SOURCE: Bartolomeo, Joseph F. “Female Quixotism v. ‘Feminine’ Tragedy: Lennox's Comic Revision of Clarissa.” In New Essays on Samuel Richardson, edited by Albert J. Rivero, pp. 163-75. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Bartolomeo deliberates on the intertextual relationship between The Female Quixote and Samuel Richardson's novels.]

In regard to gender and eighteenth-century fiction, one of the largest obstacles to essentialism is the career of Samuel Richardson, whose plots, characters and narrative techniques both defined and constricted possibilities for women writers. An examination of his influence on one of his most accomplished admirers, Charlotte Lennox, appears to undermine essentialism even further. Although Lennox accepted Richardson's artistic advice while writing The Female Quixote and his practical assistance in publishing it,¹ she eschewed such Richardsonian devices as the epistolary method, an emphasis on love and passion and an abundance of moral sentiments—devices commonly associated with “feminine” fiction. Instead, she adopted what have often been considered “masculine” techniques and practices, including an omniscient narrator, a satiric attack on the “feminized” genre of romance and an emphasis on humor over pathos and sentiment.

These differences, along with recent critical preoccupation with gendered discourse, may have obscured what I consider to be a significant intertextual relationship between the novels. Noting that the plot of The Female Quixote “veers away from tragedy or melodrama in favour of satire and farce,” and that the text almost completely rejects autobiography, David Marshall has stated flatly that it is “not a Richardsonian novel.”² I accept Marshall's premises but proceed from them to the opposite conclusion: that Lennox's novel is a rewriting of Clarissa in a comic mode. The two novelists' representation of male characters, of idiosyncratic heroines and reactions to them, and of narratological concerns about the heroine's “history” suggests that Lennox was exploring, as was Richardson, the possibilities for and limitations upon the exceptional woman. By giving these subjects a humorous turn, however, she manages to sidestep the events and outcomes that troubled Richardson's contemporaries, and, for different reasons, continue to trouble readers today.

Aside from the explicit praise of Clarissa by the Johnsonian doctor who “cures” Arabella—a character through which Lennox may be following the example of Clarissa, who “modestly put her doctrine into the mouth of a worthy preacher”³—numerous incidental parallels of character and plot between the texts suggest Richardson's pervasive influence on Lennox. Hervey, Arabella's first suitor, resembles the semiliterate Solmes in being “Master of no great Elegance in Letter-writing” (13), just as Charlotte Glanville, Arabella's eventual sister-in-law, echoes Clarissa's sister Arabella in seeking “Opportunities of revengeing [sic] herself” (90) on the heroine for some imagined slight. The women's names, of course, also point to a clever reversal: if Lennox is self-deprecating enough to give the disagreeable Miss Glanville her own name, she may well have self-consciously adopted Arabella Harlowe's name for her own heroine. The inset “history” of a more interesting secondary character—the “fallen” Miss Groves—combines elements from the stories of Sally Martin and Polly Horton, Clarissa's antagonists at Mrs. Sinclair's brothel, a spoiled childhood, a negligent mother, adolescent vanity, indulgence in gambling and a lack of serious suitors. Miss Groves is eventually seduced and abandoned by the “Honourable Mr. L—” (74), who behaves as Lovelace does to the two prostitutes. In terms of plot devices, Arabella's flight through a “Garden-door” (95) and into the hands of a man “extremely glad at having so beautiful a Creature in his Power” (100) invites comparison with Clarissa's far more consequential flight with Lovelace, who shortly afterward exultingly asks, “And is she not IN MY POWER?” (401; III:31). Finally, both novels include climactic duels. Appropriately, in the comic novel the duel ensues from a case of mistaken identity and results not in deaths but in a pair of marriages, while the duel in Clarissa provides Colonel Morden with vengeance and Lovelace with putative expiation.

One of Lennox's most direct intertextual references—Arabella's search for a precedent in the romances she has read to justify her leaving “her Father's House” in order to escape “a tyrannical Exertion of paternal Authority, and the secret Machinations of a Lover, whose Aim was to take away her Liberty, either by obliging her to marry him, or by making her a Prisoner” (35)—ostensibly situates her heroine in a position as precarious as Clarissa's.⁴ Lennox, however, consistently diminishes the threat to Arabella by softening the male characters. Arabella's father, the Marquis, can sound as authoritarian as Mr. Harlowe, who thunders, at Clarissa's resistance to marrying Solmes, “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” (64; I:49). After Arabella's refusal to accede to his choice of a husband for her, the Marquis “sternly” declares, “I'll hear no more … of your foolish and ridiculous Objections … I expect you will endeavour to obey me without Reluctance; for, since you seem to be so little acquainted with what will most conduce to your own Happiness, you must not think it strange, if I insist upon directing your Choice in the most important Business of your Life” (42). Yet as Deborah Ross has observed, Arabella's father “is not Clarissa Harlowe's”:⁵ after his outburst the narrator immediately adds that “he could not resolve to force her Consent; and, however determined he appeared to her, yet, in Reality, he intended only to use Persuasions to effect what he desired” (42). The Marquis's practice of isolating Arabella—allowing her only an occasional ride or visit to church—represents a consequence of “the natural Haughtiness of his Temper” (5), not a punishment for disobedience, like Clarissa's imprisonment at Harlowe Place.

Arabella escapes literal patriarchal control first by this paternal reluctance to command, and then by the Marquis's sudden death.⁶ His posthumous attempt to influence his daughter—a will that would leave one third of his estate to his nephew Glanville should she refuse to marry him—is not terribly coercive. As Glanville's father, her designated guardian, explains, “tho' she is directed to consult me in her Choice of an Husband, yet my Consent is not absolutely necessary” (65). Financial incentives, moreover, can have little impact on a decidedly unworldly child, and certainly not the catalytic effect of Grandfather Harlowe's will on the equally unworldly Clarissa's grasping siblings. James and Arabella Harlowe, jealous of their sister's ability to “out-grandfather” (80; I:79) them, stoke the family's intransigence toward Clarissa. One of Arabella's taunts makes their motives and methods transparent: “But let me tell you, my pretty little flighty one, that my papa's living will shall control my grandfather's dead one; and that estate will be disposed of as my fond grandfather would have disposed of it, had he lived to see such a change in his favourite” (199; I:312). Along with having a father who “had a great Opinion of his Daughter's Prudence” (65) and therefore limited her guardian's powers, Arabella is fortunate to be an only child.

Like her father, Arabella's chief suitor, Glanville, hardly represents the danger that she initially imagines. Unlike either Solmes or Lovelace, he will not attempt to force himself upon her. Despite having fallen “passionately in Love” with her within “a very few Days” (30), he not only waits patiently for her to be cured of the delusions that her voracious reading of romances has induced, but even obeys the commands that she issues under the sway of those delusions. Most notably, he abides by the romance convention behind Arabella's declaration that she “will not pardon the Man who shall have the Presumption to tell me he loves me” (44). Lennox transfers to the male the restraint and modesty commonly expected of respectable women—qualities admired by Clarissa as “punctilios” and disparaged by Lovelace as “the female affectation of denying … love” (402; III:33). This reversal helps the author minimize questions about the heroine's genuine feelings and sincerity, questions like those that have perplexed and divided interpreters—within and outside of the novel—of Clarissa's “conditional kind of liking” (135; I:183) toward Lovelace.

Glanville's attributes align him with the least predatory male characters in Clarissa. He is as patient, compliant and dull as Anna Howe's stolid suitor, Hickman, who “is humble and knows his distance” (68; I:56) in relation to his beloved—at least, she reminds Clarissa, while she occupies a position of power (similar to Arabella's) by being a single woman: “Do, dear, now, let me spread my plumes a little, and now and then make myself feared. This is my time, you know, since it will be no more to my credit, than to his, to give myself those airs when I am married” (487; III:211). By literally fighting for his lady, as a romance hero would,⁷ Glanville resembles the reformed Belford, who describes his offer of service to the dying Clarissa in self-consciously chivalric terms: “Methinks, said I (and I really, in a manner involuntarily, bent my knee), I have before me an angel indeed. I can hardly forebear prostration, and to beg your influence to draw me after you to the world you are aspiring to!—Yet—but what shall I say?—Only, dearest excellence, make me, in some small instances, serviceable to you, that I may (if I survive you) have the glory to think I was able to contribute to your satisfaction, while among us” (1 102; VI:350). Lovelace, of course, also uses such fulsome language and gestures: during the pivotal scene in which he tricks Clarissa into fleeing her father's house, for instance, he refers to himself as her “persecuted adorer” (376; II:326). But Clarissa is rightly suspicious of the “ready kneeler” (379; II:332), for he admits to Belford early on that his deference is merely tactical: “But all gentle shall be my movements: all respectful, even to reverence, my address to her! … By my humility will I invite her confidence” (165; I:237). Glanville, too, resolves “to accommodate himself, as much as possible,” to Arabella's “Taste, and endeavour to gain her Heart by a Behaviour most agreeable to her” (46). His temporary and petty deceptions, however, cannot begin to compare with Lovelace's elaborate schemes.

Lennox relegates the Lovelace role, and the threat it represents, to a secondary character, Sir George Bellmour.⁸ Attempting to win Arabella under the cover of courting her cousin, Sir George engages in Lovelacean plotting, deceit and role-playing, but each of his ventures conspicuously fails before he can do Arabella or anyone else any serious harm. Having taken over the role of the author for several chapters⁹ by delivering an extravagant, heroic autobiographical account to impress Arabella, he draws her scorn for showing himself to be an inconstant lover. Richardson himself objected to the length and improbability of Sir George's story,¹⁰ perhaps because he was uncomfortably reminded of Lovelace's superiority as a manipulator of narrative.¹¹ Sir George's disguising of a common woman as a princess who had been abandoned by Glanville mimics Lovelace's transformation of the whores at Sinclair's brothel into fine ladies, and of the whores he takes to Hampstead as his relatives. Lovelace succeeds in misrepresenting his relationship with Clarissa to her companions in Hampstead, who, in the words of Nicholas Hudson, “interpret life as if it were a romantic novel,”¹² and he tricks Clarissa into returning to the brothel, where he rapes her. Sir George's ruse, however, only helps evoke Arabella's genuine feelings for Glanville. After the “princess” names Glanville as her inconstant lover, the narrator reveals that our “charming Heroine, ignorant till now of the true State of her Heart, was surpriz'd to find it assaulted at once by all the Passions which attend disappointed Love” (349). In Sir George's final attempt to seduce Arabella, he first mistakes the disguised Miss Glanville for her, and then is set upon by the equally deceived Glanville. The ensuing duel leads not to a grandiose, melodramatic exit like Lovelace's—precisely the kind of exit that Lovelace was seeking—but to recovery, remorse and confession.

The machinations of this hapless antagonist thus pale before those of Lovelace, which, while they do not lead to ultimate success—if success is defined as having Clarissa accept him on his own terms—still enable him to exert considerable physical and psychological control over Clarissa. Moreover, although Lovelace laments “being caught in his own snares” (492; III:219) or “entangled in [his] own devices” (957; VI:75), he carries out his contrivances, and even the rape, with social and legal, if not psychological, impunity. Sir George, on the other hand, is ridiculed, exposed and traps himself into marriage to the “vain and interested” (153) Miss Glanville. In the narrator's wonderfully arch words, “Sir George, entangled in his own Artifices, saw himself under a Necessity of confirming the Promises he had made to Miss Glanville during his Fit of Penitence” (383). In spite of Richardson's protestations about having observed poetic justice in the novel,¹³ Lennox's comic punishment of Sir George's vices can be regarded as more severe than Richardson's tragic punishment of Lovelace's. Bellmour's “bad love” and scheming, like the Marquis's authoritarianism and Glanville's role-playing, enable Lennox to call attention to serious concerns about a woman's vulnerability, while simultaneously minimizing Arabella's danger and maintaining the comic tone.

Instead of Sir George, Janet Todd in The Sign of Angellica has actually compared Arabella herself to Lovelace, relating Lovelace's creation of a “false world” for Clarissa to Arabella's creation of such a world for herself.¹⁴ The differences between their motives, methods and results are more revealing, however. Arabella's immersion in romances makes her an unwitting author, in contrast to the deliberate, self-conscious Lovelace. In addition, as Catherine Craft has noted, in “Reworking Male Models,” Arabella's imagined world consistently ennobles women: she “transforms Miss Groves into an unfortunate, innocent lady, … and turns a prostitute into a persecuted maiden.”¹⁵ Lovelace's authorial activity, on the other hand, “purifies” the disreputable women he disguises only in order to corrupt the one woman he cannot transform.

Arabella's immunity—at least for most of the novel—to transformation, and her persistence in unconventional convictions, tie her tellingly to Clarissa. On the surface, she might appear to have more in common with Anna Howe, who also holds sway and exercises power over her suitor, and who believes that women “love to engage in knight-errantry, now and then, as well as to encourage it in the men” (331; II:242), much as Arabella values her “adventures.” Arabella's bond with Clarissa, which goes beyond these superficial similarities, is best captured in Carol Houlihan Flynn's comparison of Richardson's heroine to Lennox's more explicitly acknowledged fictional model: “What makes Don Quixote and Clarissa unique is not their inner lives, but the dramatic way they manifest their inner lives, acting out their fantasies in the real world.”¹⁶ Arabella's fantasies, like Don Quixote's, often seem absurd and the result of overindulgence in fiction and avoidance of reality, which would appear to distance her from Clarissa. As Catherine Gallagher has recently observed in Nobody's Story, however, Arabella consistently resists fiction: not until the end of the novel does she come to believe that her informing texts are fictional.¹⁷ Anna Howe's “character” of Clarissa reveals how she too distrusted fiction, how she “used to lament that certain writers of the first class, who were capable of exalting virtue and of putting vice out of countenance, too generally employed themselves in works of imagination only, upon subjects merely speculative, disinteresting, and unedifying; from which no good moral or example could be drawn” (1469; VIII:214). These views help make both heroines, to use Terry Castle's phrase, “naive exegetes,”¹⁸ unequipped to thrive in worlds rife with inherently unstable textuality. Yet both do thrive in the eyes of the reader precisely when they confront cynical worldly wisdom and offer an alternative.

The conventions that Arabella and Clarissa both flout are often related to courtship, marriage, and more ominously, rape. Arabella's wish “to live single” with a father “who, till now, has always most tenderly complied with” her “Inclinations in every thing” (41) echoes a refrain Clarissa repeats often to her parents, to Anna Howe, and to Lovelace, just as Arabella's desire to die “in order to avoid the Effects of what would be to me the most terrible Misfortune in the World” (54)—marriage to Glanville—recalls Clarissa's preference for death over marriage to Solmes or, after the rape, to Lovelace. In Arabella's case, however, these sentiments appear infrequently and only early in the novel, as Lennox's design, however much it explores the dimensions of the power that a single, independent and wealthy woman can exercise, anticipates the comic resolution of marriage. Richardson's heroine, on the other hand, is eager to forfeit the wealth and independence represented by her grandfather's estate,¹⁹ but not through a marriage to a cretin or to her violator. Her rhetorical preference for death is made literal not only in her careful preparations for dying, but earlier in her threats to stab herself with scissors and a penknife rather than submit to Lovelace. In this regard as well, Arabella provides a comic echo, both by her insistence to a would-be ravisher that “if Providence fails me, my own Hand shall give me Freedom” (102), and by her plunging into the Thames in order to escape other imagined pursuers and to display “in a Manner truly Heroick, the Sublimity of … Virtue, and the Grandeur of … Courage to the World” (362). Despite the ludicrous circumstances and the likelihood that Arabella is never in any real danger of being raped or of dying, her fortitude cannot help but provoke the kind of admiration that Belford and others feel toward Clarissa. When, after almost drowning, Arabella prepares for death “with great Piety and Constancy of Mind” (366) and forgives Glanville—who has nothing to be sorry for—she again replicates the attitudes and actions of Clarissa, and underscores the uniqueness of both heroines in their largely opportunistic, self-interested novelistic worlds.

The beliefs and behavior of the heroines are not completely divorced from these worlds, and therefore the response from worldly characters to both women is not entirely negative. The self-possession and pride with which Arabella speaks and acts represent, in part, an inheritance from her father, who, upon reading a letter of hers, “finding a great deal of his own Haughtiness of Temper in it, could not resolve to check her for a Disposition so like his own” (40). In a similar vein, Clarissa questions familial assumptions about her “meekness” by acknowledging a source for her temperament: “I verily think upon a strict examination of myself that I have almost as much in me of my father's as of my mother's family” (65; I:50-51). Lovelace himself bemoans her “inflexible Harlowe spirit” (690; IV:302), but never fully understands that this spirit contributes to the “majesty” and “dignity” that he cannot help but repeatedly admire. Arabella's words and actions are frequently characterized in like terms, as other characters are “mov'd to respect by the Dignity of her Appearance” (336) or “by the majestick Loveliness of her Person” (361).

Yet fortitude (or inflexibility, depending upon who is the judge) comes to be connected in both novels with madness. Arabella's adherence to her “punctilios” (381)—near the end of the novel, Lennox explicitly appropriates this key Richardsonian term—leads the fashionable world, her relatives and even the devoted Glanville to regard her as “one that was out of her Senses” (259). Leland Warren has aptly remarked that within Arabella's, and Lennox's, social milieu, a threatening, transgressive woman must be shown to be insane and must be “cured.”²⁰ Clarissa's madness after the rape is also transitory, and is the result, however inadvertent, of Lovelace's attempt to overcome and transform a uniquely powerful and strong-willed woman. The essential difference, of course, is that in the comic novel Arabella's madness seems ridiculous to the reader as well as to the other characters, while Clarissa's evokes the reader's sympathy.

Considering each heroine's character as a whole, however, neither the ridicule nor the sympathy is absolute. Despite her delusions, Arabella frequently outshines or defeats the “normal” world in argument and conduct.²¹ At Bath, she embarrasses the foolish pedant Selvin, who accepts her romance-derived information about ancient Greece as “superior Knowledge in History” (266); a literal equivalence in ignorance is offset by Arabella's superior confidence. Immediately afterward, she appropriates and supplements material from her reading to articulate “some excellent Rules for Raillery” (267), which include admonitions not “to divert one's self at the Expence of one's Friend” and not “to railly Persons who have a small Share of Merit” (268). After the assembly rejects her advice by gossiping maliciously, Arabella inveighs against the practice in language that recalls Johnson's famous remarks about fiction in Rambler 4: “The Ugliness of Vice … ought only to be represented to the Vicious; … A virtuous Mind need not be shewn the Deformity of Vice, to make it hated and avoided; the more pure and uncorrupted our Ideas are, the less shall we be influenc'd by Example” (277).²² Given her own “pure and uncorrupted ideas,” Arabella cannot condone the idleness of the polite society to which she is introduced, a society in which people spend time in “trifling Amusements” and therefore “certainly live to very little Purpose” (279). Gallagher has identified the malign influence of the scandal chronicle on the ethos of “the novel's despised ‘fashionable world,’”²³ to which Arabella's romance-induced ideals furnish a positive contrast. Glanville, less tainted by his social milieu than his sister, Sir George and others, repeatedly praises Arabella for “the Strength of her Understanding; her lively Wit; the Sweetness of her Temper; and a Thousand amiable Qualities which distinguished her from the rest of her Sex” (116-17). Yet just as Lovelace fails to see the connection between Clarissa's inherited stubbornness and her grandeur, Glanville does not realize that the attributes he admires may be connected to the one he disdains: Arabella's heroic worldview, with its impatience for the mundane.

Some of Clarissa's “deviant” behavior, on the other hand, has elicited objections from the start. Within the novel, not only reprehensible characters but sympathetic ones like Anna Howe and Belford misinterpret or reject some of Clarissa's beliefs and practices. As Richardson's correspondence, along with his numerous revisions, added footnotes and editorial “clarifications,” reveals, they were not alone. While virtually no critic today would share the enthusiasm of Richardson's contemporaries for a happy ending in which Clarissa would marry a reformed Lovelace, readers remain divided over such vexing issues as Clarissa's “over-niceness,” the nature and progress of her feelings regarding Lovelace, her unconscious complicity in the rape and an attitude toward death that prompts her to use her coffin as a writing desk. If the deluded and often ridiculous Arabella can serve as a icon of both morality and feminism, the angelic, selfless Clarissa can also be regarded as suicidal and vengeful.²⁴

Given the stakes, it is hardly surprising that like Clarissa, Arabella attempts to shape interpretation by taking some control over the framing of her “history.” Her rhetorical and narrative preferences, like Clarissa's, mirror those of her creator. Although Arabella believes that her history will be written only after her death, she gives her maid Lucy detailed instructions on how to relate her story to her relatives and Sir George. The servant/narrator, according to Arabella, must “be able, not only to recount all my Words and Actions, even the smallest and most inconsiderable, but also all my Thoughts, however instantaneous; relate exactly every Change of my Countenance; number all my Smiles, Half-smiles, Blushes, Turnings pale, Glances, Pauses, Full-stops, Interruptions; the Rise and Falling of my Voice; every Motion of my Eyes; and every Gesture which I have used for these Ten Years past; nor omit the smallest Circumstance that relates to me” (121-22). Arabella's high expectations and Lucy's naive incredulity—she “never … knew the hundredth thousandth Part of what was expected” (122) of her—make this scene one of the funniest in the novel, as the ignorant servant is required to exercise absolute omniscience. Yet it is from precisely such a perspective that Lennox's narrator tells the story, enabling the reader to approach Arabella, her follies and her strengths from the distance appropriate to comedy, and to judge them in accordance with the narrator's norms. In addition to rendering an unflattering judgment on Miss Glanville, Arabella's chief rival, this authoritative voice clarifies the nature of Sir George's attraction to Arabella, “of whose Person he was a little enamoured, but of her Fortune a great deal more” (129). More important, the narrator's consistent assurances of Arabella's attraction to Glanville foreshadow and to some degree legitimate the comic ending. To be sure, omniscience does not prevent variety in interpretation, but it undoubtedly narrows the focus of disagreement.

Clarissa's vindicatory “history,” of course, is epistolary. She commissions her executor, Belford, to compile a collection of letters—primarily Lovelace's—that will justify her: “It will be an honour to my memory, with all those who shall know that I was so well satisfied of my innocence, that having not time to write my own story I could entrust it to the relation which the destroyer of my fame and fortunes has given of it” (1176; VII:70).²⁵ Predictably, Lovelace, who believes that it “is much better … to tell your own story when it must be known, than to have an adversary tell it for you” (1038; VI:224)—even, apparently, if the adversary is one's unguarded epistolary self—demands that Belford return the letters. Clarissa's hope and Lovelace's fear both derive from a Richardsonian confidence in the transparency of the epistolary medium—a medium that characteristically embodies indeterminacy and thus invites mixed and contradictory judgments. Even Tom Keymer, who views the novel—at least in its relatively unglossed first edition—as a didactic challenge to the reader in the manner of Paradise Lost, acknowledges that Lovelace's rhetorical skill compromises the capacity of the book to do the justice that Clarissa desires.²⁶ Whether the fault rests with the reader, the method, or both, Clarissa's “history” has never enjoyed the unitary interpretation that the heroine and the author appear to have intended.

Arabella's concerns about representation prove short-lived: recent commentators have largely agreed that she can have no “history” worth relating once she is cured and marries Glanville—or, in other words, once Lennox has capitulated to “masculine” standards by reforming Arabella into the colorless and submissive heroine of a “realistic” novel. David Marshall has described Arabella's “abdication of the mastery of authorship,”²⁷ and Patricia Meyer Spacks has observed that the “novel ends as it must; but it does not leave all readers confident that this is a fine way of closing a novel.”²⁸ Indeed, the heroine's self-abasing final words to her husband-to-be can satisfy few modern readers: “To give you myself … with all my remaining Imperfections, is making you but a poor Present in return for the Obligations your generous Affection has laid me under to you; yet since I am so happy as to be desired for a Partner for Life by a Man of your Sense and Honour, I will endeavour to make myself as worthy as I am able of such a favourable Distinction” (383). The circumstances and language once again suggest a comparison to Anna Howe, who, as Mrs. Hickman, tells her husband that “if he had not loved her … with all her foibles,” she would not have married him, and confesses “that she owes him unreturnable obligations for his patience with her in HER day, and for his generous behaviour to her in HIS” (1492; VIII:273). Both strong women end up as obedient wives to lackluster husbands.

But is Clarissa's fate—or choice—necessarily better? I would agree that Lennox's preference for comedy leads to an unsatisfying conclusion, but would also stress the necessity of comparison to the tragic alternative offered by Clarissa. Clarissa attains tragic grandeur, but at the price of humiliation, ostracism, imprisonment, poverty, rape and death. Her reputation among modern critics, moreover, has replicated the ambiguity of her reputation within the novel and among Richardson's previous readers. As recently as 1983, Sue Warrick Doederlein could polemically but plausibly equate critical treatment of Clarissa to a “gang rape,” cataloguing the biases against Clarissa and scoring Richardson for generating a “discourse which devalues women and mythologizes rape.”²⁹ Feminist criticism has led to some balance through its generally commendatory attitude toward the heroine, but a feminist unhappy with the character can still transfer blame to the author for telling “the woman's story, authorizing her on his terms, eroticizing her suffering, representing her masochism as virtue and her dying as the emblem of womanly purity.”³⁰ By choosing comedy, Lennox manages to examine the dangers women face, the options they have and the threats to patriarchal order they can represent, while sparing her heroine from any suffering other than a ridicule that the text itself frequently calls into question. Her revision cannot reach the heights but also avoids the pitfalls of Richardson's tragic original.

Notes

1. The nature and extent of Richardson's assistance is summarized in Duncan Isles's appendix to Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, or, The Adventures of Arabella, ed. Margaret Dalziel, intro. by Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 419-28. Subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

2. David Marshall, “Writing Masters and ‘Masculine Exercises’ in The Female Quixote,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 5 (1993): 112.

3. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 214. This text is based on the first edition of 1747-48. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text, and followed by a parallel reference—by volume and page number—to the AMS reprint of the third edition (1751) of Clarissa. Or, The History of a Young Lady, intro. by Florian Stuber, general editor (New York: AMS Press, 1990). In this instance, the parallel reference is II:19.

4. In Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), Laurie Langbauer reads the passage as a joke about the fact that “Clarissa, the heroine of a novel, has done what is unnatural, improbable, beyond even romance heroines” (74).

5. Deborah Ross, “Mirror, Mirror: The Didactic Dilemma of The Female Quixote,” Studies in English Literature, 27 (1987): 461.

6. Langbauer in Women and Romance regards Arabella's father as the “symbol of an ailing patriarchy” (87), but a robust patriarchy does resurface at the end of the novel in the person of the doctor and in Glanville's spousal prerogatives.

7. The unwitting transformation of Glanville into a romance hero is discussed by James J. Lynch, “Romance and Realism in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote,” Essays in Literature, 14 (1987): 57, and by Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 190.

8. In Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), Patricia Meyer Spacks refers to Bellmour as “Lovelace-like (although much less diabolical)” (30) in the way he controls events and interpretation.

9. See Marshall, “Writing Masters,” 114.

10. See the appendix to Lennox, The Female Quixote, 423.

11. For a detailed discussion of the effects of Lovelace's authorial activity on the reader, see Tom Keymer, Richardson's “Clarissa” and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 177-90.

12. Nicholas Hudson, “Arts of Seduction and the Rhetoric of Clarissa,” Modern Language Quarterly, 51 (1990): 34.

13. Richardson's remarks in the postscript to the first edition (1495-499) were expanded in the third edition (VIII:276-99).

14. Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800 (London: Virago Press, 1989), 155.

15. Catherine A. Craft, “Reworking Male Models: Aphra Behn's Fair Vow-Breaker, Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, and Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote,” Modern Language Review, 88 (1991): 833.

16. Carol Houlihan Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 180-81.

17. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 175-77.

18. Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's “Clarissa” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 57.

19. For a fuller discussion of the implications of Clarissa's inheritance, see John P. Zomchick, Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 58-80.

20. Leland E. Warren, “Of the Conversation of Women: The Female Quixote and the Dream of Perfection,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 11 (1982): 371.

21. Warren, ibid., observes that Arabella “is shown to be a genuine heroine, one whose quality is revealed through the subtle exercise of intelligence and grace in social relationships” (369).

22. Dalziel, in The Female Quixote (408n), notes the similarity of the passage to Rambler 37, but there is also a clear connection to Rambler 4, with its insistence on presenting uncorrupted characters to impressionable readers.

23. Gallagher, Nobody's Story, 181.

24. For this unflattering view of Clarissa, see Flynn, Samuel Richardson, 37, 44.

25. In Reading “Clarissa”: The Struggles of Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), William Beatty Warner characterizes the book as Clarissa's revenge (75). Keymer, in Richardson's “Clarissa”, argues against such a characterization (222).

26. Keymer, Richardson's “Clarissa”, 230.

27. Marshall, “Writing Masters,” 113.

28. Spacks, Desire and Truth, 32. Compare Langbauer, Women and Romance, 81; Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, 189; Warren, “Of the Conversation of Women,” 371. Gallagher in Nobody's Story views the cure in an equivocal but more positive light—as a release from the “absolute stasis” (189) that results from Arabella's fidelity to romances.

29. Sue Warrick Doederlein, “Clarissa in the Hands of the Critics,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 16 (1983): 412.

30. Linda Abbandonato, “‘A View from “Elsewhere”’: Subversive Sexuality and the Rewriting of the Heroine's Story in The Color Purple,” PMLA, 106 (1991): 1107.