SOURCE: “Irony, Storytelling, and the Conflict of Interpretation in Clarissa,” in ELH, Vol. 53, No. 4, Winter 1986, pp. 759-77

[In the following essay, Wehr argues that deconstructionist interpretations of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa miss the ways the author uses irony to impose a single, moralizing narrative judgment on the story's characters and actions.]

In recent years dour, didactic Samuel Richardson has become a proving ground for deconstructionist criticism. The epistolary mode, in which different characters read experience according to their irreconcilable value systems, interests and desires, and the author withdraws behind an editor's mask, appears to thematize “the struggles of interpretation,” making Clarissa a tragedy of “hermeneutic anarchy … a cacophony of voices, a multiplicity of exegetes struggling to articulate different ‘constructions’ of the world.”¹ This hermeneutical struggle constitutes a power struggle: Lovelace reads Clarissa so as to inscribe her into his system while she resists the “rape” of such “colonization.”²

Though suggestive, these readings fail to register the role that irony and story play in orchestrating and evaluating the constructions of Clarissa's different correspondents. What gives Clarissa its central importance in the development of the novel is not its dramatization of a conflict of interpretations, but the system of resolution it proposes: the story establishes, through seemingly natural or self-evident inferences, a context for irony that in turn adjudicates between the claims of competing voices. It has long been noted that the novel as a genre seeks to naturalize interpretation, to make interpretation appear to arise of itself from the narrative, as opposed to acknowledging that interpretation rests upon arbitrary, allegorical signification. (The modern prose fictions, from Sterne on, that do call attention to the ambiguities of interpretation are frequently called “anti-novels,” “self-ironic,” or “self-parodic.”) The novel attempts to naturalize interpretation by using the story to justify a context for irony that in turn legitimates a certain reading of the story. Clarissa inaugurates a new genre of fiction by presenting a paradigmatic model for justifying irony through a realistic story and thus provides (or seemed to provide) a means of showing interpretation as it arises autonomously from the raw data of experience.

Instead of noting the connection between irony and story, the recent deconstructionist readings of Clarissa rely upon a generalized view of how the epistolary mode calls attention to the act of interpretation and thus reveals that “meanings are generated, arbitrarily, by different readers.”³ It is a small step from seeing every reading of a letter as a subjective construct to seeing the novel not as a story but as “a continuous gabble of imaginary voices,” lacking “any sense of a controlling, magus-like authorial presence.”⁴ The problem with such generalized analyses is that it suppresses differences: the effect of an interplay of many voices in Clarissa is not the same as the interplay in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre or a William Gaddis novel. Richardson makes his presence felt through the irony his story imposes upon the various correspondents. The worth or referentiality of the characters' readings of experience is judged by what happens to them, a matter over which Richardson has some say. Clarissa's fearsome determination to accept death rather than endure moral compromise justifies her interpretation not of the world (which was grievously misguided) but of herself; it gives the lie to the readings imposed by the Harlowes and Lovelace. After all the welter of words about Clarissa, she defines herself by her conduct, a conduct that ultimately discloses her true character, the signified that all the signifiers have been clamoring to describe and penetrate. The gradual unfolding of Clarissa's story provides a context for irony toward the various correspondents' assertions, a frame of reference that is complete only when the “History of a Young Lady” has made Clarissa's true self fully present by demonstrating that she means what she has always said, that moral integrity is more important to her than anything in this world, including life itself.

Before turning to Clarissa, we must consider briefly the relation of story to the epistolary novel and the relation of irony to multivocal narrative. It might well seem superfluous to observe that Clarissa tells a story, but Terry Castle maintains that it does not.⁵ Her argument rests upon the assumption, recently put forward by a number of critics, that the epistolary mode intensifies interpretive uncertainty.⁶ Since there is “no identifiable single voice of narration,” the reader “must piece together a sequence of actions” (a story) by himself. Letters produced by characters are the material for this construction, but “letters open themselves, promiscuously, to distortion by readers. …”⁷ Terry Eagleton makes much the same point: “the utterance of the moment, once paralysed to print, is then secured for the most devious interpretative uses.”⁸ The problem with this account is that it places letters in a narrative vacuum. But each letter stands in a collection, created by an author, that shapes the way individual letters are read (on first and subsequent readings) because they are made moments in a story that unfolds progressively. Castle makes this point herself. Our interpretation of Clarissa's reading of “Mr. Doleman's” letter describing a number of London lodgings is conditioned by “Lovelace's own account” of the letter: it was dictated by Lovelace himself to delude Clarissa into choosing to go to Mrs. Sinclair's: Clarissa's “reading of the letter has been anticipated; indeed, its very rhetoric, it turns out, has been designed to incline her toward Dover Street and Mrs. Sinclair.”⁹ There is a simple dramatic irony at work here. Because the reader and Lovelace know more than Clarissa, they can read Doleman's letter in a way she cannot and can see that her free choice is really, ironically, predetermined. Similarly, as Castle skillfully remarks, the conception of Mrs. Sinclair's that Clarissa gathers from the letter “blinds her to the true nature of her surroundings.”¹⁰ The act of blinding and its consequences are part of a story told through a series of letters. Clarissa's view of Mrs. Sinclair is subject to irony from the context of “the true nature of her surroundings”; that is, her surroundings as they are revealed to be in the course of the story. There is a conflict of interpretation between Clarissa's and Lovelace's view of Mrs. Sinclair's, but Castle can say with assurance that Lovelace's interpretation is right and Clarissa's is wrong because, in terms of the story, what Lovelace sees is what is really there. Because the story creates a context which backs up or refutes the claims or values of any correspondent, it is simply wrong to say, as Castle does, that “the only events in epistolary fiction, strictly speaking, are events of language.”¹¹ What is represented indirectly in a story is no less an event than what is represented directly. In a play characters who are killed off-stage are no less dead than those killed on-stage.

The story cannot be neglected with impunity. Although Eagleton and Castle use deconstruction to further their arguments, they both reject William B. Warner's Reading Clarissa on the grounds that Warner obscures the significance of what actually happens between Lovelace and Clarissa. In Warner's peculiar allegory of reading, Lovelace is a playful fellow who knows that words never signify anything and that values are a bore while Clarissa is hopelessly deluded by the mythology of a unified self and logocentricism. Lovelace's rape is an act of decentering, creatively applied, “subvert[ing] this fiction [of the unified self] by introducing a small part of himself into Clarissa. Thus the rape, like all Lovelace's displacements, will seek to induce the slight difference that will make all the difference.”¹² Eagleton's devastating critique of Warner exposes the moral irresponsibility that arises from failing to take the story seriously: “Lovelace, whom Warner finds ‘charming’, moves towards the rape ‘with an inexorable necessity’: what else can the poor fellow do if he is out to deconstruct her? … Clarissa, presumably, couldn't take a joke. … Warner … regards most critics as conspiring with the prim Clarissa to judge Lovelace in such shabbily undeconstructed terms as ‘seriousness, consistency, sympathy, maturity, a full deep heart, and belief in the “real”’.”¹³ Castle, who finds Clarissa “ethical” because it teaches us that readings are arbitrary and that we should “read ourselves” (presumably, arbitrarily) detects in Warner's glossing over what actually happens a failure to consider the politics of interpretation, a failure that takes the form of “ill-considered attacks” on Clarissa, “boyish expressions of admiration” for Lovelace, and a pervasive tone of “startlingly primitive misogyny. …”¹⁴ What is the standard against which Warner's words are measured to judge them ill-considered and boyish? Eagleton and Castle claim that those words fail to address the represented reality: Lovelace's abduction, drugging, and rape of Clarissa—the story that is there even though Richardson tells it through a series of letters.

Because the story provides nonarbitrary benchmarks against which the readings of the multiple correspondents may be judged, it establishes a means of determining whether a certain letter, a certain interpretation, even a certain voice is accurate or is refuted by the action the novel sets forth. Lovelace constantly proclaims that his success will be measured by his ability to subdue Clarissa's will. When abduction, deceit, and intimidation fail to achieve that result, he drugs and rapes her on the assumption that once subdued, always subdued. Clarissa, in turn, maintains that her will shall never be subdued. The events—Lovelace's need to resort to drugs, Clarissa's subsequent escape and steadfast refusal to marry him despite poverty, isolation, and ill-health—make Lovelace's boasts seem as ironically blind as Clarissa's naive conception of Mrs. Sinclair's. They back up Clarissa's claim to know her will and have the courage to hold to it. Instead of presenting mere “hermeneutical anarchy” and a “gabble of imaginary voices,” the novel shows experience subjecting some words, some interpretations, to ironic refutation while confirming others. We must emphasize that the represented experience, what actually happens, is a fiction, created by Richardson. One may reject the fiction as unrealistic or ideologically mystified: Richardson was himself aware of that possibility. We will address this difficulty later; here it is important to distinguish between standing outside the story in order to reject it and viewing the function of the story within Richardson's epistolary novel. Within Clarissa, 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.

Since the work of Mikhail Bakhtin has become available in the West in the last decade, critics have sought to apply his notions of dialogic narrative and multivoiced fiction to nearly every novel, including Clarissa. Eagleton believes that the letter in Clarissa is dialogic because it is both private expression and public discourse, “overhearing itself in the ears of its addressee. …”¹⁵ Bakhtin's description of Dostoevsky's novels as a “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” stands behind the “gabble of imaginary voices” that Castle hears in Clarissa.¹⁶ As frequently occurs, the ideas a major critic develops to apply in a judicious, learned manner to particular types of work are appropriated for use everywhere. For Bakhtin, Dostoevsky originates the polyphonic novel as an exception to the standard, monologic European novel. Eagleton's claim that the letter is dialogic because it is both private and public and is “speech-for-another” makes “dialogic” so general a term that it is useless. In Bakhtin, it is discourse “directed both toward the referential object of speech, … and toward another's discourse, toward someone else's speech” (185). Eagleton's correspondent's words are not directed toward another's speech, but toward another's subjectivity: “you must write with a wary eye on the other. …”¹⁷ Emile Benveniste has argued persuasively that all language establishes an “I-thou” axis, that all language is both subjective and “speech-for-another.”¹⁸ As for letters being both private and public, Hegel has noted that all language objectifies subjectivity, externalizing the internal.

In addition to applying a trendy term so broadly that it loses its original discriminating value, critics frequently set up simple paired opposites, valorizing one side of the opposition: showing against telling; organic unity against editorial intrusions; disruptions against centeredness. Recently, multivocality has become valorized at the expense of irony. Roland Barthes argues that irony contradicts multivalence by giving speech a speaker, “the voice which would give the text its (‘organic’) unity. …” The multivalent (good) text would have a “wall of voices” not owned or subordinated and thus equally valid, whereas the classic (bad) text would order the voices into a hierarchy of value through irony.¹⁹

Although the conflict between multivocality and irony is real, the simple either/or paired opposition is not. To delineate how story allows irony to regulate a multiplicity of voices, we must recall Bakhtin's discussion of Dostoevsky. Whereas most European novels evoke a plurality of voices only to subordinate them to a “finalizing artistic vision” (5), Dostoevsky leaves the conflicting voices and consciousnesses unmerged, setting competing world-views alongside each other in “dramatic juxtaposition” (28). In contrast to a Hegelian artist like Goethe, who sees diverse consciousnesses as stages in a unified process, Dostoevsky conceives the diversity in “simultaneous coexistence” (29). Thus, the voices are not subordinated into a hierarchy, but are kept “fully valid” with each other in polyphonic juxtaposition. To maintain this full validity, Dostoevsky shuns “finalizing authorial words” and seeks “plot situations that provoke, tease, extort, dialogize,” that remain open-ended. There is, in fact, a conflict between the “fundamental open-endedness of the polyphonic novel” and the “conventionally monologic ending” that Dostoevsky provides for most of his novels (39). For our purposes, the critical point is that a completed story has the same effect as “finalizing authorial words”: it constrains multivocal plurality by establishing a basis for irony against which the various voices are measured and thus articulates a vision into which they are set. In the following discussion of Clarissa, we shall explore how story stands in for “authorial words” in Richardson's epistolary novel, how it imposes irony and thus places the heterogeneous material into a finalizing, monologic artistic vision.

The story does not merely impose a context for irony; it also justifies it. Bakhtin is led to downplay the role of plot in Dostoevsky lest the thesis of equal validity for every voice be compromised. It is unclear, at least in translation, whether the term “fully valid” (as in “a plurality of fully valid voices”) refers to realism of presentation or truth of content. Still, we may ask whether it is true that Dostoevsky simply juxtaposes competing voices in a spatial manner (28). The Brothers Karamazov tells a story of murder. Does Ivan's role in that murder have no effect upon the validity of his voice against the voices of Dmitri and Alyosha? The novel may present the three voices as equally real while the story indicates that they are not equally true or good. To put the question in a different way, is “The Grand Inquisitor” the same story and the same work of art when it is anthologized independently as when it is a moment in the action of The Brothers Karamazov? Ivan's ideas (and the character, voice, and consciousness fused to those ideas) are tested by the story in which he is placed. His ideas, as well as Dmitri's and Alyosha's, are judged against the context of a represented experience just as the ideas of Lovelace and Clarissa are judged against what actually happens, the reality their story bodies forth.

The story does not merely set different voices side by side; it tests the validity of each voice against the others. Indeed, Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky's type of narrative derives from the method of “testing truth” (111) in Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire. The narrative propulsion of the Socratic dialogue lies in “collectively searching for truth, in the process of … dialogic interaction [between people]” (110). By anacrisis, provoking the words of one's interlocutor, Socrates elucidates the implications and consequences of ideas, thus testing their validity. “The dialogic testing of the idea is simultaneously also the testing of the person who represents it” (111-12). Menippean satire, according to Bakhtin, transposes Socratic testing into a story: the plot, by means of some anacrisis (some illuminating provocation), becomes “a mode for searching after truth, provoking it, and, most important, testing it” (114). The application of all this to Clarissa is apparent: the story tests the ideas Clarissa and Lovelace represent by presenting Clarissa and Lovelace in a conflict that makes their struggle a testing of truth. In fiction, if not in life, the testing yields some result and that result takes the form of irony. Irony may be provisional or final. As we shall see, the irony the story imposes upon Clarissa is eventually superseded by a higher irony imposed upon Lovelace. Irony may be, as Wayne Booth has noted, stable or unstable.²⁰ It may invalidate a certain perspective by asserting the superiority of an opposite perspective, or it may juxtapose contrasting perspectives or meanings while coolly refusing to endorse any. Irony may finalize a unified, coherent worldview; it may, as in Friedrich Schlegel, endorse an ongoing interplay of separate local truths; or it may, as in Novalis and Samuel Beckett, subject every finalization to ironic subversion ad infinitum.²¹ The type of irony a particular story's testing of truth may justify varies, but the effect of this justification is to naturalize a particular interpretation of experience and thus to legitimate some ordering of multivocality, whether that ordering involves reducing all voices to one, distributing degrees of validity, or approving anarchy. The centrality of the novel to modern society derives in no small measure from its ability to legitimate an interpretation by using story to create a natural justification of a context for irony, a process first mastered by Richardson in Clarissa.

Clarissa draws on a type of story that predates epistolary fiction and does not derive from Socratic dialogue or Menippean satire. In the Middle Ages, exemplary tales, based loosely on Job, subjected extraordinary virtue to extraordinary trials. In Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, the heroine becomes an earthly image of heavenly patience as she endures a succession of calamities.²² The metaphysical assumptions behind such storytelling are directly opposed to those underlying the “dialogic means of seeking truth,” which is “counterposed to official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth. …” (110). Instead of testing a proposed truth against its implications and against experience, the exemplary tale seeks to illustrate a pregiven, supersensual reality. The story is exemplary because it directs attention away from the distortions of this life, picturing the essence of patience shorn of accidental dross. The notion that trials exhibit virtue led to a subgenre of tales such as Boccaccio's “Griselda” (Decameron, 10.10), in which a husband contrives a series of events to test the fidelity or obedience of a wife. The story becomes problematic when its portrait of experience ceases to be clearly subordinate to the illustration of an idea (fidelity or obedience as such), when the represented reality begins to provide a context for judgment. Whereas Boccaccio describes the husband's decision to test his wife in brief, formal, impersonal terms, Chaucer's version asks the reader to consider the decision's moral propriety:

He hadde assayed hire ynogh bifore,
And foond hire evere good; what neded it
Hire for to tempte, and alwey moore and moore,
Though som men preise it for a subtil wit?
But as for me, I seye that yvele it sit
To assaye a wyf whan that it is no nede,
And putten hire in angwyssh and in drede.(23)

Chaucer judges the merits of the husband's actions by their consequences in this life, while Boccaccio keeps the story focused on illustrating exemplary virtue. Richardson attempts to have it both ways. Lovelace's testing of Clarissa is a cruel attempt to be a “subtil wit” at the expense of another. By arranging to put Clarissa's virtue on trial, Lovelace seeks to attain a God-like control over experience. But Richardson's own storymaking endeavors, through showing in detail how virtue is rewarded, to place the reader in the God-like position of seeing through everyday events to the providential design underlying them. Richardson wishes to illustrate a received, orthodox, monologic truth, but in order to convince a skeptical public of the validity of his moral lessons, he must show that a certain (moral) interpretation arises naturally from a faithful representation of experience. The need to naturalize interpretation leads him to the testing of truth, to the development of a context for irony arising from a dramatized conflict of interpretations. Beginning with Pamela's rejection of Mr. B.'s assertion that he has a right to her, Richardson's stories test the strength of competing worldviews against the evidence of experience. By portraying how Pamela is able to move from being a servant to being an exemplary wife, by demonstrating that marriage can be an ennobling union of minds, Richardson indicates that experience legitimates the values by which Pamela defines herself. Conversely, the story endorses an interpretative framework that subjects Mr. B.'s attitudes and actions to increasing irony: the more cruelly he tests Pamela, the more thoroughly he disproves the assumptions behind the test.

Of course, the experience against which worldviews are judged is created by a story that is made up. If the story is rejected as fantastic or improbable, the context for irony it proposes is left without foundation. Fielding's parody of Pamela imposes a counterstory and thus endorses a quite different irony directed at Mr. Booby's victimization by the socially climbing Shamela. Richardson is keenly aware of the danger that his novels might be rejected as mere fictions. He casts his exemplary tales in the epistolary mode in order to create a sense of mimetic authenticity and immediacy, to give the reader the impression of “looking into the hearts of some [of the characters], through windows that at other times have been close shut up.”²⁴ The mimetic illusion, reinforced in each scene, should be buttressed by a credible sequence of events.²⁵ The point of constructing stories faithful to ordinary experience, of eschewing the marvelous in favor of the probable, is to allow moral judgment to arise naturally from the represented situation, so that the interpretation seems to belong to the events rather than to the beliefs of the author. Of course, arguments have raged from Richardson's time on about the probability of certain characters, episodes, and plot turns. Yet the very terms of the debate (“Would Lovelace really do that?”) assume that fiction may possess a type of truth that is distinct from both history and lying.²⁶ A story acquires the authority of representing experience by showing what would happen if there were a Clarissa and Lovelace set in battle against each other. The reader's conviction that the story does portray what would happen makes the represented experience seem true and thus allows that experience to legitimate a context for irony toward each character's reading of experience.

Clarissa's trial, like Pamela's, places worldviews in conflict. But the story does not simply disclose the victory of one perspective, nor is victory without cost. Clarissa's nobility of soul makes her vulnerable to Lovelace's manipulations even as it saves her from his power. The story imposes and displaces a succession of ironic contexts: Clarissa's filial loyalty ensures that her family will misunderstand and mistreat her; her sense of right reinforces Lovelace's determination to conquer her; despite abduction and rape, Clarissa transforms Lovelace's victories into defeats by maintaining an integrity of will he is powerless to shake. The story's termination in Clarissa's death establishes a finalized perspective in which superseded readings of experience are accorded a place.

Clarissa defines herself by attempting to realize ideal standards in daily life. Her family basks in the glow of her exemplary behavior until it challenges their worldly ambitions. By inheriting her grandfather's estate and rejecting Solmes's suit, she inadvertently puts her individual merit in the way of the Harlowes' “darling view … of raising a family,” of using great wealth to acquire a title.²⁷ Solmes's offer to settle his immense fortune on Clarissa would allow the Harlowes to buy their way into the nobility. Though lust for wealth and status is alien to her, obedience to parents is part of the ideal code Clarissa strives to realize. She is dutifully compliant in whatever does not compromise her moral integrity, offering to surrender her claim to the estate and never to marry against her family's will. Unappeased, the Harlowes insist that she prove her obedience by marrying Solmes. Much has recently been written about Clarissa's oppression by patriarchy, about her family's assumption that she is their property.²⁸ While this is undeniably true, Clarissa's own objection to being treated like disposable property centers not on the violation this entails per se, but on its consequences upon her own ethical conduct: “To marry a man one cannot endure, is not only a dishonest thing, as to the man; but it is enough to make a creature who wishes to be a good wife, a bad or indifferent one … and then she can hardly be either a good mistress, or a good friend; or anything but a discredit to her family, and a bad example to all around her” (1: 307). As Jean Hagstrum points out, Clarissa's ideal of marriage rests upon the Miltonic conception of wifely obedience and a free communion of spiritually attuned minds.²⁹ Since Clarissa's character is grounded in striving for unity of conduct and principle, the Harlowes are asking her to repudiate herself, to yield up her soul for worldly gain by introducing an ironic gap between what she is and what she ought to be.

Being thoroughly worldly themselves, the Harlowes naturally interpret Clarissa's refusal in terms of lust and self-interest. Clarissa's story hinges upon the cruel irony that all her efforts to maintain exemplary conduct turn into means by which she is brought to compromise it. She would live without introducing an ironic disjunction between principles and conduct into her being. However, the world—in the form of her family—insists upon this disjunction as the price of retaining the protection of a secure social position. Clarissa's motives are constantly misread as selfish and worldly because the idea that one might really mean to live by an ideal code is foreign to the Harlowes' conception of experience. Furthermore, since Clarissa really does mean what she says, she constantly disarms herself. To combine ideality and actuality, she must behave as an ideal daughter to her real family, which means that she must pretend not to see the ironic distance between the way an ideal family would behave and the way her real one actually behaves. Out of a sense of filial obedience, she rejects Miss Howe's advice that she assume her estate; instead, she surrenders control of it to her father. Each refusal to act according to self-interest narrows her options, rendering her more, not less, vulnerable to the demands for moral compromise voiced by the Harlowes and Lovelace. Richardson makes grimly clear that attaining a position in this life that will permit moral independence requires a degree of self-interest that compromises ideality and therefore must be rejected by Clarissa.

Unwilling to stoop in her battle against the Harlowes, Clarissa is increasingly compromised by Lovelace. After beginning a correspondence in order to prevent him from taking revenge against her family for their insults, she continues to write, despite her parents' prohibition, in hopes of averting mischief. Clarissa cannot bring herself to wash her hands of responsibility for her family, but by continuing the correspondence she slides into the very separation of principles and conduct she strives to avoid: drawn into clandestine communication with a libertine, she is forced to deceive her parents. This deception gives Lovelace a weapon he can use against her. Similarly, in renouncing her estate, Clarissa gives up the means of shielding herself from the Harlowes' plans to drag her to the altar. Finally, though Clarissa repents of agreeing to go off with Lovelace, she nevertheless decides to meet him rather than break a promise. Because she is determined to be faithful to her word, she gives him the opportunity to abduct her.

As R. F. Brissenden observes, Lovelace's treatment of Clarissa repeats the Harlowes' treatment of her in a more stark and intense way.³⁰ Their conflict assumes the ferocity of a death struggle because Lovelace realizes that unless he can make Clarissa accept life without moral ideality the worldview by which he defines himself will stand refuted; she realizes that Lovelace is attempting, no less than her family, to separate her conduct from her values. Like the Harlowes, Lovelace struggles to assimilate Clarissa into an interpretative context of lust and self-interest. Unlike them, he is no hypocrite, asserting outright that virtue is a mask, that pride and the will to mastery provide the keys to any penetrating analysis of behavior. Behind Lovelace lie Mandeville, Hobbes, and the cultivated cynicism of the seventeenth-century libertinage tradition, summarized by the Earl of Rochester's lines: “Look to the bottom of his vast design, / Wherein man's wisdom, power, and glory join: / The good he acts, the ill he does endure, / 'Tis all from fear, to make himself secure.”³¹ Lovelace defines himself by his skill in manipulating people's hidden, base impulses. When his power is challenged, he constructs plots to compel experience to affirm his estimation of others and of himself; in effect, he invents stories to legitimate his context for irony. Lovelace spares the innkeeper's daughter, Rosebud, because her grandmother implores him to “be merciful to her.” There is no need to make a story out of her (1: 170).

Clarissa offers Lovelace different treatment: “her whole air … expressed a majestic kind of indignation, which implied a believed superiority over the person to whom she spoke” (2: 14). He expects her to realize that she is in his power and that thus it is in her interest to appeal to his generosity. Instead, she refuses expediencies such as a rapid agreement to marry him or even a pretense of flattery. Lovelace quickly senses that if Clarissa can be what she wishes to be, she will stand outside his context for irony and hence be living proof of the insufficiency of his vision and power. Thus, he turns his plotting against her, listing to his friend Belford a series of premises to be put on trial: “Importunity and opportunity no woman is proof against …”; “Is not, may not, her virtue be found rather in pride than in principle? (2: 35); “Is then the divine Clarissa capable of loving a man whom she ought not to love?” (2: 38). Lovelace hopes, by subjecting Clarissa's beliefs about herself to devastating irony, to legitimate his Hobbesian-Mandevillian premises, to confirm his own worldview. The rest of the novel, three-fourths of its bulk, describes in minute detail how Lovelace's effort to impose irony on Clarissa succeeds, ironically, in imposing irony upon him, granting Clarissa the opportunity to justify her view of herself at his expense.

At first, Lovelace's campaign follows the pattern established by the Harlowes' bullying of Clarissa. Virtue is apparently defenseless. Miss Howe urges Clarissa to realize that she has “a nice part to act,” that she should try to “engage [Lovelace's] pride, which he calls his honour …” (2: 44), but Clarissa cannot “palliate,” cannot deliberately mislead without renouncing unity of conduct and principles. In a grimly ironic manner, virtue seems to open itself for attack. Seeing her “believed superiority,” Lovelace's determination to defeat her is constantly renewed. Even her vigilance seems to turn against her. Each time she resists and sees through his schemes, he is driven to more elaborate and less merciful subterfuge. In the middle sections of the novel, Richardson appears to establish a context for irony that endorses neither Lovelace's cynical worldliness nor Clarissa's faith in providence. Instead, irony seems to rest upon a tragic view of experience in which genuine, innate nobility of soul provides persecutors the weapons that allow such nobility to be manipulated, deceived, and brought low.

Lovelace constructs a world where the ironic disjunctions that Clarissa discovered at Harlowe Place between appearances and reality, ideal standards and actual behavior, are radically intensified: the pious widow Sinclair turns out to be a madam of a brothel; her uncle's friend, Captain Tomlinson, who seeks her out to arrange a reconciliation with her family, is really one of Lovelace's tools; Lovelace's lady relatives who offer to welcome her into his family are actually prostitutes hired to take her back to the brothel. As Brissenden remarks, “Lovelace brings into existence a horrible parody of the world in which Clarissa places her faith, gets her to accept it, and then destroys it.”³² Being a type of artist, Lovelace constructs a lie that discloses the truth with a sharpness and clarity it would otherwise lack: the polite world of the Harlowes is a sham, a veil for the most mercenary of designs.

Although Lovelace's artifice works sufficiently to return Clarissa to the brothel, where he drugs and rapes her, his storymaking does not work out the way he intends. Instead of leading Clarissa to confirm the rake's creed, Lovelace's deceptions subject that creed to irony by eliciting behavior for which it cannot account. Like Anselmo in Cervantes's “El Curioso impertinente,” Lovelace is punished for his impious aspirations by a higher plotter. Anselmo places his wife's virtue on trial much the way Lovelace places Clarissa's virtue on trial.³³ He induces his best friend, Lotario, to prove his wife's merit by attempting to seduce her. To the surprise of all three, Lotario and Anselmo's wife fall in love. Both Anselmo and Lovelace set stories in motion whose implications they cannot control. Whereas Anselmo learns, to his grief, that no woman can incarnate the ideal of chastity, Lovelace is taught much the opposite lesson: a real woman can be virtuous out of principle alone. By testing Clarissa and the values she seeks to realize, Lovelace unwittingly subjects himself to the type of devastating irony he would impose upon her. The tragic irony that makes Clarissa's vigilance a form of vulnerability is displaced by a higher irony in which Lovelace's exploitation of Clarissa's vulnerability makes manifest the falsity of his own worldview: after the rape, Clarissa steadfastly refuses to marry him.

Instead of simply setting a number of competing consciousnesses alongside each other in a spatial manner, the story exploits the temporal apprehension of narrative in order to create in the reader a sense that the progressive penetration of experience leads to a progressive refinement and alteration of contexts for irony. The generation of irony by story in Clarissa cannot be explained adequately by Bahktin's spatial deployment and juxtaposition of competing voices alone. Instead, narrative extension (the sequence of discrete scenes) is constantly composed into provisional unities in the (temporal) course of reading. Each provisional unity is then displaced by further extension, giving rise to new, reconfigured provisional unities, followed by new displacements by extension (something more happens). In a general way, this process accords with the phenomenologies of narrative cognition explored by Ingarden and Ricoeur.³⁴ Each provisional unity connects the foregoing extension through some causal hypothesis, which in turn naturalizes a context for irony. The basis for irony seems to arise of itself from a realistic portrait of experience. Lovelace's ability to seduce Clarissa back to Mrs. Sinclair's suggests that virtue, no matter how scrupulous, is too good not to be vulnerable to artful, evil imposition: Clarissa simply fails to anticipate, until it is too late, that Lovelace might dress up prostitutes as his own aristocratic relatives. But once Lovelace rapes Clarissa the story's continuation, the narrative's further extension, reveals that irony against Clarissa's unworldliness is not the final irony. By tracing Clarissa's escape from the brothel and her resolute rejection of all his pleas for marriage, the story reveals that Lovelace's trickery has the ironic effect of unmasking his true character to Clarissa, which in turn ensures, ironically, that she will not be tricked by him, that she will never marry him.

But while Clarissa maintains her integrity against all efforts to subvert it, she becomes increasingly aware that earthly existence entails moral compromise. She was abducted by Lovelace because she refused to break a promise to meet him in her father's garden. She escapes Lovelace's power by resorting to breaking a promise in order to flee Mrs. Sinclair's brothel. When she recounts the deception to Miss Howe, Clarissa exclaims, “How hard, how next to impossible, my dear, to avoid many lesser deviations, when we are betrayed into a capital one!” (3: 20). However unwittingly, Lovelace's storymaking does subject Clarissa's desire to combine ideality and actuality to brutal irony. She strives after a greater-than-human moral conduct just as Anselmo yearns for a greater-than-human knowledge (he would know rather than trust that his wife is faithful). The effect of Lovelace's manipulations is to place Clarissa in situations where she cannot be in the right. Either the desire for ideality makes her demand, impiously, immunity from human imperfections, or her acquiescence in ambiguous actions (lying to escape Mrs. Sinclair's) makes her guilty of equivocations. In either case, her principles and conduct stand in ironic opposition. Rather than accept such a violation of her sense of herself as the price of existence, Clarissa longs for death: “and since all my own hopes of worldly happiness are entirely over; let me slide quietly into my grave …” (3: 374).

From Richardson's point of view, Providence kindly answers her wishes. Her death, alone, impoverished, disdaining Lovelace's offers to make amends through marriage, justifies and completes the self revealed through her writings. Richardson wisely resisted the pleas of his friends to save Clarissa. Anything less than a resolute and pious death would vindicate Lovelace's ironic worldview by showing that no matter how he has treated her, the consequences need not be serious because everything may be patched up after all. Instead, Clarissa's refusal of any compromise subjects the worldly irony of Lovelace and the Harlowes to a withering higher irony. Rather than being, as Eagleton would have it, an “aggressive onslaught on the whole social system,” Clarissa's death is an assertion of the superiority of spiritual values, of her “true home,” to the values of any social system.³⁵ In the last fourth of the novel, the testing of truth, of competing worldviews and voices, shifts from getting along in this life to the manner in which one faces the next. When the arena of conflict moves from Harlowe Place and Mrs. Sinclair's to deathbed scenes, Clarissa's apparent defenselessness and vulnerability become, ironically, the only defense and strength that matter. Just as the change of scene from Harlowe Place to Mrs. Sinclair's involves, as Brissenden observes, a deeper penetration into reality and a raising of the stakes in the battle, so does the change of scene from Mrs. Sinclair's to the deathbed. Clarissa's dying is contrasted to the dying of Lovelace's minion, Belton, Mrs. Sinclair, and eventually Lovelace himself. Whereas they babble in mindless fear, Clarissa alone speaks composedly and meaningfully.

Castle argues that Clarissa chooses the silence of death once she has lost her (naive) faith in referential language.³⁶ It is more accurate to say that she has discovered the sphere and the means by which she can secure referentiality for her language. Once her family has learned that she is truly ill, Uncle John Harlowe writes that her assertions had been discounted because “we know your talents, my dear, and how movingly you could write, whenever you pleased. …” (4: 352). Dying in an exemplary manner, Clarissa can back up her words, show that they really do refer to something, and close off at least the most slanderous misinterpretations that have plagued her. Quite simply, knowledge of Clarissa's manner of death colors a second reading of her early letters in a different way than would her marrying Lovelace, marrying Belford, escaping to her grandfather's estate, or running off to America. Far from sinking brokenly into silence, Clarissa goes on talking and writing until the hour of her death. What has changed is that all her words, past and present, come to revolve around that nodal point: her way of dying becomes the ever present signified towards which every remark, no matter how oblique, points.

The final testing of an idea and a character by experience lies in the confrontation with death. Hence Richardson gives over so much of his novel to a picture of how Clarissa's values permit her to put this transitory life behind her. Myopic modern readings fail to take seriously the structure of Clarissa, which is designed to drive home that the most important thing about this life is that it is a preparation for death. Castle argues, for example, that Clarissa's refusal to bring suit against Lovelace shows that she “now mistrusts any form of linguistic self-presentation,” citing as evidence not Clarissa's many explanations of her refusal, but Lovelace's jibes at lawyers and courts.³⁷ Clarissa is interested in a different court. Indeed, her indifference to all lower courts has the effect, ironically, of advancing her earthly vindication by giving her history yet another instance of her refusal to confuse intrinsic rightness with the opinion of the world. For this reason she is able to face an apparently sordid death (abandoned by family, deprived of friends, without money, comforted by strangers alone) with composure and pious anticipation. Richardson's story, by testing competing claims of truth until the conflict yields a portrait of ideality in experience, justifies a context for irony that sets all the previous, superseded contexts into a “finalized artistic vision.”

Richardson's justification of irony by story establishes a model for naturalizing interpretation and adjudicating between the conflicting claims of juxtaposed voices and values. Such justification underpins the novelistic mode of organizing narrative, for the novel seeks to legitimate a certain reading of experience by showing, in a mimetically plausible manner, what would happen if fictional characters and situations were real. Confidence in this mode of demonstration underlies the historical development of the novel, and it is a faith to which novelists, however tenuously, still cling.

Notes

1. The phrase, “the struggles of interpretation,” is borrowed from William B. Warner's Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979). The characterization of Clarissa as a “hermeneutic anarchy” is from Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's “Clarissa” (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), 21.

2. See Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982), 44-45; Castle, 26; 89; 90.

3. Castle, 45; see Eagleton, 40-51.

4. Castle, 148, 165.

5. See Castle, esp. 38-46; 148-80.

6. See Eagleton; Ronald C. Rosbottom, Choderlos de Laclos (Boston: Twayne, 1978); Tzvetan Todorov, Littérature et signification (Paris: Larousse, 1967), 39-49.

7. Castle, 41, 42, 43-44.

8. Eagleton, 49.

9. Castle, 94.

10. Castle, 94.

11. Castle, 46.

12. Warner, 49.

13. Eagleton, 67.

14. Castle, 186, 194.

15. Eagleton, 52.

16. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 6. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

17. Eagleton, 52.

18. See Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

19. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 44, 45.

20. See Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974).

21. See Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs' definitive study of irony in Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung, 2nd. ed., (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1977) esp. 7-91, 100-112.

22. Chaucer's use of the genre in the Man of Law's Tale may be ironic. That question, however, supersedes the scope of this discussion.

23. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Clerk's Tale” (ll. 456-62), in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957), 106.

24. To Lady Echlin, October 10, 1754; quoted in Donald L. Ball, Samuel Richardson's Theory of Fiction (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), 26.

25. See Ball's discussion of probability in Richardson's theory of fiction.

26. See Leopold Damrosch, Jr., God's Plot and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 10.

27. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, in 4 vols. (London: Everyman, 1932), (1:53). Further citations are to this edition and will be included parenthetically in the text.

28. See Eagleton, 56.

29. See Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), esp. 186-218.

30. R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974), 181.

31. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “A Satyr against Reason and Mankind” (ll. 153-56) in The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), 99.

32. Brissenden, 181.

33. The tale, of course, appears as an inset narrative in Don Quixote, Part One.

34. Despite differences, both Ingarden and Ricoeur discuss the relation between narrative extension and the reader's act of (provisional) unification. See Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), particularly “Temporal Perspective in the Concretization of the Literary Work of Art,” 94-145; Paul Ricoeur, Time And Narrative, vol. I, trans. Kathleen McLauglin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), particularly “Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis,” 52-87.

35. Eagleton, 90.

36. See Castle, 108-35.

37. Castle, 128.