¹ The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Rinehart, 1953), p. 47. Like lesser critics before and after her, Van Ghent seems oddly reluctant to spend any time on this piece of action, moving swiftly from this lofty dismissal to her much admired treatment of Clarissa as myth. I admire it, too, but a passage like that quoted makes me flinch from the popular judgment, expressed most recently by Phillip Stevick (introd. to Clarissa, New York: Rinehart, 1971), that Van Ghent's is really the only piece of criticism one need read on Clarissa. I would add as a complement the sensitive and precise discussion of the rape and particularly of Clarissa's 10 “papers” written afterward in Mark Kinkead-Weekes' Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist (London: Methuen, 1973), pp. 219–42.

² Ruth Herschberger, Adam's Rib (1948; rpt. New York: Harper, 1970), pp. 17–18. “Indeed,” continues Herschberger in indirect response to generations of readers and critics who have found Clarissa's obstinacy and penknifery excessive, “if the receptivity of women were put in doubt for a moment, women might begin to think their own honor, as well as man's, was defensible. The carnage that would almost immediately result in buses, streetcars, theatres, and other places of public congregation would probably reduce the incidence of rape to a whisper” (p. 21).

³ It is an article of evolving feminist metaphysics that on the level of civilization itself this rape rite governs all significant actions from education to war, all significant relationships from man-woman to humanity-planet. See, e.g., Phyllis Chessler, Women and Madness (New York: Avon, 1972); or Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon, 1975).

⁴ Quotations are from Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady, Everyman's Library Ed., 4 vols. (London: Dent, 1968).

⁵ It is this side of the novel and its accompanying myths that fuel Leslie Fiedler's important discussion of Clarissa in Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Dell, 1969), a discussion more helpful for an understanding of the first third of the novel than for an overall picture.

⁶ The great value of the Ian Watt-Christopher Hill school of criticism on Clarissa is the amount of social detail they bring to Richardson's account of this beam in the eye of Western culture, woman as property, woman as weapon and tool in class conflicts. However, this approach, perhaps inevitably, seems a bit abstract : in Watt's case abstractly positive—“she is the heroic representative of all that is free and positive in the new individualism, and especially of the spiritual independence which was associated with Puritanism” (The Rise of the Novel, Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1967, p. 222) ; in Hill's case abstractly negative—“How could she have lived? There is no place in a commercial society for flawed goods” (“Clarissa Harlowe and Her Times.” Essays in Criticism, v, 1955, 331).

⁷ One of the best-selling paperbacks in America at this writing is Irving Wallace's The Fan Club, in which four men abduct a movie actress on the premise that once the barriers of fame, fortune, and home are removed she will recognize herself as “a woman just like all of them,” a woman, that is, eager to serve men, and, even more, her own lust. She doesn't. Rape follows, and attempted murder. Utterly faithful to mass instinct, Wallace presents the American male dream in the first half of the book, and then the accompanying nightmare, in which Clarissa (Sharon Farrell), anxious above all to survive on this earth, deceives each man in turn into thinking that with him. only with him, rape has become seduction and her desire has awakened. Mistress of deception, she arranges her own rescue and then, gratuitously, rapes back the head rapist, permanently, with a Colt revolver. Nevertheless, before it is all over, one of the more poetic and gentle of the rapists does indeed, to her shock, “make it happen” for the victim. Him she saves from justice, as no doubt, had Richardson really been Lovelace as Wallace clearly is The Dreamer, Clarissa would have saved Lovelace. To do justice to truth, in its usual relation to fiction, it seems proper to record, out of a surfeit of possible examples, that the Chronicle of Higher Education reported (31 March 1975): “A woman student at Purdue University has returned to the campus unharmed after being held for more than three weeks in a bizarre experiment in which her abductors allegedly tried to brainwash her into falling in love. The two people charged in the abduction are … an assistant professor of business administration, and ... a former student of [his]”; and that the English House of Lords in a recent case (April 1975) decided that if a man believed he had the consent of a woman for intercourse, even if she told him no, he could not be convicted of rape (one Lord was quoted as remarking that what a woman says she wants and what she wants are not always the same thing).

⁸ Very little critical attention has been paid to Sinclair and the harlots, other than to celebrate Belford's description of Sinclair's death as a great Gothic tableau, which it is. To Watt, for instance, Sinclair is less a character than a symbol of corrupting urbs, Richardson's London.

⁹ Watt's remark that in Clarissa Richardson is painting “a more complete and comprehensive separation between the male and female roles than had previously existed” (Rise of the Novel, p. 162) needs qualifying. This separation may seem to be the intention of the characters. But life as Richardson paints it and psychology as he unravels it (and as the characters occasionally unravel it to themselves) are constantly revealing combinations and meltings together of the separate “roles,” above all in the woman-man Lovelace and in the man-woman Sinclair. More to the point are those critics like Morris Golden (Richardson's Characters, Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan. 1963) and Phillip Stevick (introd. to his ed. of Clarissa) who remark instead on Lovelace's resemblance to Leopold Bloom in his androgyny.

¹⁰ It is in this mood, two days later, that he writes to Belford his fancy—clearly it is not an actual plan—about carrying off both the Howes from the high seas. Nothing stimulates his contriving will like this subterranean sense of being himself a puppet, as nothing stimulates his sadistic passions more than the subterranean sense of impotence—“but the fruition, what is that?”

¹¹ Movingly, Richardson in his Postscript abandons his own puzzlement at the strength of evil to the description, and the solution, of the Psalmist, whom he quotes: “As for me … my feet were almost gone ; my steps had well nigh slipt ; for I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For their strength is firm : they are not in trouble as other men… . For all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning.—When I sought to know this, it was too painful for me. Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end” (iv, 557).