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Allegory and Narrative in "Clarissa"

1981; Duke University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1345335

1945-8509

Jonathan Loesberg,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

Critical treatment of Clarissa seems frequently torn between two kinds of impulses, both of which respond to aspects of the novel, neither of which accords well with the other. On the one hand are critics who use Clarissa and Lovelace as emblems of a polar opposition. The oppositions range from Dorothy Van Ghent's mythic scale with God above, hell below, Clarissa representing the archetypally virtuous and masochistically suffering female and Lovelace the archetypally violating male, to Christopher Hill's social scale in which Clarissa represents the virtuous Puritan impulse away from the bourgeois, financial concerns of her world and Lovelace represents an aristocratic, cavalier rebellion against those concerns.1 Despite differences in the valorisations they give their emblems, all these critics see the novel in terms of allegory, as a war of ideas or concepts, for which the text supplies labels. Nor is there any question that there is considerable pressure by Richardson, and by Clarissa and Lovelace, to see the two protagonists as embodiments, warnings, exemplars, ideals, of virtuous women, fallen women, rakes, triumphant or despondent. Still, quite a few other critics have insisted on looking at the book less as a war of themes than as a delicate investigation of the often different, but often quite similar, psychologies of Lovelace and Clarissa.2 They note, rightly, that the novel is, after all, considered an initiator of the kind of psychological realism which we normally associate with Henry James and more modern writers,3 and that the epistolary format of the work necessarily forces us to see characters from the inside as minds rather than from the outside as labels.4 One could reconcile the two approaches by positing that the allegorical divisions exist in the minds of the characters, which minds Richardson details with novelistic realism. Such a reconciliation, though, avoids more problems than it