday's account of grammatical metaphor is in Introduction to Functional Grammar, 340-67. "Metaphor is usually described as variation in the use of words: a word is said to be used with a transferred meaning. Here, however, we are looking at it from the other end, asking not 'how is this word used?' but 'how is this meaning expressed?' A meaning may be realized by a selection of words that is different from that which is in some sense typical or unmarked. From this end, metaphor is variation in the expression of meanings" (341). In this perspective, metaphor involves variation in grammatical forms as well as in lexis, and, in addition to the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, and synec-

203 Notes to pages 91-2 doche, it also includes such tropes as personification. Regarded as variation in the use of words, personification is achieved through words being used in unexpected grammatical roles, which give their referents human-like powers of action and mental process, allowing them to be assigned typically human attributes. As variation in the expression of meanings, it enables concise generalization of patterns of behaviour and succinct characterization of how one person influences another, all the while shifting attention (somewhat) away from the human figures involved. Halliday's perspective on grammatical metaphor, which is to relate metaphorical expressions to non-metaphorical expressions, or to other metaphorical expressions of closely related meanings, complements the approach to figurative language taken by literary critics. Both perspectives will be used in subsequent chapters: styles will be discussed both in relation to other styles which express related meanings and in terms of the contrasting meanings different characters use the same style to express. It is through relations between styles and relations between meanings that we can appreciate how characters struggle to enforce their own interpretations of events, and how Richardson conducts his detailed, exhaustive investigation of values through these conflicting interpretations. 6 Eliza Haywood, The Rash Resolve, 56. Following the lead of William Farrell, Margaret Anne Doody has compared Clarissa to earlier "novels of love and seduction" and found that Lovelace "often speaks and thinks in a Haywoodian manner" (A Natural Passion, 145), approaching Clarissa in the style of Haywood's lovers, and pronouncing reflections on love that sometimes echo Haywood's word for word. In addition to showing that these reflections are closely connected to the texture of the narrative, Doody argues that Richardson differs from other contemporary major English novelists because by drawing on minor novels and drama he developed a language of love, not just a language about love: "Using the style and vocabulary available to him, he is able to convey desire, warmth, tenderness, admiration, hostility. Like all attempts to convey such feelings the language is conventional to a certain degree, not least because Richardson is aware of the ironies involved in the love situation" (144). 7 Mental processes are divided into three subtypes, processes of perception (such as seeing and hearing), processes of affection (such as loving and hating), and processes of cognition (such as thinking, knowing, and remembering). 8 This separation of observer from observed is important also for the kind of pleasure Lovelace seeks as a libertine (discussed in chapter 6); here it enables him to use "seduction" as a mode of scientific experiment, a

204 Notes to pages 93-5 dimension of the process well discussed in Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, 60-82. 9 Anna may be remembering Pope's conjunction of lap-dogs and husbands in The Rape of the Lock and the sexually suggestive lap-dogs in the paintings of Richardson's friend Hogarth. The other term of the contrast appears in Lovelace's citations of Dryden's lion "slumb'ring in the way" (165) and Rochester's "nobler" lion which "invade[s] / When appetite directs" (742). Clarissa remembers this metaphor in Mad Paper in, in which "a young lion, or a bear ... or a tiger" given to a lady follows her "like a lap-dog ... all over the house" (891) while it is young. 10 Clarissa's "mighty" has the ironic force Johnson attributes to "mighty" in adjective-modifying roles (in which, he says, it is "Not to be used but in very low language"). Compare Mrs Jewkes's "Mighty Piece of Undone" (Pamela, 169), Dryden's "Jove left the blissful realms above, / Such is the pow'r of mighty love" (cited by Johnson to illustrate adjectival sense 3, "Powerful by influence"), but also Sally Martin's "once I too wept mightily" (1061). 11 The intransitive activity of root-taking, "vegetable love" appears later when Clarissa opposes the charge that virtue is affectation with the claim that she is moved by "Principles, that are in my mind; that I found there; implanted, no doubt, by the first gracious Planter" (596), and Lovelace's subsequent recognition that "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" (657). 12 Ironically, this is not always the case; in one of Lovelace's sudden proposals, the "ecstatic nonsense" (493) is spoken involuntarily. William Farrell has argued that Lovelace usually approaches Clarissa in a restrained style, which contrasts with the stereotyped love language in which he refers to her in letters to Belford, except in moments of triumph or desperation, when the pressure of the situation forces his true feelings to show through ("The Style and the Action in Clarissa"). Although Lovelace does not approach Clarissa with extremes of hyperbole in the early stages of the novel - she remarks when making one of her reflections on compliments that "Mr Lovelace, the least of any man whose letters I have seen, runs into those elevated absurdities. I should have been apt to despise him for it, if he did" (296) - she still hears enough of "promises" and "gratitude, of eternal gratitude" (296) to make her suspicious. A later reflection on compliment, made as a criticism of Tourville's conversation when she first meets him, is a good example of Clarissa speaking more obviously for Richardson. Tour-

205 Notes to pages 96-100 ville's words are not as significant for her happiness as Lovelace's are, her reflection on them is superfluous after the passages cited here, and her explanation of what compliments are assumes that the addressee is less familiar with them than Anna was assumed to be earlier: "Mr Tourville's conversation and address are insufferably full of those really gross affronts upon the understandings of our sex, which the moderns call compliments, and are intended to pass for so many instances of good breeding, though the most hyperbolical, unnatural stuff that can be conceived, and which can only serve to show the insincerity of the complimenter; and the ridiculous light in which the complimented appears in his eyes, if he supposes a woman capable of relishing the romantic absurdities of his speeches" (544). 13 Clarissa sees through, or thinks she sees through, another stereotype in this scene: that of a disappointed lover falling on his sword. She says she "was prepared to have despised him for supposing me such a poor novice as to be intimidated by an artifice so common" (377), but she does not expect, and is disturbed by, his offer to enter Harlowe Place and settle matters with her family at once. Reading his behaviour (correctly) as including an assessment of her knowledge, she does not expect that, in dispensing with a stereotype she understands, he might turn its masculine violence on someone else. Richardson does give Lovelace this stereotype later in the novel: when he thinks that Clarissa has stabbed herself with a concealed weapon, during their first meeting after the rape, Lovelace says he "was upon the point of drawing my sword to dispatch myself" (915). 14 In Sir Charles Grandison, repeated reference to Milton's Adam and Eve develops this ideal allusively; in Clarissa, the allusions to Paradise Lost are more often to Eve and Satan. Comparing himself to Satan, Lovelace throws off his Hampstead disguise when touched by Clarissa's "celestial eye" (772), although in a later description of one of his appeals to Clarissa at Hampstead, Lovelace resumes Satan's position just before being touched by Ithuriel's spear in his earlier quotation: "When we were in the garden, I poured my whole soul into her attentive ear; and besought her returning favour" (867). For an excellent discussion of how these ideals developed in English and European literature from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, see Jean Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility. 15 In his study of verbal networks in Clarissa, Irwin Gopnik argues that "generosity" is the most numerous and important of the key words in the novel (A Theory of Style, 90-2, 122-5). My own informal (and highly selective) concordance of key words in the same edition of the novel as Gopnik used (the Everyman version of the third edition) suggests that only the word "heart" is more frequent. Robert A. Erickson's The

206 Notes to pages 100-4 Language of the Heart, 1600-1750 culminates in a discussion of the thematic significance of this important pattern, part of it previously published as "Written on the Heart." 16 A theological analogue to this linguistic difference is the difference between strategies for raising Eden in the wilderness, for opening that "paradise within thee, happier far" promised to Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost (12: 587), and strategies for simply warding off further evil in a fallen world. 17 Lovelace has maintained this style through their previous conversation, even though his defence of his management of their meeting at Harlowe Place provoked Clarissa to write of him repeatedly with Anna's favoured execration, "wretch" (435-9). By making politeness a departure from Lovelace's usual range of terms of address, Richardson foregrounds the usual practice of his society, pushing it toward readers' conscious consideration by deautomatizing it within his text, showing why it should be the usual practice. Styles of reference and address will be discussed more fully in the following chapter. 18 Clarissa agrees that hypocrisy and dissimulation are "the most odious of all vices" (445). In a letter to Lady Echlin, Richardson described hypocrisy as "the lowest of all Vices, Ingratitude excepted" (letter of 10 October, 1754, Selected Letters, 316). 19 The collocation "good motions," which Lovelace describes as occurring in him - to Clarissa (445) and to Belford (163, 447, 451) - may also be taken in a theological sense, as the work of God in the soul, and so would subtly suggest more specialized knowledge than he wishes to admit. 20 The "ray of hope" "darting" is a wording Richardson also uses to suggest the work of grace in contexts of deathbed or suicidal despair. Belford later wishes he could have seen "one ray of comfort darting in upon [Belton's] benighted mind" (1243), and as she approaches the pond Pamela's bodily weakness gives "Time for a little Reflection, a Ray of Grace, to dart in upon my benighted Mind" (Pamela, 151). 21 It lengthened substantially the section of letter 121 between "Sunday morning" (454) and "Lady Betty in hers, expresses herself in the most obliging manner" (455). 22 William Beatty Warner, Reading "Clarissa," 202-8. 23 Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers, 57. "Her understanding is limited because she believes, innocently enough, in a correspondence between utterance and truth, between the outward sign and the inward reality. Clarissa's basic assumption is that words embody, absolutely and transparently, the inner life of the speaker" (67). Castle goes on to show how Clarissa fails to interpret the words of her family (72ff.), how all of her "accustomed models of intelligibility do not hold" (75), and she dis-

207 Notes to pages 104-6 cusses the ways in which Clarissa is defined and circumscribed, even forced to act and think by (or at least against) the terms of Anna's and Lovelace's discourses. I interpret this study of the different purposes for which characters exploit the conventional connections between sign and referent (which is what Castle means by "linguistic arbitrariness") as demonstrating not so much the "arbitrariness" of linguistic signs in themselves as what Bakhtin calls the dialogic quality of discourse. Although the relation of word and sound is arbitrary, words are connected with purposes for using them in ways that can be studied. The relation of linguistic "arbitrariness" and Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia is discussed in Jay Lemke, "Discourses in Conflict," in Benson and Greaves, eds., Systemic Functional Approaches to Discourse, 31-3. For a discussion of this problem relating Richardson's treatment of language failure to book 3 of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and to Tristram Shandy, see Tom Keymer, Richardson's "Clarissa" and the Eighteenth-Century Reader, 222-9. 24 Lovelace is called a Proteus only once in the first edition, much later, and by Belford (1243) not Clarissa. The much stronger suggestiveness of the allusion here, its capacity to indicate that Clarissa both knows Lovelace through it and yet is not fully aware of what this knowledge implies, represents a real improvement (moral and aesthetic) in revision. In my reading of this allusion I have been strongly influenced by A. Bartlett Giametti's "Proteus Unbound," and the chapter "Poets and Proteus" in his Play of Double Senses, 118-33. 25 See Margaret Anne Doody, "The Man-Made World of Clarissa Harlowe and Robert Lovelace." 26 A poem in Sir Charles Grandison (possibly by Richardson himself, according to Jocelyn Harris) celebrates this possibility in its last two verses: "My soul, with gratitude profound, / Receive a Form so bright! / And yet, I boast a bliss beyond / This angel to the sight. / / When charms of mind and person meet, / How rich our raptures rise! / The Fair that renders earth so sweet, / Prepares me for the skies!" (3: 274) After Clarissa has written to his family definitively rejecting their appeal on his behalf, Lovelace takes up this idea more seriously, asking Belford to tell her "that if SHE abandon me, GOD will" (1184) and begging her forgiveness (in a letter to her) on the grounds that "I am now awakened enough to think that to be forgiven by injured innocents is necessary to the Divine pardon; the Almighty putting into the power of such ... the wretch who causelessly and capitally offends them" (1185). 27 As is well known, Haywood participated in this reform herself, writing in The Female Spectator, for instance, a reflection which enables us to say that Clarissa, as well as Lovelace, "speaks and thinks in a Haywoodian

208 Notes to pages 107-12 manner": "Love in itself, when under the Direction of Reason, harmonizes the soul, and gives it a gentle, generous Turn" (The Female Spectator, i: 8; quoted in Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 196). Richardson's attempt to reform a related aspect of the ideologies of love and seduction will be discussed in a later chapter; Ballaster's "Conclusion: The Decline of Amatory Fiction: Re(de)fining the Female Form" (Seductive Forms, 196-211) shows how thoroughly the market for fiction had changed by the end of the eighteenth century. 28 Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, 5: 67-70. 29 The lineage of this convention in French prose fiction from Scudery through Lafayette to Marivaux is discussed in James S. Munro, "Richardson, Marivaux, and the French Romance Tradition." 30 Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, 82. 31 The repeated negative is made in Richardson's usual form, the now archaic inversion of Subject and Predicator, so there is no foregrounding by deviation from negation with auxiliary "do" ("you do not know"). This is important from the perspective of poetics because the repetition "know not" is an instance of what Kristeva (in her essay "The System and the Speaking Subject") calls the disturbance of the symbolic order of language by the transgressive, semiotic force of drives, but it is done by means Kristeva has overlooked, through patterning of resources available within the symbolic order. Kristeva's extended discussion of foregrounding by deviation in texts of the modernist avant-garde (Revolution in Poetic Language) has drawn considerable criticism for its apparent privileging of texts written mostly by men for small audiences. Provided it can learn to construe disruption through instances of foregrounding by pattern, and thus set in a larger context the foregrounding by deviation which Kristeva has interpreted with psychoanalytic theory, stylistics can rise to an important theoretical challenge and move one step closer to achieving a fully postmodern poetics. 32 Following Threadgold's recommendation of "the positive values of 'undecidability'" (Feminist Poetics, no), I would argue that it is not by positive, unqualified pronouncements that Richardson moves readers most deeply, but by this kind of intimation that rigidly enforced boundaries will collapse when characters trade what they know for what they can hope. CHAPTER

FIVE

1 Samuel Richardson, Pamela or, Virtue Rewarded, 30. 2 Kristina Straub, "Reconstructing the Gaze." Richardson's scope for changing the ideology of femininity encoded by men looking at

209 Notes to page 113 women is limited, Straub argues, because he works within a social system that hierarchizes all differences, "a social system in which some form of oppression is always implied" (430). 3 Samuel Richardson, letter to Lady Bradshaigh, 15 December 1748, Selected Letters, 104-5. 4 The third variable Richardson specifies, the mode of discourse (which is writing as opposed to speech), does not vary in the passages studied, so it will not be discussed further. Nancy J. Vickers, writing on an earlier "poetic tradition that, from the classics to the Renaissance moderns, had celebrated the beauties of a woman's body" (a related register, which the one studied here displaced in the novel), argues that as a male-dominated register, "the product of men talking to men about women," it was "shaped predominantly by the male imagination for the male imagination" ("'This Heraldry in Lucrece' Face/" 209). For a brief sketch of an aspect of the rake's register which will not be analysed here, a strain of wit and worldly wisdom drawn most probably from the published letters of such rakes as the Earl of Rochester, see Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion, 130-1. 5 James D. Benson and William S. Greaves point out that "The principal signalling of field is achieved through collocation, the patterned recurrence of certain lexical items in relatively close proximity with each other," and that most fields of discourse are signalled not by the presence of particular items but by a clustering of items ("Field of Discourse, 49). In discussions of lexis, items regularly collocated are referred to as a lexical set. Through studying the lexical items collocated with those for physical description of a woman's body it is possible to interpret how the female body is being valued within a wider semiotic system. 6 According to Lennard Davis, for instance, "Richardson's work demands that the reader continually be the voyeur, placed in much the same position as Lovelace or Mr. B in intercepting the letters of the heroines and penetrating their private discourse. The experience of reading Pamela or Clarissa is the experience of staring through the keyhole along with the libertine kidnappers. Bared bosoms, stolen kisses, and supine, helpless figures are the essence of Richardson's eroticism, and the reader of the work is placed within the text as voyeur" (Factual Fictions, 187-8). For a judicious discussion of how far charges of pornography are justified in the case of Pamela, see James Grantham Turner, "Novel Panic," esp. 82. 7 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun." See also E. Ann Kaplan, "Is the Gaze Male?" for a discussion of Mulvey which emphasizes that "the power of action

2io Notes to pages 114-15 and of possession" (30) is crucial to the male gaze but inaccessible to women who might wish to adopt it, an important point for understanding what is at stake in Lovelace's physical descriptions of Clarissa. 8 John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?" and Susanne Kappeler, "Why Look at Women?" Two kinds of gazing within Clarissa that this chapter does not consider are the looking by which Clarissa and Lovelace both desire to penetrate and so master each other (discussed by Leo Braudy, "Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa") and the gazing into Clarissa's downcast face which Lovelace fantasizes as the height of his triumph over her (601), which will be discussed in the following chapter. Beyond the limits of this discussion, the gazing on women studied here is to be connected with the gazing done by socially and politically powerful males in respect of their public roles. In addition to Straub's discussion of spectatorship as a mode of power from Descartes through Hobbes and the Spectator (420-3), see John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730-80, on literary treatments of the problem of who could establish, and from what viewpoint, an understanding of English society as unified in spite of its growing economic complexity, and John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, on the significance of spectatorship in the development of a modern conception of the self, adumbrated in novels and mobilized for social reform in the new prisons of the late eighteenth century. 9 I adopt the suggestive phrase of Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire, 11. 10 M.A.K. Halliday, Introduction to Functional Grammar, 106-75, recognizes three main types of process (and associated participants) through which English construes experience: material (processes of doing), mental (processes of sensing), and relational (processes of being). Mental processes are divided into three subtypes, processes of perception (such as hearing and seeing), processes of affection (such as loving and hating), and processes of cognition (such as thinking, knowing, and remembering). 11 Nominal groups are elements that function as Subject or Complement in the clause. They are composed of a Head (which is most often a noun but sometimes an adjective) and optional modifiers. Modifiers which follow the Head are called Qualifiers, and they are often dependent clauses. For further discussion see Halliday, Introduction to Functional Grammar, 179-96. 12 I assume that "charming umbrage" refers both to Clarissa's breasts and to the handkerchief covering them. Jocelyn Harris reads Lovelace's exclamation two paragraphs later ("How near, how sweetly near, the throbbing partners!") as a more explicit reference to Clarissa's breasts,

211 Notes to pages 115-20 but because Lovelace begins that paragraph by referring back to his account of his own transports when the gate first opened, I wonder if it is not a reference to their two hearts, which have never been so near as at this moment ("Grotesque, Classical and Pornographic Bodies in Clarissa," in Albert J. Rivero, ed., New Essays on Samuel Richardson, 113). For examples of moralizing male use of the idea of transgressive imagining, see the critics of Richardson cited in note 22 below, and Dr John Gregory, from whose gaze as deployed in A Father's Legacy to His Daughters women can find no refuge: "A fine woman shews her charms to most advantage, when she seems most to conceal them. The finest bosom in nature is not so fine as what imagination forms." Quoted in Tassie Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender, 22. 13 It is unclear why Richardson thought a critique of sonnet language was necessary, or why he thought it plausible that a modern rake like Lovelace, whose college tutor has spoken to him of "Alexander's Feast" as an acknowledged masterpiece (1146-7), should ever have made sonnets in what was an archaic and already much satirized style. For a brief discussion of the style's displacement from prose fiction, see Natascha Wurzbach, ed., The Novel in Letters, 4. 14 Turner's discussion of this description mentions only Clarissa's waxlike flesh and her clothes, reading the occurrence of such "feminine" detailed specification of clothing as an irruption of femininity within Lovelace's language: "The great seducer disappears in a cloud of Brussels lace and primrose-coloured paduasoy" (Turner, "Lovelace and the Paradoxes of Libertinism," 84). 15 It also recalls Clarissa's madness by echoing the words of her quotation from Hamlet, "I could a tale unfold - / Would harrow up thy soul!" (893), and is taken up later by Lovelace's claim (during his own madness) that "this high point of philosophy, to laugh and be merry in the midst of the most soul-harrowing woes, when the heart-strings are just bursting asunder, was reserved for thy Lovelace" (1310). These echoes show both how differently the characters confront their weakness and construct a self with which they can live in peace, and how closely related are their styles for doing so. 16 When another rake, Colonel Morden, applies the formula to Anna Howe to describe her strong feelings at the side of Clarissa's coffin, it is as if he cannot prevent the erotic dimension of the libertine register from disrupting the key of sentimental pathos in which he begins: "In a wild air, she clasped her uplifted hands together; and now looked upon the corpse, now up to Heaven as if appealing her woes to that? Her bosom heaved and fluttered discernible through her handkerchief" (1402). Apparently the man has no other language for describing a woman. Even Clarissa, when she describes her state of mind as

212 Notes to pages 121-3 she enters for an interview with her mother, presents it through this external view - "I went down ... approached her trembling and my heart in visible palpitations" (88) - rather than as a statement of feeling (as "I could feel my heart ... "). 17 Francis Plumer, A Candid Examination of the History of Sir Charles Grandison, 23. 18 Anonymous, Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa and Pamela, 39, 46. Near the end of the first part of David Simple, Fielding's narrator says that she has deliberately chosen not to describe the "Persons" of her characters (The Adventures of David Simple, 303). 19 Letter to Mrs Chapone, 6 December 1750, quoted in Selected Letters, i73n68. "Lady V" is Lady Vane, whose "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality" Smollett had included in Peregrine Pickle. 20 T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, "An Unpublished Pamphlet by Samuel Richardson," 405. 21 Ballaster discusses the scene in "Manl(e)y Forms: Sex and the Female Satirist," 231-4. 22 Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 156, 207. 23 Richardson's reading supports the later eighteenth-century reading of Behn, Manley, and Haywood as "negative precedents" to the novel of domestic virtue which became dominant (Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 198). A Jacobite Richardson has been construed by Margaret Anne Doody ("Richardson's Politics") and by Toni Bowers, in her discussion of Mrs Harlowe in The Politics of Motherhood, 201-5. John Dussinger's study of Richardson's relation to one of the most partisan electoral contests of the mid-eighteenth century, the Oxfordshire election of 1754 ("Clarissa, Jacobitism, and the 'Spirit of the University'"), suggests otherwise. 24 Eliza Haywood, Memoirs of a Certain Island, 76-7. 25 Male and female readers will respond differently to this description and others like it, but my primary concern in this chapter is with Richardson's attempt to change the male response modelled by Plumer. 26 In her discussion of this type of scene in Haywood, Doody points out that Lovelace assumes of Clarissa the meaning expressed through these Qualifiers - that the feelings informing the woman's body are already allied with the man's desire (A Natural Passion, 148). 27 Haywood, Memoirs of a Certain Island, 172. 28 John Richetti, "Popular Narrative," in J.M. Armistead, ed., The First English Novelists, 15. In an earlier study, Richetti suggested that the audience encouraged to fantasize was predominantly female. The passage Richetti comments on, from Manley's The New Atalantis, dwells on the woman communicating desire through all her features, but most especially through her eyes. The Haywood passages analysed here give more precise physical details. Richetti does not consider the political

213 Notes to pages 125-31 significance of the passage he comments on (Ballaster criticizes his reading in "Manl(e)y Forms," 231, and Seductive Forms, 127), and for this reason his commentary suits Richardson's own depoliticizing recontexualization of the scene as an erotic situation in which what is at stake are issues of sexual politics. 29 In his defence of the fire scene, Richardson wrote, "The Passion I found strongest in me, whenever I supposed myself a Reader only, and the Story real, was Anger, or Indignation: I had too great an Aversion to the intended Violator of the Honour of a CLARISSA, to suffer any-thing but alternate Admiration and Pity of her, and Resentment against him, to take place in my Mind, on the Occasion" (Eaves and Kimpel, "An Unpublished Pamphlet," 404). Jane Collier expresses similar emotions in her own able defence of the scene, published by Tom Keymer in "Jane Collier, Reader of Richardson, and the Fire Scene in Clarissa," in Albert J. Rivero, ed., New Essays on Samuel Richardson, 141-61. 30 When the sexual pattern is fulfilled in the rape of Clarissa, Lovelace's account includes no physical description, and in addition to being cryptic is euphemistic to the point that Clarissa's reaction is the most convincing evidence it has happened at all. These passages exemplify Richetti's argument that "In formula fiction, as a strict rule, language is transparent, a vehicle for whatever emotional and ideological satisfactions are being delivered by the narrative: hence the unembarrassed repetition and eager reception of cliches that are crucial to its effects. More sophisticated narration tends to stress the functionality of language for revealing character and describing setting and action. That stress on language as a medium, manipulated openly by characters or by authors, points at times to its inadequacy for rendering the truth, the latter emphasis helping to establish the mode of narration we call 'realistic'" (Richetti, "Popular Narrative," in J.M. Armistead, ed., The First English Novelists, 29). 31 As will have occurred to those who regard this scene as essentially voyeuristic, the assurance that virtue will triumph in the end (an agreement between writer and reader which becomes in time a convention in sentimental treatments of such scenes) might be said to license titillating portraits of virtue in distress. This might be possible once "Virtue Triumphant" has replaced "Love Triumphant" as the stereotyped narrative pattern satisfying uncomplicated expectations, but in Clarissa the suspense and narrative complexity (including an acute awareness of the functioning of language in critical situations) call all stereotypes into question. 32 This elaborate conceit, itself overcharged with modification, is a cruel pun on the opiate Clarissa has been given. Lovelace comes close to the wording of a couplet Pope aimed at Lord Hervey in The Dunciad:

214 Notes to pages 131-2 "Narcissus, prais'd with all a Parson's pow'r, / Look'd a white lilly sunk beneath a show'r" (4: 103-4). As the Twickenham editor points out, Pope recalls (presumably for a sexual resonance of which Richardson may have been aware) Dryden's wording of Euryalus's death in his translation of Aeneid, 9: 581-4. 33 The sharing of this motif between Clarissa and Lovelace is an element of Richardson's deliberate design, spreading the style of reference so that it will suggest a consensus, but it marks also a limitation in the extent to which characters are free to form styles that differ absolutely one from another. Lovelace appears to appreciate Clarissa in language she uses of herself, and what he appreciates is, significantly, the importance for Clarissa of this most intimate relationship in her life, that with her mother. No other character in the novel fully shares his perspective, although Mrs Harlowe's sister, Clarissa's Aunt Hervey, comes closest in calling Clarissa "Flower of the world" (1400) when she views the corpse in the coffin. Raymond Milliard comments on the meaning shared through these images as follows: "The maternal breast or 'bosom/ much more than a conventional synecdoche for Richardson, looms large in the consciousness of both Lovelace and Clarissa and points to important underlying congruities in the psychic trajectory of their two stories" ("Clarissa and Ritual Cannibalism," 1089). Milliard's overall argument is that through an underlying symbolic system expressed in widespread occurrence of lexis having to do with eating, physical incorporation, and orality, the novel "gives symbolic expression to a collective psychic economy dominated by the preoedipal mother imago" (1087). In this context, and also in the context of Milliard's further claim that the male in patriarchal societies can "affirm both his separateness and his distinct gender identity" through "the renewed violent ritual severing of the mother-infant bond" (1087), this image may suggest a shared yearning for a return to preoedipal union. When Clarissa puts her face against her mother's bosom (following the first interview in which she has been left alone with Solmes [88]), Mrs Marlowe subsequently charges her "on my blessing, that you think of being Mrs Solmes," a move Clarissa calls a "dagger" driven into her heart (89). 34 For further exploration of this parallel, see Paul Yoder, "Clarissa Regained." 35 The term "sentimental pathos" is from Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 394-5. For Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Baroque novel is a discourse of pathos" (394). Sentimental pathos occurs in apologetic modes, "associated with justification (self-justification) and accusation," and the speaker "immerses himself in such a discourse, there is no distance, there are no reservations" (394). Bakhtin's view of novelistic pathos as

215 Notes to pages 134-6 "almost always a surrogate for some other genre that is no longer available to a given time or a given social force" (394) might suggest that Belford does not work to establish new norms of statement about women but rather draws on aspects of the rake's register to clarify assumptions about women which will henceforth inform the polite language men use to discuss women, although they may be nowhere expressed directly in that language. 36 Contextualizing this description within an Ovidian tradition of "holy voyeurism" that she traces back through Swift's poem to its classical precedent, the myth of Diana and Actaeon, Brenda Bean argues that Belford speaks directly for Samuel Richardson, who "models Sinclair and her prostitutes upon the representations of fallen women in Swift's work, but deploys precisely the schematization of good and evil, spirituality and carnality, that Swift satirizes as priming the male spectator for ludicrous disillusionment" ("Sight and Self-Disclosure," 5-6). Much of what Bean argues about the significance of men looking at women in this tradition is pertinent to the present discussion, although as I relate Belford's description of the prostitutes to Richardson's revision of the warm scene, I consider it is less important to decide whether a "Richardson" speaks directly through Belford, or whether any authorial figure we posit is not at some ironic distance from him. 37 Whether Clarissa deliberately chooses to die and wilfully effect an earthly triumph through saintly resignation has been a vexed question since Lovelace's claims within the text that this is so. Milliard's suggestion that her behaviour be interpreted with reference to Rudolph Bell's concept of "holy anorexia" ("Clarissa and Ritual Cannibalism," 1092-3) offers a way to reconcile repeated critical assertions that Clarissa chooses to die with Raymond Stephanson's persuasive argument that for contemporaries familiar with physiological theory there was no problem understanding Clarissa's death as the consequence of the trauma she had suffered and not a deliberate choice ("Richardson's 'Nerves'"). 38 Bearing in mind Straub's caution against anachronism ("Reconstructing the Gaze," 423-4), I am making a strictly limited use of Mulvey's account of the male gaze, drawing upon the second paragraph of section C.i ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 21-2) and am using it simply to interpret Lovelace and Belford. Mulvey suggests that in the kind of gaze Belford directs on Mrs Sinclair, voyeurism associated with sadism, "pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness." This "fits in well with narrative," whereas in the kind of gaze he directs on Clarissa, "fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into

216 Notes to pages 136-8 something satisfying in itself." This kind of gaze "can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone" (22). There is a strong contrast in narrative context as well: Belford's demystification of the prostitutes accompanies Mrs Sinclair's relentless movement toward death, and he elaborates his fetishizing gaze on Clarissa in a moment of narrative stasis. Terri Nickel's comments on the function of fetishization in Pamela are relevant to this process also ("Pamela as Fetish," esp. 38). 39 The wording is borrowed from a persuasive reading of Velasquez's Rokeby Venus in Edward Snow, "Theorizing the Male Gaze," 38. There is not space here to explore the differences between the verbal and visual media that are important for Richardson's deconstruction of the gaze, for instance the problem of how far the linearity of language enables a writer to compose an experience analogous to a "reading" in movement of the eye anticipated and controlled (within and against the particular visual conventions of a period or school) by a painter. Despite the differences in media and the problem "that such a theory can - and in practice often does - become an unwitting agent of the very forces of surveillance it wishes to oppose" (Snow, 31) - a problem Mulvey herself has addressed ("Afterthoughts") - the theory of the gaze does help to contextualize the styles of Richardson's rakes. As Threadgold remarks in her discussion of de Lauretis's strong criticism of Mulvey, "It is not the apparatus which is the problem, but the fact that it has been produced, used and defined within patriarchal ideological and social formations" (Feminist Poetics, 45). 40 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men. Sedgwick argues that "in an male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power" (25). Richardson's attempt to reform how men look at women does not (in this novel) extend to how men regard other men as they compete within a patriarchal society. For a brief argument that Sedgwick's concept of homosociality both is and (more often) is not relevant to Richardson, see Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender, i7o-m25 and 184^2. 41 Edmund White, "Sexual Culture," 165. 42 Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, i: 9, 13. Lovelace admits that before he knew Clarissa he had "questioned a soul in a sex, created ... only for temporary purposes" (1037). 43 The degree of diminution suggests further movement along a trajectory from Haywood. It is tempting to suggest that this movement carries through to the later nineteenth century: in her study of representation of the female body in the Victorian novel, the three parts of the body Helena Michie considers to have been most important ("not

217 Notes to pages 138-41

44 45

46

47

only for what they represent but for the absences they suggest") are hair, hand, and arm (The Word Made Flesh, 97 ff.). Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, i: 11-12. Nancy Armstrong, "The Rise of Domestic Woman," 114, and Desire and Domestic Fiction, 120, cited by Gwilliam, who argues that "the finding of value in 'inner' qualities does not transform existing ideologies of femininity as much as it reinscribes them" (Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender, 17). Even if existing ideologies are rewritten (as they must be, when such an important change is made), the result is neither complete revision nor mere recopying, for from differences made in "rewriting" arise variations in practice which map possibilities for change. A conservative novelist who "reinscribes" an ideology is not free to do so just as he might wish. Katherine Sobba Green, "The Heroine's Blazon and Hardwicke's Marriage Act," 287, and The Courtship Novel 1740-1820, 79. Green relates these new possibilities to the movement from arranged to companionate marriage. Green, "The Heroine's Blazon," 288, and The Courtship Novel 1740-1820,79. CHAPTER

SIX

1 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 457. See also Pocock, "The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology," in his Virtue, Commerce and History, 103-23, Catherine Ingrassia, "Women Writing/Writing Women," and Catherine Ingrassia, "The Pleasure of Business." 2 Markman Ellis conveniently summarizes these discussions (in terms of sentiment and sensibility) in The Politics of Sensibility, 17-18. 3 Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa, 95. This topic has more often been alluded to (as in Eagleton) than discussed at length: Jean Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility, says that "the impregnation [of sensibility] by the feminine spirit" has been "insufficiently studied" (163); one study taking up that challenge, John Mullan's Sentiment and Sociability, says that Richardson "was always involved in the attempt to make feminine his own discourse" (8); Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse refer to "the strategies of feminization by which [Pamela and Clarissa] finally subdue these unruly men [Mr B and Lovelace]" ("The Interior Difference," 478). In a persuasive argument that Pope is responding to it in the Dunciad, Catherine Ingrassia defines "feminization" as "the perception of a pervasive erosion of traditonal male values and cultural practices that are replaced with characteristics culturally defined as feminine, such as passion, sentiment, fancy, and emotion" ("Women Writing/Writing Women," 40). And according to

2i8 Notes to pages 141-3

4

5 6

7

8

Randolph Trumbach, "in the century's second generation the ... libertinage of the previous generation was modified by the sentimental movement and its devotion to the free flow of emotions and its desire to produce in men behavior that was gentler and more subject to the influences of women" (Sex and the Gender Revolution, 73). This well describes the process studied in this chapter, which I see as Richardson's attempt to "feminize" a "male" discourse in order to represent and influence changing patterns of gender relations through changing the linguistic resources associated with critical situations. Tassie Gwilliam's excellent discussion of Clarissa in Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender explores the ways in which "Lovelace's identification across the supposedly impassible [sic] boundary between the sexes destabilizes both gender difference and masculinity" (109) and "his incorporative desires leave their mark not only on the model of masculinity, but on Clarissa and on femininity" (no). This chapter studies one of those ways. Gwilliam's discussion complements and intersects with this one in several places; the most important will be cited in notes. For an interpretation of changes in eighteenth-century libertinism that contrasts in many ways with my own, see Tiffany Potter, Honest Sins. On the use of seventeenth-century historical and literary allusion, see Jocelyn Harris, "Protean Lovelace"; on the way Lovelace selfconsciously models himself on classical figures, see John Carroll, "Lovelace as Tragic Hero," and Arthur Lindley, "Richardson's Lovelace and the Self-Dramatizing Hero of the Restoration"; and on the use of mythology see Douglas Murray, "Classical Myth in Richardson's Clarissa." Lovelace's use of other imagery for libertinism is discussed in Penelope Biggs, "Hunt, Conquest, Trial." This problem and related ones are well discussed in James Grantham Turner, "Lovelace and the Paradoxes of Libertinism," 70-88. For the libertine tradition upon which Richardson draws in creating Lovelace, see Peter Hughes, "Wars within Doors," and James Grantham Turner, "'Illustrious Depravity' and the Erotic Sublime" and "The Libertine Sublime." M.A.K. Halliday, "Antilanguages," in Language as Social Semiotic, 171, 165. The cant language of the criminal underworld, attested from the sixteenth century and still current in the eighteenth, is a good example of a widespread and extensively developed antilanguage that would have been known to Richardson. The nominal group structure Determiner + Modifier + Head, especially with "creature" as Head, is one of Lovelace's favourites. As A.M. Kearney has described it, "Lovelace, despite his real feelings for Clarissa, can never quite rid himself of this hackneyed poeticized way of looking at her - his language can never break free of the rake's code. In

219 Notes to pages 144-8 his own way he reinvents Clarissa as the sexual object he would like her to be, and keeps returning to the same picture with a slight juggling of adjectives" (Samuel Richardson, 56). 9 If John Carroll's suggestion of the source in Montaigne is correct, Lovelace alludes to a passage in Montaigne's essay "Of Three Commerces or Societies" in which he speaks of difficulty setting an edge on sensual pleasure ("On Annotating Clarissa," 59-60). Jonathan Lamb has suggested that Richardson might have also been influenced by Montaigne's essay "Upon Some Verses of Virgil," which discusses the deferred delights of a winding game ("The Fragmentation of Originals and Clarissa," 458n8). 10 In the third edition, Lovelace admits to rewording Burnet's statement, and italics point the contrast of their wordings: "Were it not for what the learned Bishop in his Letter from Italy calls The Entanglements of Amour, and / the Delicacies of Intrigue" (3: 308). 11 In a story told as an apologue to illustrate the contention that "no woman, tho' of the most exemplary Virtue, is able to withstand the Treachery of some Men," Mandeville describes a seducer in the same terms as Lovelace presents himself: "He despis'd every Thing that was easy, and only lay in Wait for such as were counted cunning and difficult, and commonly for Women of a very good Reputation. Having heard of Leonora's exemplary Vertue and Reservedness, as well as dazling Beauty, he thought attacking her would be a noble Enterprize." The Virgin Unmask'd (1709), 183, 205; quoted in Hector Monro, The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville, 37. 12 John Carroll has observed that "Richardson's use of direct quotations ... is not always functional" and has gone on to argue that "The really telling use of drama and poetry comes not through direct quotation but through dramatic devices of the kind Richardson used when Lovelace takes Clarissa to see Venice Preserved" ("Richardson at Work," 70). This interweaving of quotation and text, of which there are many instances, seems as effective a dramatic device as any. Critical assessment of how far Richardson's use of Bysshe renders his art of quotation shallow has varied. Pessimistic assessments by Dwight Culler ("Edward Bysshe and the Poet's Handbook") and Michael E. Connaughton ("Richardson's Familiar Quotations") have been displaced by a more robust view, especially in the work of Jocelyn Harris. As the interpretive community gathered around Clarissa assembles fuller annotation, it will become clear that the novel is densely intertextual. 13 This passage may well have been suggested by Addison: "Modesty ... is a kind of quick and delicate feeling in the soul ... It is such an exquisite sensibility, as warns [the soul] to shun the first appearance of every thing which is hurtful" (Spectator 231; quoted in Claude Rawson,

22O Notes to pages 150-3 "Some Notes on 'Delicacy/" 341). Richardson's participation in the tendency to anchor the mental processes of sensibility in physical sensation (a trend Lovelace's sentimental libertinism can be read as both resisting and confirming through its many windings) is discussed in Sentiment and Sociability by John Mullan, who writes of such passages as this that "Richardson cannot allow perversion to have its own values. He must turn the private language of the libertine to a (dangerous) conformity with the impulses of sensibility, delicacy, nature" (72). 14 A more extreme statement of this idea was added elsewhere in revision, and in this instance at least the purpose of the "restoration" (if such it is) was clearly to blacken Lovelace's character: "Nor are women ever angry at bottom for being disobeyed thro' excess of Love. They like an uncontroulable passion. They like to have every favour ravished from them; and to be eaten and drunk quite up by a voracious Lover. Don't I know the Sex?" (3: 309). This is a good example of the way in which revision made the novel more lurid by projecting more extreme variants of attitudes already stated in the first edition - here by the macabre touch of strongly tactile lexis elaborating the notion stated at first politely. 15 Clarissa readily expresses her detestation but is reluctant to use language expressing hatred of Lovelace because in Richardson's mind the rhetoric of execration available for voicing it would tempt her into a position Lovelace has anticipated and knows how to exploit. Anna uses this style (the word "wretch," for instance) indiscriminately; Clarissa never uses lexis from this field of discourse (which includes "barbarous," "cruel," "ungrateful") unless the situation warrants high seriousness, as it does in her speech in the fire scene discussed in the previous chapter, where she calls Lovelace "wicked wretch" and "insolent villain" (725). 16 Richardson's third novel recontextualizes Hickman retrospectively as a dress rehearsal of the virtues from which Richardson constructs his namesake, Sir Charles Grandison. Within Clarissa, Hickman functions sometimes as a surrogate for Richardson himself: the interview in which Lovelace frightens Hickman with the allegory of Clarissa loving an old miser (1091-8) can be read as Richardson discussing with Lovelace what should be the heroine's fate, death or life. 17 Sir Charles Grandison is discussed in these terms in Mary V. Yates, "The Christian Rake in Sir Charles Grandison." 18 A truly virtuous woman, a Clarissa, would unite herself to a husband but never be "all his own"; it is because Lovelace assumes that passion is unsustainable but demands that his own be satisfied fully, with a woman surrending to him even her duty to God (669), that experience could exhaust his interest in her.

221 Notes to pages 153-8 19 Eliza Haywood, Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, 62. 20 Haywood, The Rash Resolve: or, the Untimely Discovery, 80-1. 21 Beyond this emphasis on specifically sexual novelty, a strong, extensively nourished desire for "novelty" was widespread in the reading community which novels came to satisfy, a point well argued by J. Paul Hunter in Before Novels, especially chapter i. 22 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 2. 2. 234-9. 23 John Milton, Paradise Lost, 5, 17-19. Throughout this chapter I am considerably indebted to Hagstrum's Sex and Sensibility, which demonstrates the resonance of Milton's representation of prelapsarian relations between Adam and Eve for later writers and reads Richarson's novels so insightfully in relation to the tradition it traces. Another variation on the theme of novelty, although not related to love, is the idea that novelty appeals to women as well as to men. After his account of Clarissa's ordering her coffin and having it delivered to her room, Belford (still not fully comfortable with the religious field of discourse which Clarissa increasingly imports into the register of moral decorum) exclaims, "Tis a strange sex! Nothing is too shocking for them to look upon, or see acted, that has but novelty and curiosity in it" (1305). In a letter to Susanna Highmore of 2 August 1748, Richardson refers to "the charms of dear variety, that soul of female pleasure" (Correspondence, 2: 208). 24 George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, Advice to a Daughter, in Halifax: Complete Works, 296. 25 Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers, 2. 2. 256-60. 26 John Gay, "Air LXIX," The Beggar's Opera, in Dramatic Works, 64-5. 27 Ira Konigsberg suggests that these are the voyeuristic pleasures available in the novel: "There is a pornographic element in Clarissa, a particular focus that shows in great detail and at great length the mental and physical torture of a virtuous and attractive woman. Clarissa and Lovelace are inseparably connected in the novel and satisfy within us both our masochistic and sadistic needs" (Narrative Technique in the English Novel, 97). 28 Writing fulfils the triumph as a substitute for what Colonel Morden suggests a married libertine will do to his wife: "Prayers, tears and the most abject submission are but fuel to his pride: wagering perhaps with lewd companions and, not improbably, with lewder women, upon instances which he boasts of to them of your patient sufferings and broken spirit, and bringing them home to witness both" (564). Clarissa's mother, Colonel Morden's aunt, has been made just such a spectacle of broken spirit in Clarissa's family.

222 Notes to pages 160-1 29 When she reads Clarissa's account of the next scene to be analysed, Anna resents Lovelace's "teasing ways," and when Lovelace reads his clandestine copy of Anna's letter he asks, "Are women only to tease, I trow? - The sex may thank themselves for learning me to out-tease them. So the headstrong Charles xn of Sweden learned the Czar Peter to beat him, by continuing a war with the Muscovites against the ancient maxims of his kingdom" (636). Teasing the lovely teaser fulfils one of Lovelace's deepest desires, to exercise a "lady-like" tyranny over women; incidentally, as the historical allusion suggests, he achieves another aim by subverting the maxims of female education even while confirming their general validity. In the third edition, Lovelace's "learning" and "learned" are replaced by "teaching" and "taught" (4: 182), forms which the prescriptivists (such as Johnson) were establishing as standard, and a brief connection between Lovelace and Anthony Harlowe (155) is lost. 30 Warner discusses this scene (along with the tea-drinking scene discussed in chapter i) as an instance of Lovelace, confident in his control of Clarissa, pausing to "sketch her excellences in a verbal portrait." Warner argues that by "isolating Clarissa as a self-complete object, and naming the splendid elements she holds in tension, Lovelace feels her overabundance, her excess of energy," then, experiencing a process best described by the myth of Pygmalion, he is mastered by his own creation (Reading "Clarissa," 47, 48). The reason for this phenomenon is Richardson's desire to persuade his readers that virtue can triumph in any situation, and some readers have followed Anna Laetitia Barbauld in considering this the central meaning of the novel (Richardson, Correspondence, i: xcix, ci). While I discuss Lovelace as a voyeur rather than an artist in this scene, Warner is right to point out that Richardson is dramatizing a belief about "human nature," not merely representing or "imitating" a "natural" fact. 31 One of the ways Lovelace has steeled himself is by killing his conscience. He hopes to exploit the close relation between "consciousness" and "conscience" in women but must eliminate it in himself; if he is to succeed, Clarissa must be the only one on trial. The allegorical murder of his conscience, while certainly unusual and no doubt included for its strangely mixed proportions of the shocking and the ludicrous, is an extension of widespread stylistic features emphasizing the close involvement of ideas and moral properties in the action. Abstractions sometimes appear in the role of Actor in the transitivity structure, and sometimes, when characters address exclamations or imperatives to them, in the role of Subject in the mood structure of the clause. These personifications, like the occasional allegories, are not simply tropes added for heightened effect but parts of Richardson's

223 Notes to pages 163-6

32

33

34 35 36

attempt to extend (or to preserve for prose fiction an extension of) the linguistic resources for rendering "sentimental" meaning. The passage on awe, reverence, and apprehended prohibition sweetening Lovelace's first kiss, quoted above, is an example of moral analysis explaining the significance of action. Anna has characterized this "mannishness" similarly when qualifying her contempt for Lovelace and his friends: "Lords of the creation! Noble fellows these! - Yet who knows how many poor despicable souls of our sex the worst of them has had to whine after him!" (549). In a novel in which women are so maligned, it is only appropriate that morphological innovation ("mannish" rather than the available "manly," which would realize a meaning Clarissa does not want) should be used to make a style to answer it. Meaning as active process, that "can mean" is "can do," is one of the central themes of Halliday's Language as Social Semiotic, and it is developed extensively in social semiotic critiques of individualist ideologies, whether in psychology, sociology, or politics. Quoted by Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 534. Samuel Johnson was present at this scene. Quoted by Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 535. Lovelace's use of "conscious" is a good example of the pejorative sense of the word, in particular its association with sexual sin, which Jean Hagstrum traces in "Towards a Profile of the Word Conscious in Eighteenth-Century Literature," esp. 28. The positive sense of the word informs Clarissa's behaviour in the tea-drinking scene analysed in the first chapter, when Lovelace describes her as "conscious of dignity," and in the scenes in Hampstead when she "penetrates" Tomlinson and Lovelace, making them "conscious" in the sense of conscience-stricken. While still a figure of "conscious honour" and "conscious innocence," Clarissa's desire to "wrap myself about in the mantle of my own integrity" (508) recalls Indiana's pledge to "wrap [herjself up in the integrity of [her] own heart" at the end of act 2 of The Conscious Lovers, in a speech whose importance Hagstrum discusses in Sex and Sensibility, I72n25. The two, opposed senses of the Latin conscius which Hagstrum cites from the Aeneid ("Towards a Profile," 24-5) are both apposite to Clarissa, particularly that associated with Dido in book 4. Belford's statement that Clarissa is "like a harmless deer that has already a barbed shaft in her breast" (1224) also recalls Dido, who is said to wander through Carthage raging for love, as if she were a deer wounded by an arrow (Aeneid: 4: 95-100). Lovelace has already compared Clarissa to Dido in an attempt to argue that Clarissa has been better treated (1142-3), but Belford uses this image to persuade Lovelace to stop persecuting a dying woman, and it is unlikely that he

224 Notes to page 168 remembers Dido's "rage of slighted love." Clarissa's religious recontextualization of Lovelace as libertine hunter, effected in the title of her meditation, "On being hunted after by the enemy of my soul" (1221), and her biblical quotation, "the arrows of the Almighty are within me" (1125), translates the imagery into a different register. Although he seems familiar enough with the Aeneid to have remembered the image of the wounded deer from it, Richardson could have derived the image from one of his favourite poems, The Faerie Queene, where Fidessa (i.e. Duessa) tells Redcross, "And many years throughout the world I straid, / A virgin widow, whose deep wounded mind / With loue, long time did languish as the stricken hind" (I, ii, 24: 7-9). 37 As has been pointed out by Braudy ("Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa") and Warner (Reading Clarissa), Clarissa can penetrate and control Lovelace through his knowledge of himself, but she refuses to do so any longer than is necessary for her self-protection. Warner's analysis of Clarissa as an adept politician, a skilled rhetorician whose most persuasive construction is herself as injured innocence, has received at least its share of criticism, but any doubt that Clarissa leaves the world not understanding the sexual political epistemology underlying sentimental libertinism can be dispelled by a reading of her letter to Anna dated "Friday, Aug. 25." There a brilliant use of the register of moral decorum anatomizes the social humiliation and psychological pain that husbands and wives may inflict on each other - and the style allows her never to let on that she knows Lovelace might say much the same. In particular, the advice to Anna on how to proceed with Hickman suggests that Clarissa could adeptly practise what she so shrewdly theorizes. "Give me leave to observe," she writes, "that to condescend with dignity, and to command with such kindness, and sweetness of manners, as should let the condescension, while single, be seen and acknowledged, are points which a wise woman, knowing her man, should aim at: and a wise woman, I should think, would choose to live single all her life, rather than give herself to a man whom she thinks unworthy of a treatment so noble" (1264). There is no grandiose claim to "know the sex" here - if Anna knows one man, that will be enough. After marriage, the wise woman will know too that to insist on repeated, acknowledged performance of her control will be to risk losing it, and for the same reason no woman of any delicacy will invest her erotic energy in such a performance. She will not need to. 38 In addition to Turner's "Lovelace and the Paradoxes of Libertinism," see Jocelyn Harris, "Richardson: Original or Learned Genius?" in Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor, eds., Samuel Richardson, 188202, and "Protean Lovelace."

225 Notes to pages 168-72 39 William Congreve, The Way of the World, 4. i. 203-4. Lovelace's words are "Speak out then, love, and spare not." In addition to Gwilliam's Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender, the significance of such "transvestism" has been explored in James Carson, "Narrative Cross-Dressing in the Novels of Richardson," in Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ed., Writing the Female Voice, 95-113, and in Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism, 103-150. 40 Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender, 100. 41 As Gwilliam puts it, "Lovelace uses cross-gender identification as a conscious tool to gain power over women, but, for a variety of reasons, this willful form of gender transgression rapidly evades his control, not only opening him to the power Clarissa wields, but sapping his own 'imperial' will" (Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender, 12). 42 Correspondence 6: 186-7. This case is discussed in Lawrence Stone, The Road to Divorce, 164-5. 43 Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 18. 44 Thus it is part of what McKeon describes as Richardson's "darker, conservative apprehension" that, in a world where virtue reigns, status distinctions might be worryingly insecure (The Origins of the English Novel, 418). 45 I have touched on the question of homosociality toward the end of the previous chapter. David Robinson, whose "Unravelling the 'cord which ties good men to good men': Male Friendship in Richardson's Novels," in Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor, eds., Samuel Richardson, 16787, has made an important (and persuasive) contribution to this question, concludes that although Lovelace and Belford manage finally to "relate affectionately with, and directly to, each other, without using women as either a bond or a battleground," Richardson does not through them "experiment with any new kind of intimate male bond" (176). 46 There is a good sample of such accounts in Ian McCormick, ed., Secret Sexualities. 47 Randolph Trumbach, "Gender and the Homosexual Role in Modern Western Culture: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Compared," in Dennis Altman et al, eds., Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?, 154-5. See also Trumbach, "The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660-1750," in M.B. Duberman, M. Vicinus, and G. Chauncey, Jr, eds., Hidden from History, 129-40. While I am sympathetic to the concern for issues of class and gender which motivates Cameron McFarlane's criticisms of Trumbach's work in The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire 1660-1750, 14-17, 42-7, those criticisms do not seem to me seriously to challenge the argument

226 Notes to pages 172-3 on which I am drawing here. What McFarlane describes as a rigidly prescriptive schematization of masculine and feminine enacted sexually through activity and passivity parallels Lovelace's use of sentimental libertinism to preserve a structure of dominance as the basis for securing and perpetuating the gender differences which his own practices call into question. 48 The closest we can come to evidence of a mollie's reading of Lovelace as sentimental libertine is the use of a popular stereotype in John Channing's letter to Richardson of 28 November 1748. Shortly before the first publication of Clarissa, David Garrick's Miss in Her Teens (1747) had introduced Fribble (the role played by Garrick himself) as a satire on the effeminate manners now associated exclusively with the adult male sodomite (Trumbach, "Birth of the Queen," in Duberman et al., eds., Hidden from History, 134). In the play, Fribble is contrasted as "frib'ling Beau" to his rival, the "vap'ring Bully" Captain Loveit (Prologue, line 14). Charming contrasts him with Mowbray (presumably to model a spectrum of libertine response): "You'l excuse a late visit: let me only tell you that the other day I hapen'd into the company of a Mowbray and a Beau Fribble, each of whom had a Volume of your work in his hands; Skipping like monkeys from Letter to Letter. Your's Gentlemen, what so busily employ'd about? this d d Clarissa. Ye ds what a rout is here about a woman! don't you like her Character? - I can only tell you she's such a woman as I never met with yet, and hope never to have to do with, what say you Sir. Laud what a multitude of reading without coming at the Story. Tis quite tiresome, a man can never get through with any tolerable patience by my Sawl" (Forster Manuscript, XV, 2, ff. 25-6). Richardson takes care to distinguish Lovelace from such a fop; the rake whom readers might have associated with Fribble is Tourville. 49 The following passage can be read as a gloss on Lovelace's trial of Clarissa as an attempt to demonstrate the truth of sexuality and of woman: "And so, in this 'question' of sex ... two processes emerge, the one always conditioning the other: we demand that sex speak the truth (but, since it is the secret and is oblivious to its own nature, we reserve for ourselves the function of telling the truth of its truth, revealed and deciphered at last), and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness" (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, i: 69). The most extensive application so far of Foucault's History of Sexuality to Clarissa is Brigitte Glaser, The Body in Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa." 50 This formulation paraphrases a passage in Foucault's "What Is Critique?": "And if governmentalization is indeed this movement through

227 Notes to page 173 which individuals are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth, well, then! I will say that critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth" (The Politics of Truth, 32). 51 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Epistemology of the Closet," 49.

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Index

Note: Terms used in grammatical analysis which are not listed separately in this index are introduced and illustrated on 1981143 Abrahams, Roger D., i87n6 Addison, Joseph, 36-7, 54-5, 63, 2i9ni3 Aikins, Janet, 24 antilanguage, 142-5, 160 antisociety, 142-4 Armstrong, Nancy, 50, 139, 2i/n3 Atkinson, Paul, i87n6 Bakhtin, M.M., 14, 16-17, 61, 77-9, 2O7n23, 214^5. See also dialogism, heteroglossia Ballaster, Ros, 121-2, 2o8n27, 2i3n28 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, I96n22, 222n3o Barchas, Janine, I75n2 Barrell, John, 2ion8 Barthes, Roland, 61-2, 2Oon46 Bean, Brenda, 2151136 Beckingham, Charles, 63 Behn, Aphra, 121-2 Belford, (character), 85-7, 112-13, 128-35/ 138

Bell, Michael, I94n7 Bell, Rudolph, 215^7 Bender, John, i86n59, 2ion8 Bennington, Geoffrey, 197^33 Benson, James D., and William S. Greaves, 2011149, 207n23, 209n5 Berger, John, 113 Bernstein, Basil, 35, 3941, 50, 60 Bex, A.R., 16 Biggs, Penelope, 21804 Birch, David, i8on2i Blair, Hugh, 195^ Blake, William, 48, 77 Borck, Jim Springer, I75n4 Boswell, James, 164 Bourdieu, Pierre, 197^7 Bowers, Toni, 2i2n23 Bradshaigh, Lady, 57,113, 169, I75n2 Braudy, Leo, 2ion8, 224n37 Brissenden, R.F., i92ni Brown, Murray, 185^3

Brown, R., i86n6o Buckley, Theodore, ig3ni Burke, Edmund, 63 Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop, 144 Bysshe, Art of English Poetry, 147 Carnochan, W.B., i87nn Carroll, John, 57, 2i8n4, 2i9ng, 12 Carroll, Susanne, 15 Carson, James, 225n39 Carter, Ronald, 17^15 Castle, Terry, 23-4, 77, 104, 111 category: of code, 13, 35, 40; of gender, 168-70; of genre, 12, 13, i82n33; of ideology, 12 13; of register, 12, 15 Chaber, Lois, xii-xiii Charming, John, 226048 Chapone, Hester, 121 Chesterfield, Lord, 3-4, 36,63 Clarissa (character): use of hypothesis by, 46-7;

246 Index verbal authority of, 24, 27-^ 45-6 class, 35-6, 40 code, 35, 45, 51, 85, 108, i88n2o; definitions of, 39-40, 41; elaborated, 63; restricted, 42, 46-7, 49' M* Collier, Jane, 213^9 collocation, 209^ comedy, no, in; Lovelace's use of, 25-6, 43, 77; readers' desire for, 90 commonplace book, 61 community, 39, 51, 83; female, 49, 133; and individuality, 14, 34 Congreve, William, 168 Connaughton, Michael E., 2i9ni2 context, 12, 14, 23; cultural, 8, 15, 39, 62, 152; situational, 12, 15, 16 control, 113, 142; language as means of, 119, 163-4; libertine, 113, 142; male fear at loss of, 135; personal and positional, 41, 45-7, 49 Cook-Gumperz, Jenny, i88n2o Copeland, Edward, I9in3i courtly style, Lovelace's, 27 courtship, 33, 87, 93, 94, 139. See also love, discourse of critical discourse analysis, 8, 21 Critical Remarks, anonymous writer of, 84, 121 "critical situations," 14, 33, 84, 163-4, 174 Culler, A. Dwight, 2igni2 Davis, Lennard J., 185^8, 2ogn6 decorum. See moral decorum

Defoe, Daniel, proverbs used by, i88ni4 de Maria, Jr, Robert, i95n8 Denton, Ramona, i88n2o desire, erotic, 86, in, 123, 153, 174; ideology of, 33; Lovelace's, 117-18, 130,142,163; reform of, 136, 139, 141, 169. See also discourse of love and desire dialect, 88, 99-100; proverb as marker of, 35; social, 15, 19-20 dialogism, 16-17, 54> 59/ 61, 77-8. See also Bakhtin; heteroglossia didacticism, 10, 23, 52-3, 127; Richardson's, and creativity, 19, 174 Diderot, Denis, 4-6, 55, 84^ 173 discourse, 16, 34, 62, 113, 164, 172; of courtship and seduction, 84-5, 96, 105, 106, 109; feminization of, 141; field of, 68, 105, 154, 173; of love and desire, 84-5, 87-9, 96, 109, 2O3n6; mode of, i82n33, 209114; subfields of, 116,145; tenor of, 123, 138. Doane, Mary Ann, 2ion9 dominance, 157, 159; expressed in language, 19, 44; gendered categories of, and submission, 168, 169, 170; struggle for, 24, 108, 142 Doody, Margaret Ann, xiv, 105, in, i86n59, 203n6, 209114, 2i2n23 Douglas, Mary, i88n2O Dryden, John, 90, 146-7, 149 Dussinger, John A., I94n7, 2i2n23 Eagleton, Terry, 77, i85n5i, 52, 2i7n3

Eaves, T.C. Duncan, and Ben Kimpel, I94n6, 2i3n29, 223n34, 35, 2251143; on revision of Clarissa, xii, I95ni3, i96n22 Eggins, Suzanne, i8oni8, i82n3o Eliot, George, 63 Ellis, Markman, 2i7n2 Emerson, Caryl, 2Oin52 epistolary form, 56, 87, 112, 152 Erametsa, Erik, ig2ni ergativiry, 87-8, 151; definition of, 66; discussion of, I98n43. See also transitivity Erickson, Robert A., 2O5ni5 Etherege, George, 168 explicit. See style, explicit Fairclough, Norman, i82n32, i97n34 fantasy, 120, 123, 124, 156-7 Farrell, William J., i84n44, 203n6, 2O4ni2 feminization, 140-1, 1689, 171-2 field of discourse. See discourse Fielding, Henry, 54, 55-6, 78 Fielding, Sarah, 54, 55-6, 121, i84n5o Firth, J.R., 14 Fish, Stanley, 17^14 Fludernik, Monika, i86n59 foregrounding, 25-6, 66, 117, 127, 174; definition of, 9-11; through deviation, 9, 18, 19; discussion of, 17-19, i8on22, i8in25; through generalization, 33-4,52, 67, 133-4; grammatical and lexical, 18, 70, 89, 144, 156, 2o6ni7;

247 Index through patterning, 18, 149. See also Kristeva formal analysis, 10 Foucault, Michel, 84, 172 Fowler, Roger, I78ni6, i8oni9, i88n20 Frank, Joseph, i8in25 friendship: between Clarissa and Anna, 48-9, 103, 107, 158; between women, 169; marriage as, 99 Frow, John, 13, 79 Frye, Northrop, 197^1 function, I78ni8 Galan, F.W., i8on2o Garrick, David, 226^8 Garvin, Paul L., i8on22 Gay, John: The Beggar's Opera, 156-7 gaze, 112, 123, 132, 135, 159, 173; libertine, 137, 157; theory of male, 113, 136. See also voyeurism gender, 24, 138, 141, 171, 172; as ideology, 14, 83, 137. See also category of gender generalization, 33-4, 60, 83, 114, 156, 161. See also moral sentiments; proverb genre, 34, 59, 73, 78, 174; macro- and micro-, 14, 54, 60, 63, I96n3i. See also discourse, mode of; moral sentiment, proverb Ghadessy, Mohsen, l8 n 3 37 Giametti, A. Bartlett, 207n24 Gillman, A., i86n6o Glaser, Brigitte, 2261149 Goldsmith, Elizabeth C, 225n39 Gopnik, Irwin R., i8in25, i84n45, I93n2, 2O5ni5 grammatical metaphor, 202n 5

Greaves, William S. See Benson, James D., and William S. Greaves Green, {Catherine Sobba, 50, 139 Gregory, Dr John, annia Gregory, Michael, 15, iSomg Grundy, Isobel, 64, 197^9,40 Guillory, John, 62-3 Gwilliam, Tassie, 168, 2imi2,2i6n40,2171145, 2i8n3 Hagstrum, Jean, i92ni, 2051114, 217113, 22in23, 2231136 Halifax, Marquess of [George Savile], 154-5 Halliday, Michael: discussion of, 8, 66, 142-3, i8in25,185^9,189^2, 2O2n$, 2ionio; reference to, i8oni9, i8in24, i83n37,2ionn, 223^3; and Ruqaiya Hasan, 1821136, *83n37 Harlowe family (characters): Arabella, 28-9; James, 28-9, 45; Mr, 45, 47, 108; Uncle Antony, 46-8, 98-9; Uncle John, 64-5,66-7, 137 Harris, Jocelyn, ij6n6, 207n26, 2ioni2, 21804, 2i9ni2,224^8 Hasan, Ruqaiya, 8, 60, 62, iSonig, i88ni7,2001145; on foregrounding, 10, 21-2. See also Halliday, Michael, and Ruqaiya Hasan Haywood, Eliza, 85, 106, 120, 122, 216^43; The Rash Resolve, 91-2, 153; Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, 112, 122-6, 129, 153

heteroglossia, 17, 61, 78. See also Bakhtin; dialogism Hill, Aaron, 55, 58 Milliard, Raymond, 214^3 historicism, 23 Hjelmslev, Louis, 22 homosociality, 137, 143, 171 Howe, Anna (character): analysis of Clarissa by, 67-70, 93-4, 103; on love, 150-1, 152 Hudson, Nicholas, 187114 Hughes, John, 36 Hughes, Peter, 2i8n6 Hume, David, 191^0, i92ni Hume, Robert D., 185^5 Humphreys, A.R., 177^ Hunter, J. Paul, 53, 22in2i Hynes, Peter, I9on25 ideology, 67, 79, 120, 137, 191^0; critique of, 21; in language, 109, 116, of love, sex, and gender, 14, 83; male, of female nature, 131-3; problems of, 23, 33 implicit. See style, explicit and implicit individuality, 71, i78ni7. See also community Ingrassia, Catherine, 2i7nni&3 interpretation, 7-8, 9, 77, 11 4~I5/ ^64 Ishak, Samia Fahmy, 184^4 Jakobson, Roman, 9 Jarrell, Mackie L., i87nn Johnson, Samuel, 58, 64, 164; as critic, 54,202114; Dictionary, 62, i