Clarissa: The Affair is Over

I have finished reading Clarissa. The last 200 pages were a total slog. As Jeff put it, thinking you have "only" 200 pages left is like driving the 1800 km from Vancouver to Calgary and thinking that you have "only" 300 km to go.


Granted, once Clarissa dies, the narrative slows down. Her death has its own odd momentum. Clarissa lets herself waste away, gradually getting weaker and weaker. While the heroine gets weaker, the suspense increases; you keep reading thinking that she's going to die any page now, and there are a couple of false alarms. Once she does die, Lovelace writes a mad letter demanding that Clarissa's body be cut open and her heart preserved in a jar for him. It's rather gruesome, but an apt continuation of the theme of bodily violation. Clarissa's will addresses this as well, stipulating that her body is not to be opened (autopsied?) in any way. Even past death she's concerned with maintaining bodily integrity.


And here it is in all its flagged glory. I still have to go through them all and make notes. What was I thinking?

Clarissa: musings on sex and death

I have 220 pages to go.

Clarissa has finally escaped from Lovelace and has begun the long, protracted process of gradually wasting away. She hasn't died yet, but she is very ill and eats and drinks little. At this point, Lovelace genuinely wants to marry her because she has passed his trial—she never gave into him (which is why he raped her). All of Clarissa's supporters, including her best friend, think she should marry him, since it would be the only way to preserve her reputation in society. She disagrees on the grounds that it would be legitimizing all that he's done to her up to this point, she does not believe that they would make each other happy, and she believes she's going to die soon. For a 21st-century reader, it seems mind-boggling that the societal "solution" to rape is either marriage or legal prosecution (which Clarissa also refuses, for various reasons). Richardson understands the disjunction and presents a third, tragic path: death. It's ironic. Lovelace's elliptical description of the rape ends with the declaration that "Clarissa lives", but instead, the sexual violation means that narratively, Clarissa must die. It is her death sentence.

Emotional Wringers

Yesterday I read to page 915 of Clarissa, past the strange elided description of Lovelace's rape of the heroine. It was a culmination of a day's odd set of viewings that each, in their own way, elicited strong emotions from me.

1. Mother India (1957) for the Film Studies class I TA for. A long, three-hour Bollywood epic in which the title character (a new wife) suffers and suffers and suffers, starting with indignities of having to pawn the family's belongings to pay off a mortgage, to her husband losing his arms in a farming accident and then leaving the growing young family, to her mother-in-law dying soon after, to a flood ruining the entire village's crops so that there's nothing to eat, to losing one child in the flood (swept away) and another to hunger after the flood, and then to almost prostituting herself to the villanous moneylender so that her children don't starve. And that's just the first half. The second half is not as intense, but it does end with the heroine shooting her own son, which is shocking.

2. Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), an hour-long movie by Winnipeg avant-garde filmmaker Guy Maddin, which I needed to return to my friend Dave. While totally different in tone and style from Mother India, it's weirdness and dark themes (sex, violence, hands, hockey, murder) and autobiographical undertones (the director's commentary is really personal) stuck with me. It's a fascinating film, and I would recommend Guy Maddin's work to anyone interested in anything off the beaten path.

3. Clarissa. Leading up to the rape, Clarissa manages to escape from the Sinclair house/brothel, but Lovelace finds her in lodgings and through sheer linguistic power, convinces everyone around her that they are actually married (not true), that Clarissa is a jealous, petulant wife (also not true), and that he's a decent guy (no fucking way). He orchestrates events, intercepts letters, and even hires people to play the parts of his noble relatives, all to trick Clarissa back to the Sinclair house. The power imbalance is particularly affecting because Clarissa believes that she's actually free of him, which is patently untrue. The rape itself is (not) detailed in a brief letter Lovelace writes to his best friend: "I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives." I read the letters leading up to the rape with dread, despairing over the clear power imbalance. Truth be told, the closer I got, the slower I read.
Clarissa's version of events comes much later, and in the meantime I'm anxious to see if I correctly remembered a key scene as taking place in the dining room, which would really help a nascent argument I'm forming about the unusual function of the dining room in Clarissa.

Tagged

Tagged by Karine:
1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag 5 people

Well... the identity of the nearest book should surprise no one.

From Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. 1747-48. Ed. Angus Ross. London: Penguin, 1985. A letter from Clarissa to her mother in which she compares her brother with Mr. Lovelace:
"... Over the one indeed, I have had some little influence, without giving him hitherto any reason to think he has fastened an obligation upon me for it—Over the other, who, madam, has any?
"I am grieved at the heart to be obliged to lay so great a blame at my brother's door, although my reputation and my liberty are both to be sacrificed to his resentment and ambition."

I do kind of wish a different book had been closest. Clarissa isn't exactly quote-worthy.

I tag Nicole, Nat, Daorcey (ha! two tags, one blog!), Christine, and Kris. As if Kris will ever respond.

Clarissa to pg. 653. Plus, something funny.

In this post: Self-recrimination and a funny Clarissa story.

My progress through the novel has been unacceptably slow. I thought that tracking my progress on this blog would keep me honest and diligent; instead, it's made me less likely to post.

When I last posted, Clarissa was still at home. She has since been tricked away, through a strategem involving a bribed servant, by the rake Lovelace. Her family believes that she left of her own accord and therefore have given her up for ruined. Clarissa still corresponds with her best friend and Lovelace with his; these letters form the bulk of the middle of the novel. After staying a farm house for a week or so, Lovelace finally persuades Clarissa to go to London and stay at what he claims is a reputable house, but in reality is two houses linked by a passage, one facing the street and one facing the back garden. Clarissa takes up residence in the inner house; the outer house is a brothel.

The novel drags in the middle. One Clarissa gets to the Sinclair house, she's completely in Lovelace's control, though she does not know it. Some letters in this section describes events that have no direct relation to the central plot. At this point, Lovelace manages to get at some of Clarissa's letters, so one of his letters is a summary and commentary on her letters. There's even an interesting cross-cutting (to use a film term) of letters at one point in which the "editor" of the entire book interrupts a Lovelace letter to insert Clarissa's point of view of the same incident from one of her letters, and then resumes with Lovelace's original letter. There is much overlap in the events described in both letters (since Lovelace is also staying at the house—albeit in another room), but Richardson keeps it interesting because the two warring factions interpret events differently.

Previously, I had flagged the page where the rape occurs, which is not until the page 800's. I can see that flag while I read, and it's a clear indication of how far I have to go before I get to the most difficult section, and also how little I've actually read.

And now the story: I attended Prof. Bruce Stovel's memorial service on Thursday, where I admit I wept for the first 30 minutes. Many stories were shared, including one that was read out from an e-mail. The former student wrote about taking a novel class with Bruce, in which they were reading Clarissa. One day Bruce realized that the edition that they were reading gives away the ending in the blurb (I have that edition). He was incensed, and at the beginning of class, told his students that those lucky enough to be early and on time for class would get to see something unusual. Bruce then proceeded to punt the heavy book. To everyone's shock, it sailed across the room and landed, appropriately, in the garbage can. When Bruce went to fish it out, the class saw that the book had split in half due to the force of the kick.

I've flung a library book across the room before (angry at Marilyn Butler's blantant misreading of a passage in Emma) but I have never been enraged enough to kick a book for its paratextual failings. I'm going to miss that man.

Re-readings

While I haven't been reading much of Clarissa (see post below), I have been dipping in and out of a book of collected essays about re-reading edited by Anne Fadiman, titled, simply enough, Rereadings.

I find it highly appropriate that while I'm struggling to reread Clarissa, I'm also reading essays in which authors detail their experiences rereading books they loved as kids or teenagers. Fadiman's introduction, I think, speaks to my current experience with Richardson: "The former [reading] had more velocity; the latter [rereading] had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story."

When I had the pleasure of interviewing Carol Shields for the Gauntlet, she mentioned that she never re-read books, which took me aback. I've always enjoyed re-reading my favourite books, and I find that I'm never comfortable writing an essay on a novel until I've at least skimmed it a second time and made copious notes. Ironically, I believe that Shields' books reveal themselves more fully upon rereading. I like Fadiman's simile for the pleasures of rereading: "...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again."

Incidentally, Fadiman also notes that Edward Fitzgerald (who?) read Clarissa five times. Dear lord.

Clarissa, post the third

Blame the holidays, blame the lethargy, but I'm only up to page 332 even though it's after Christmas. There must be much catching up in the next few days, and then I'll reward myself with dim sum and a New Year's Eve party (all in the same day... can you stand it?).

Clarissa is still living as a virtual prisoner at home because she refuses to marry the "odious" man her family wants her to. I wouldn't either—Solmes is portrayed as mean-spirited, uneducated, physically repulsive and ungenerous. The family believes that Clarissa secretly prefers the immoral rake Lovelace, who they hate. Clarissa has been secretly corresponding with both Lovelace and her best friend Anna Howe, detailing the constraints her family puts on her, including their search of her room and closet for any letters and their confiscation of her pens, ink, and paper.

And finally, the dread I noted in my previous Clarissa post is still present, but at least the plot (such as it is) has developed enough to carry me along over the waves of trepidation. I know that it gets much worse for the eponymous heroine before it gets marginally better (in the last 350 pages), so I'm trying to steel myself. Perhaps the holidays wasn't the best time to re-read a long, emotionally taxing, tragic novel about abduction and rape.

Clarissa: p. 1-136

Or, for Nat, 9 mm.

Briefly, the novel, published 1747-48, is about a young woman who is tricked into running away from her overbearing family, is raped, and then dies. Clarissa is an epistolary novel, that is, a novel composed entirely of letters written between characters, a common literary genre in the 18th century.

The first section describes the deterioration of Clarissa's relationship with her family, who are trying to force her to marry a rich man whom she finds repulsive, physically and morally. The novel begins in media res, though there is some useful summary of antecedent action. Structurally, I'm struck by Mrs. Harlowe's three visits to Clarissa's set of rooms (taking place in increasingly intimate spaces—her library and then her closet) where she tries to persuade her to marry the odious Mr. Solmes. There's a stage-y confrontation in a parlour which Clarissa directs and then escapes (as if into the wings), and a gradual curtailing of her personal space—the places in the house where she can go.

I've also noticed the gradual introduction of Lovelace's voice into the text. At first, Clarissa only paraphrases one of his letters in a letter to her best friend, Anna Howe, and in a later letter she quotes a few sentences from another letter. Also, Clarissa occasionally quotes a snippet or two of Lovelace's conversation which she remembers. This seems to be foreshadowing Lovelace's appearance as a letter writer in the novel. He will eventually dominate the letter writing, not only writing the longest letters and the most frequently, but also by intercepting Clarissa's letters and forging letters from both Clarissa and Anna.

There also seems to be something at work regarding the theme of freedom and independence. Clarissa frequently declares that her heart is free (her family suspects she secretly loves Lovelace). I think there's a connection between her free heart and her economic independence, which stems from a small estate left to her by her grandfather. I just can't figure out if it is indeed a simple correlation (Clarissa's independence of heart = indpendence of fortune) or a misunderstanding of how a woman's public worth is measured not in dollars but in reputation and virtue. Clarissa's heart may be free, but if it is not seen to be so (and it's not), then she will never fully escape the plots and snares of her family.

And finally, I cannot shake the sense of dread I have when re-reading this novel. Knowing all the bad things that are going to happen makes me less eager to get into the book.

The Clarissa Project: The Beginning

(Yes, that's a post-it note, for comparison)

The first chapter of my dissertation concerns Samuel Richardson's doorstop of a novel, Clarissa, which is 1499 pages long and, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, likely the longest novel ever written in English.


I did not have to reread Clarissa for my exams because I know it well enough to speak about it generally (and parts of it quite specifically). However, now that I'm (supposed to be) writing my first chapter, I need to read it again. The last (and first) time I read it was during my Master's degree five years ago. I did flag it when I first read it but alas, I took the flags out, thinking that I would never read Richardson again. Little did I know that the seminar paper that I wrote for my Rise of the Eighteenth-Century Novel class would eventually be the basis for my PhD dissertation. That'll teach me to look for closure in anything academic.

And so, for the second time in five years, I will be reading Clarissa over Christmas break. I will keep all and sundry appraised of my progress, including any plot developments and frustrations. Alas, at 6x9x2.5 inches, it's a little too big to be flung across the room in a fit of anger.

Anyone out there want to join me?