The Persistence of Clarissa

6 The Persistence of Clarissa sarah ellenzweig —Let it run, therefore; for it will run— (Letter 37: Miss Howe to Miss Clarissa Harlowe, 173) At 1,500 pages, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, still the longest novel written in English, does nothing if not persist. His novel’s persistence is a subject that, notoriously, caused Richardson anxiety. Ever “diffident in relation to this article of length,” Richardson, in the final paragraph of the novel’s postscript, defends himself on this count, insisting that “length ... must add proportionably to the pleasure that every person of taste receives from a well-drawn picture of nature.”1 The novel’s textual history – multiple revisions, four editions in Richardson’s lifetime, companion texts to supplement prior versions, and yet another rewrite in the works upon the author’s death – underscores its extraordinary tendency to perpetuate itself.2 Through Richardson’s ongoing editorial exploits, curtailed only by death, the formidable life of Clarissa endures. The plot of Clarissa hinges on problems of persistence – problems that enable and stretch the novel’s extended length. In brief, Clarissa’s family persists in their insistence upon her marriage to Solmes; Solmes persists in his suit for her affections; Clarissa persists in her opposition to both; Lovelace persists in his attempt at Clarissa’s seduction; Clarissa persists in her resistance to it. True, a rape intervenes, yet it barely interrupts the pattern. Although Lovelace claims at this juncture that he “can go no further” (883), his persistence returns apace: “Have I gone so far, and am I afraid to go farther?” he asks Belford (943). Clarissa’s resistance likewise persists: consider Lovelace’s suggestively cryptic comment after the rape that she “lives” (883). Clarissa’s “living” post-rape The Persistence of Clarissa 171 develops into a persistent waiting for death (almost 500 pages of it), yet the point to understand here is, we might say, that persistence persists.3 Richardson also peppers his novel with the term “persistence” and its close associate, “perseverance.” On the subject of her family’s dogged determination to push Solmes as a lover, Clarissa remarks on “Such a strange perseverance in a measure so unreasonable!” (206). Adding that “if they will still persevere; if that strange persister against an antipathy so strongly avowed, will still persist, say, what can I do?” (231). Her solution is to “take example by their perseverance! – Indeed I will!” (191). Solmes declares repeatedly that he is “determined to persevere” (266). “I must persist,” he avows, “and happy shall I be, if by patience and perseverance, ... I may at last overcome the difficulty laid in my way ... Pardon me, dear miss, but I must persevere” (160). Lovelace, needless to say, is the novel’s persister par excellence. As Anna Howe tells Clarissa early on, “in anything he sets his heart upon, or undertakes, he is the most industrious and persevering mortal under the sun. He rests, it seems, not above six hours in the 24” (74). Lovelace frequently brags about his skills in persistence. He self-describes as “an intrepid persevering enterpriser” (428), telling Belford that “Importunity and opportunity no woman is proof against, especially from a persevering lover, who knows how to suit temptations to inclination” (426). When his efforts to seduce Clarissa become so protracted that they arouse skeptical ribbing from the women in Sinclair’s brothel, Lovelace returns, “Why then should I be reflected upon ... for my patience and perseverance in the most noble of all chases?” (558). “What but difficulty,” he explains to Belford, “engages me to so much perseverance here?” (810). All this persistence, needless to say, consumes many pages, deferring resolution and suspending closure. Surely Richardson smiles at his readers when, 1,400 pages in, upon Clarissa’s long anticipated death, Anna Howe bewails, “And is this all! – is it all of my Clarissa’s story! ... This cannot, surely, be all of my Clarissa’s story!” (1402, 1403). Richardson would appear to have inaugurated the new novel form with the insight memorably articulated by Henry James a century later: “really, universally, relations stop nowhere.”4 In this essay, I will ponder the manifold ways in which the problem of persistence informs Clarissa. In particular, I will examine how the novel’s fascination with persistence tracks back to early modern materialist philosophy, especially the revival of Epicurean materialism and its legacy in Hobbes.5 We’re not inclined to consider Richardson, humbly educated and of the eighteenth-century commercial class, to 172 Sarah Ellenzweig be a philosophical writer and thinker, but I will put this assumption to the test.6 While readers have long noted that Lovelace is a materialist who takes his cue from Hobbes, critics have ignored the larger implications of Richardson’s evident familiarity with materialist thinking and its significance for the “close, hot, day-dreamy continuity” of his novel more generally.7 In his essay, “‘Alien Spirits’: The Unity of Lovelace and Clarissa,” John Allen Stevenson points us in a useful direction, proposing that we have been too quick to assume that Lovelace and Clarissa represent opposite attitudes towards the world, nature, the body, and sex. Clarissa’s early readers, he suggests, were thus doing more than just voicing a sentimental whim when they “begged Richardson to end his novel happily.”8 Readers’ desire for the main protagonists’ ultimate union, on this view, reflected their uncomfortable awareness of Lovelace and Clarissa’s “shared subversiveness,” particularly their “strange” refusal to affirm marriage, a refusal that undermines the Christian ethics that Richardson claimed to defend.9 Yet while Stevenson roots the novel’s transgression in what he sees to be Lovelace’s and Clarissa’s Gnostic repudiation of matter and the flesh, I will argue that our intuition of Lovelace’s and Clarissa’s radical strangeness in fact reflects Richardson’s deep, if troubled, exploration of materialist theories of life and the inclinations that move us. With Clarissa as my example, I will suggest that the development of narrative form in the early novel was driven by the insight, as Hobbes puts it, that “Life it selfe is but Motion,” a view that calls for the capacious formal register characteristic of the novel for its fullest expression.10 Although it is true that Hobbes’s wisdom made its mark in poetic forms as well as in drama, I contend that the novel becomes the form of choice for contemporaries seeking to explore imaginatively the ways that life moves and develops dynamically through time and space. (It was Hobbes himself, incidentally, who suggested in his Answer to Davenant that “the ways and motions” of narrative “are so uncertain and undistinguished, like the way and motion of a ship in the sea.”)11 In his essay “Why the Novel Matters,” D.H. Lawrence described the novel as “the one bright book of life.” We learn from the novel, he argues, because in it, “the characters can do nothing but live.”12 Himself inspired by Lawrence as well as by such naturalist philosophers as Nietzsche and Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze argues similarly in his literary criticism for the novel’s deep-seated investment in life’s creativity and variability. I’d like to suggest that the novel’s primordial concern with what Lawrence The Persistence of Clarissa 173 calls “man alive,” an embodied being of “flow and change” that continues through an ongoing defiance of inertia, was integral to the novel form from its earliest expressions in texts like Clarissa.13 The fundamentally open-ended nature of the novel so important to Lukács’s and Bakhtin’s foundational theories of the novel lends itself to a restless persistence that seeks future possibility. In the novel, Lukács argues, our goals and our way to them are no longer “directly given.” And as Bakhtin puts it, “The novel took shape precisely at the point when ... the object of artistic representation was being degraded to the level of a contemporary reality that was inconclusive and fluid.”14 The implication here may be prosaic, but it’s worth making all the same: when our subject is a present-day reality whose meaning is understood to be uncertain from the start, our writing about it might struggle to come to an end. In addition to emphasizing the novel’s open-endedness, much of the best work on narrative theory since the 1980s has underscored the dynamic quality of narrative, to understand the desires and forces that propel narrative forward, and that find themselves, in Peter Brooks’s words, butting up against “man’s time-boundedness, his consciousness of existence within the limits of mortality.” (This idea takes up Bakhtin’s assertion that “the novel, from the very beginning, developed as a genre that had at its core a new way of conceptualizing time.”)15 For Brooks and his student, D.A. Miller, psychoanalysis provides an especially productive framework for understanding narrative movement. The key concept for their paradigm is desire, which on their view is “always there at the start of a narrative, often in a state of initial arousal, often having reached a state of intensity such that movement must be created, action undertaken, change begun.” Because desire, on Freud’s account, is a perpetual want, “never wholly satisfied or indeed satisfiable,” it continues to generate the longing to tell.16 This model helps us to grasp how desire comes to drive the logic of narration and how narrative desire keeps us striving towards narrative ends. Yet to the extent that desire, ever insatiable, cannot achieve rest, even upon its arrival at these narrative ends, for Miller “the narratable inherently lacks finality.” If truth be told, “it can never be properly brought to term. The tendency of a narrative,” Miller provocatively concludes, “would therefore be to keep going.”17 I will argue below that a long-standing materialist heritage (from Lucretian naturalism to its revival in Hobbes) emphasized the problem of desire’s persistence long before Freud theorized the drives. 174 Sarah Ellenzweig Materialism has been a neglected source in our understanding of narrative dynamics. What’s more, although both Brooks and Miller mention the eighteenth-century novel in passing, their examples draw from the nineteenth-century narrative tradition as the decisive moment, as Brooks puts it, “when one no longer can look to a sacred masterplot that organized and explains the world.”18 If, on Brooks’s view, secularization informs the novel’s narrative dynamics, all the more reason to begin a study of narrative motion in the literature of the Enlightenment when the new form first imagined an account of human experience that was not providentially informed.19 My interest here, then, is to show that the link between narrative and problems of persistence gives rise to the novel at its moment of origin in the eighteenth century. The novel’s affinity with materialism is crucial to this story. Before turning to persistence and to its relationship to materialism in Clarissa, I’d like to return to Hobbes’s famous dictum that “Life it selfe is but Motion” as an entryway into the larger problem of persistence for materialist philosophy. Part of my interest in this essay will be to argue that Hobbes’s philosophy of motion, traditionally seen to be unambiguously mechanistic, had a more vital, Lucretian tendency than has been appreciated.20 Moving off from Galileo, Hobbes’s materialism grew out of the fundamental insight from physics that motion, once started, will continue indefinitely until or unless an external force intervenes to stop it. In the history of philosophy, Hobbes’s physics is seen to follow from Descartes’s similar formulation of what he calls the laws of motion. Yet, given Hobbes’s rejection of God’s role in the workings of the universe, Lucretius, for whom motion’s persistence played a key role in the rejection of Aristotle and his view that all motion seeks rest in the centre of the universe, was a far more likely intellectual influence. “No rest is given,” Lucretius explains, to the bodies moving through the void. “Always the business of the universe is going on with incessant motion in every part.”21 Life itself, in other words, is but motion. Unlike Descartes but like Lucretius, Hobbes emphasizes the magnitude of the break from the scholastic emphasis on rest, allowing that while we can understand that a thing at rest will remain in rest unless something comes to “stirre it,” the flip side of the proposition, “that when a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion, unless somewhat els stay it, ... is not so easily assented to.”22 What Hobbes implies but does not say is that the principle of persistence is perhaps met with resistance because it calls to mind the nagging problem of the origin of The Persistence of Clarissa 175 motion. Here again, Hobbes departs from Descartes’s and mechanism’s emphasis on God’s role in beginning motion, suggesting instead that in his search back “from cause to cause,” man “will not be able to proceed eternally, but wearied will at last give over,” never quite able to arrive at “some first eternal movement.” One senses here Hobbes’s covert reliance on the radically naturalist view from Lucretius that “nature is ... free ... of proud masters, herself doing all by herself of her own accord, without the help of the gods.”23 Yet what does the physics of motion tell us about the behaviour of human beings? “After physics,” Hobbes writes in De Corpore, “we must come to moral philosophy; in which we are to consider ... appetite, aversion, love, benevolence, hope, fear, anger, emulation, envy, &c; what causes they have, and of what they be causes.”24 Here, too, we find that Hobbes’s “moral philosophy,” the study of the motions of the mind, fits uneasily within a mechanistic conception of material life. Once again, Hobbesian psychology follows logically from Lucretius’s teachings on the restlessness of matter. For Lucretius, just as bodies can never stand still in the void, so too is man’s mind and its search for pleasures ever moving and seeking: “one unchanging thirst of life fills us and our mouths are for ever agape.” While Epicurean philosophy commits itself to providing a therapy against this unquenchable and thus often destructive lust for life, Hobbes takes a darker view.25 Like it or not, for him our minds’ processes are inexorably marked by this appetitive tendency – what Hobbes often calls conatus or endeavour. Though purportedly absent in nonliving things, these appetites follow the same principles of motion as all matter.26 That is so because the appetites in Hobbes’s system are themselves instances of motion. It’s just that they begin internally and thus invisibly: “although unstudied men, doe not conceive any motion at all to be there, where the thing moved is invisible; or the space it is moved in, is (for the shortnesse of it) insensible; yet that doth not hinder, but that such Motions are.” Even when we cannot see it, appetitive motion is the driving force, the sine qua non in any explanatory paradigm. The “appetite to go, or move” is definitive of organic life, a view that takes Hobbes beyond mere physicalism in its identification of an origin of motion that is internal to bodies.27 Once we allow that the appetites are invisible life motions that follow the physical rules of motion and its persistence, we begin to understand from Hobbes that our appetites are endlessly ongoing, and, strictly speaking, insatiable.28 The upshot is that our appetites (as well as our aversions, as the case may be) are what help keep us alive; they impel 176 Sarah Ellenzweig us as we strive, like all things in nature, to persevere.29 When Hobbes argues that “Life it selfe is but Motion,” he adds for clarification that it “can never be without Desire.”30 And when we consider the whole system, we understand why. Desire is constitutive of and co-terminus with life. Desire determines our activity.31 Emphasizing man’s tendency to crave ad infinitum – when we attain what we think we want, we then crave something else – Hobbes is explicit about the fact that desire is itself a motion that follows nature’s principle of persistence: “for while we live, we have desires,” he writes in Human Nature, “and desire presupposeth a further end ... Seeing all delight is appetite, and presupposeth a further end, there can be no contentment but in proceeding.” Leviathan argues similarly that “the object of mans desire, is not to enjoy once onely, and for one instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desire.” The important thing to know about appetite and desire, then, is that, like all forms of motion, they have a tendency to continue.32 Writing Desire’s Persistence How do materialism’s teachings on the appetites help us understand Clarissa? To put it simply, Clarissa is symptomatically long precisely because it buys into Hobbes’s and Lucretius’s linking of life with desire and its motive persistence.33 Diderot, himself a vital materialist, suggests as much in his Éloge de Richardson, defending Clarissa against accusations of excessive length: “the smallest enterprise” in Richardson, Diderot insists, “display[s] [the] passions,” recalling us to the truth of “what go[es] on daily right under your eyes that you never see.” At the broadest level, as Diderot esteemed, bringing out the passions requires the spontaneous activity and persistent present-ness of writing itself, which in Richardson’s able hands, “shows me the nature of things that surround me.”34 To the extent that life is something that goes on, so does writing. As Clarissa tells Anna Howe of her “passion for scribbling,” “I know not how to forebear writing ... And I must write on, although I were not to send it to anybody” (483, see also 757). Lovelace understands the process as similarly endless: “Write ... I can do; and as well without a subject, as with one” (142). “I must write on,” he tells Belford, “and cannot help it” (721, also 846). In his preface, Richardson links the “Length” of Clarissa to the formal conceit in novels of letters that he termed writing “to the moment” (721, see also 882, 1178). Richardson’s signature technique, in which The Persistence of Clarissa 177 “the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects” (35), strives above all to close the gap between writing and life. And as the bulk of Clarissa bears testament, such a mandate requires infinite textual generativity, productivity, and proliferation, an attempt that, as Terry Eagleton observes, leads paradoxically to a break from representational realism: how could any group of people actually write this many letters?35 For Richardson, however, what might be called the hyperrealism of writing-to-the-moment gives the reader something more important than strict plausibility: its deepest ambition is to offer up the epistolary novel as nothing less than the continuous pulse of life in its processes of embodied unfolding, for writing-to-themoment necessarily assumes writing to the live moment. That is the point.36 In the epistolary world of Clarissa, for better and for worse, the boundlessness of writing makes it a libertine activity, one that necessarily frustrates the established moral order.37 We learn of Lovelace simultaneously that he is “notoriously ... a man of pleasure” as well as “a great plotter, and a greater writer” (50), who “rests ... not above six hours in the twenty-four,” and “has always, when he retires, a pen in his fingers” (74).38 Early in the novel, as Anna Howe is musing on Lovelace’s reputation as a writer and particularly on the fact that “all his vacant nightly hours are employed in writing,” she wonders, “what can be his subjects?” (74). Anna does not have to answer her own rhetorical question for us to understand that, however latent, the subject of the letter in Clarissa always returns to the unfathomably complex motions of desire. Anna contrasts the “twenty innocent subjects” that she and Clarissa “scribble upon” (75) to the “secret” and “treasonable” content of Lovelace’s “great correspondence by letters” (74). Yet here, too, the reader recognizes that Richardsonian letters, leaving traces of ink on fingers in their striving to capture life alive, are never, strictly speaking, innocent (75, 345).39 Mrs Harlowe likens writing to insubordination and to the “stiffen[ing]” of “will,” preferring her daughter to read, an activity seen to teach “duty” (328). In a letter preceding her escape with Lovelace, Clarissa admits her struggle to “govern” (333) her pen and her self-designation as a “scribbler” suggests that a libertine tendency towards lawlessness and license underlies her letters as well: “My talent is scribbling,” she reflects to Anna, “and I the readier fell into this freedom, as I found delight in writing” (408). Delight in writing bespeaks an illicit freedom as well as a flux of feeling, an emotional dynamism, and a volatility of desire and 178 Sarah Ellenzweig intention, all of which Clarissa struggles to regulate. Lovelace relishes the complex set of moving interrelations set off by writing, in particular what he sees to be the erotic implications of Clarissa’s contradictory behaviour, of “every changeable motion of your pen” (392).40 Despite herself, Lovelace insinuates, Clarissa’s erratic variability, her unpredictability, shows that “a sweet girl” is also “a rogue” (400). For this reason, Clarissa obsessively blames her personal downfall on her consent to correspond clandestinely with Lovelace, a correspondence that, as she admits, was not in her “power to discontinue” (408, also 381). Once it begins, the libertine motion of writing in this novel appears to endure. “Never was there such a pair of scribbling lovers as we,” remarks Lovelace to Belford after successfully abducting Clarissa from her imprisonment at Harlowe Place (416). Glorying in Clarissa’s “blameworthy” correspondence with him, Lovelace recognizes that a correspondence begun is one that will go on: “Has she been capable of error? – Of persisting in that error?” (427). Libertinism’s Persistent Aspirations Lovelace ties his assurance of eventual success with Clarissa to his conviction of desire’s persistently seeking quality. It is because desire seeks that love, in his view, “is an encroacher. Love never goes backwards. Love is always aspiring. Always must aspire” (704).41 Lovelace’s imperative here is theatrical and its sexual politics suspect. Yet let’s pursue for a moment its Hobbesian philosophical underpinnings, which are rigorous in their own right. When Lovelace claims that love aspires, he wants to conjure up something bigger about human experience than his libertine attitudes towards women might otherwise suggest. Insofar as life is motion, and cannot be without desire, the good life is to be found in the accentuation of that motion, its forward trajectory, its futurity. According to this logic, if Clarissa appears on the outside to be a “frost-piece,” this is merely a culturally imposed artifice that cannot belie the appetitive force that we know to be constitutive of living things.42 We also see Lovelace’s assurance of the truth of Clarissa’s appetite through his tendency to emphasize her bodiliness (and thus her inscription in the natural order of things and its tendency to strive). With a “constant glow upon her lovely features; eyes so sparkling; ... health so florid; youth so blooming: air so animated ... How then can she be so impenetrable?” (145), he asks. At the moment of the abduction, The Persistence of Clarissa 179 Lovelace is particularly fired with this materialist conviction about the covert desire animating Clarissa’s resistance, waxing ecstatically to Belford: this lady is all alive, all glowing, all charming flesh and blood, yet so clear, that every meandering vein is to be seen in all the lovely parts of her which custom permits to be visible ... And I saw, all the way we rode, the bounding heart; by its throbbing motions I saw it! Dancing beneath the charming umbrage. (399–400, also 431, 575, 633) After the rape, when Lovelace is forced to admit that in fact he has “nothing to boast of as to her will,” he meditates again with some confusion on those secret life signs that purportedly cannot lie: “such a glowing, such a blooming charmer” (886). “How had I known that a but blossoming beauty, who could carry on a private correspondence and run such risks with a notorious wild fellow, was not prompted by inclination?” (912). Lovelace’s way out of this seeming contradiction is to assume that “had she been sensible, she must have been sensible, so they say” (943). His belief in Clarissa’s post-rape pregnancy forwards the same kind of case for her inclination. Just as Clarissa’s glow, the coursing of her blood, and the bounding of her heart would appear to reveal an incontrovertible bodily truth about inclination, so does conception, in the views of the period, assume a prior consent to, and thus appetite for, sex.43 Clarissa’s pregnancy would “prove,” Lovelace says, “in this charming frost-piece, the triumph of nature over principle” (1147, also 916). Once again, Lovelace stresses the body’s latent (and always infinite) desire. He here reflects Hobbes’s insistence that appetite is precisely that inclination towards an object whose persistent motion is unseen (and unseeable) because it is psychological, occurring first in the imagination and from there transferring its motive endeavour outward to the body’s actions.44 The women in Sinclair’s brothel give a salacious spin to this particular insight, assuring Lovelace, as he tells Belford, that because appetite begins internally, one cannot know the status of a woman’s desire: “and that yet, and yet, and yet, I had not tried enough” (971–2). While the reader is positioned against Lovelace at these key moments of libertine vaunting, it is, as I will argue, Richardson’s great accomplishment to show that Lovelace’s faith in the force of appetite, of inclination, is confirmed, though not in the way he imagines. 180 Sarah Ellenzweig The Endeavour of Aversion And yet Lovelace must still account for the difficulty of aversion, that other striving endeavour that propels us forward and that drives Clarissa’s plot. As Hobbes explains, our general impulse towards continued self-preservation consists of two forms of motion: 1) endeavours towards what assists our persistence, or what Hobbes calls appetite, and 2) endeavours away from what we feel impedes it, or what he calls aversion.45 The point here is that both appetite and aversion are expressions of endeavour, the broader striving for life’s and thus desire’s persistence. Aversion, in other words, is a local means to the furthest reaches of desire. This is a fundamental tenet of materialism, originating with Epicurus’s dictum that “pleasure” is “our first innate good, and … our starting point for every choice and avoidance.”46 Lovelace is more than ready to sexualize the materialist heritage, to read Clarissa’s extreme aversion to Solmes as a sign of her secret appetitive propensity. Yet in a key and unanticipated extension of materialism beyond Lovelace, it is the Harlowes, and even Anna Howe, who become the most committed followers of this logic.47 James Harlowe consistently construes Clarissa’s aversion for Solmes as a mask for her rabid concupiscence, as a confirmation, in his terms, that “Virgil’s amor omnibus idem [love is the same for all] ... is verified in you [Clarissa], as well as in the rest of the animal creation” (218). As Mrs Harlowe puts it, “Such extraordinary antipathies to a particular person must be owing to extraordinary prepossession in another’s favour” (98). Anna Howe reiterates the point: “Nor must you have Solmes, that’s certain: not only because of his unworthiness in every respect, but because of the aversion you have so openly avowed to him; which everybody knows and talks of; as they do of your approbation of the other” (330). “On inquiry,” Anna teases Clarissa, “it will come out to be love” (71). Sounding much like Lovelace, Anna seeks to access Clarissa’s “one secret” (71), that “unowned inclination” (356) that despite prudence makes Clarissa’s face “glow,” her “heart” “go throb, throb, throb, as you read just here” (71). Mrs Howe sums up everyone’s shared conviction of Clarissa’s desire thus: “Is it such a mighty matter for a young lady to give up her own inclinations to oblige her friends? ... Either ... the lady must be thought to have very violent inclinations (and what nice young creature would have that supposed?) which she could not give up; or a very stubborn will, which she would not” (245). A good Hobbesian critic herself, Mrs Howe makes clear here that in the final analysis, The Persistence of Clarissa 181 “inclination” and “will” circle back to the same appetitive place, particularly in matters involving deliberation. “Will,” explains Hobbes in a demystifying gesture, “therefore is the last Appetite in Deliberating.”48 Let me pause for a moment. It is no surprise that Lovelace understands life through an appetitive Hobbesian lens. It is perhaps more surprising that the Harlowes and the Howes do as well. Yet the real question that Richardson prompts is whether this lens illuminates anything apposite to Clarissa and her status as a living body. Is Clarissa pressed by inclination? And if so, what does this mean outside the concupiscent readings of others? As we have seen, Clarissa’s various interlocutors, via Hobbes, want to insist that aversion signals desire and that desire enlivens the body despite itself. Life for them is thus assumed to be animate and striving and driven by appetite. Yet on Clarissa’s own account, by contrast, aversion is not animate, and life would seem to persist as a kind of motive inertia more than as an appetitive inclination in any particular direction. As Jonathan Kramnick has shown, we know Clarissa best by her “posture of inaction,” her “stillness,” her tendency to “stand … apart from life.”49 The novel begins as Anna Howe introduces us to Clarissa’s preference for inertia, as Anna commiserates with her friend on the familial tumult sparked by Lovelace’s suit: “So steady, so uniform in your conduct; so desirous, as you always said, of sliding through life to the end of it unnoted” (39–40). Clarissa knows that like all bodies, she moves through time and space, yet she wants to maintain, via mechanism’s teachings, that her motion has no internal dynamism; if she is set going and goes, it is only because of the impact (usually unwanted) of other bodies.50 From Inertia to the Swerve Clarissa is bewildered to find herself drawn from mechanism’s inertia to materialism’s activity, however unwanted, and she struggles to understand her passage from one state to the other. “I know not how it comes about, but I am, in my own opinion, a poor lost creature,” she writes to Anna, “and yet cannot charge myself with one criminal or faulty inclination. Do you know, my dear, how this can be?” (565, also 1261). Despite herself, Clarissa’s question confronts a crucially important lesson from materialism about the progress of living things and their appetites and aversions through time. Although Descartes’s and Newton’s law of inertia considered matter to be constitutionally inert, sluggish, and incapable of self-animation, an unintended outcome of 182 Sarah Ellenzweig the discovery of persistent motion was the repudiation of this supposed passivity, the recognition that somewhere along the path of seemingly passive motion, the habits of inertia ever so slightly diverge.51 At its most dangerous logical endpoint, persistent motion in its materialist formulations takes us back before Hobbes to the unpredictable, capricious inclinations of Lucretian bodies, inclinations that, like Clarissa’s, break out of inertia below the threshold of exact measurement. As Lucretius teaches, all bodies “bring with them a nature secret and unseen.” This nature is on the one hand “unchangeable,” a stable force that explains why a bird remains constant as a bird; a tree always a tree, and so forth. On the other hand, however, the “distinct power” in things also explains their liveliness, their capacity to evolve, to explore novelty, even while preserving, at the same time, their existing form: “but who is there who can perceive that [bodies] never swerve ever so little from the straight undeviating course?”52 In Lucretius’s famous account, the declination of the atoms is what makes life possible in the first place, for in declination from motive equilibrium, the atoms connect and form the complex structures that comprise live bodies. In swerving to life, Lovelace hopes that Clarissa will prove his variety of sexual materialism right, and, with him, make more life: as he asks Belford, “But why shouldst thou imagine that such a mind as hers, meeting with such a one as mine; and, to dwell upon the word, meeting an inclination in hers to meet, should not propagate minds like her own?” (558). Lovelace thus hinges his hopes of success with Clarissa on her having already “swerved,” as he concedes, “in lesser points” (430). “A Clarissa (herself her judge) has failed,” so “may she not further fail? Fail in the greatest point, to which all the other points in which she has failed, have but a natural tendency?” (429). Clarissa’s “swerve,” her “deviation,” her “false step,” thus invokes this essential element of the materialist tradition, the almost undetectable declination of Epicurus’s atoms as they fall downward through the void.53 It is difficult to imagine that Richardson had no inkling of this tradition (and its libertine implications) when he imagined Clarissa’s “error” as a departure or step away from the straight path, from the inertial status quo: “One devious step at setting out! – That must be it: ... for, although but one pace awry at first, it has led me hundreds and hundreds of miles out of my path” (565–6, also 643, 1036).54 Related to Clarissa’s acknowledgment of the necessary animacy of her position vis-à-vis Lovelace is the painful recognition that she has, The Persistence of Clarissa 183 indeed, put something in motion that she can no longer stop: “My faults began early,” she bemoans to Anna, “for I ought not to have corresponded with him. I thought I could stop or proceed as I pleased” (381). “One evil draws another after it; and how knows she, or anybody, where it may stop?” (480). The point becomes a consistent refrain in the novel. Colonel Morden takes it up in his resonant summary letter ending volume three: “And how do you know,” he asks Clarissa on the subject of marrying a rake, “if you once give way, where you shall be suffered, where you shall be able to stop?” (563).55 How do we understand the pressure of this refrain? The answer, I want to suggest, points us to the novel’s vital materialism and to Richardson’s commitment to rendering the continual progress of dynamic passions that make up any life’s impulsion to keep going. No living body, strictly speaking, can start or stop as it pleases, for as Clarissa learns too well, we never proceed as self-contained, isolated actors; there is no individual agency, no passive course through life apart from relational entanglement with others. All appetites and aversions unfold in reciprocal, multifaceted relation with other agents and the result, as Hobbes explains in De Corpore, is both “a certain continual progress” and “a continual mutation in the ... agents.”56 Clarissa attempts to determine a single origin point for the causal chain she finds herself perpetually moving along – the “one devious step at setting out!” – yet this attempt once again assumes that causation involves singular actors and a sequence of distinct events. The protracted length of Clarissa is itself enough to give the lie to Clarissa’s causal emphasis on her “first fatal step” (1016), bearing testament instead to the unfathomable difficulty of causation, to the impossibility of identifying a single act as the “sole” cause because no one occasion can be plucked from its embeddedness in an always active antecedent world. We see Clarissa’s implicit awareness of this truth when, after she escapes to the Widow Moore’s in Hampstead, she repeatedly answers the ladies’ queries about her relations with Lovelace with the wearied assertion that her story is “too long” (791, 799). Clarissa’s failure to master the intricacies of her own story betrays her struggle to capture the irreducible complexity of material experience, an experience that resists being reduced to her clandestine correspondence with Lovelace or to any other preliminaries. This irreducible complexity anchors Richardson’s theory of the novel, one in which epistolary form saturates us with competing interpretive accounts that no final authority ever adjudicates.57 184 Sarah Ellenzweig Thus, while Lovelace’s and the Harlowes’ libertine reading of Clarissa’s animacy is biased at best, even Clarissa knows that they are not wrong to claim that indifference and motive inertia in live things is a fallacy. And in a certain sense, she has understood this truth all along. Were she truly indifferent, she would not feel such aversion for Solmes.58 In an especially revealing letter to Anna a quarter of the way through the novel, Clarissa reflects on her recognition that this aversion, “an aversion so very sincere!” (506), is indeed based precisely on an active sensitivity, on what she calls “the finer sensibilities,” on the impossibility of her “indifference” to sex (507). Had she been capable of the indifference to which she aspired (“I wish I had been able in some very nice cases to have known what indifference was”), she admits, “my duty should have been the conqueror of my inclination” (506). As a living being, then, Clarissa is an animate, desiring body, and no living thing, even a Clarissa Harlowe, can persist in the real world in a purely inertial and static state. Clarissa unwittingly suggests as much in a letter to Anna about her family’s steadfast support of Solmes: “Astonishing persistence! ... I was quite tired with so many attempts, all to the same purpose. I am amazed that they are not! So little variation! And no concession on either side” (344). As Lovelace later comments, adding materialism’s crucial layer of complexity to the principle of persistence, “’Tis human to err, but not to persevere – I hope my charmer cannot be inhuman!” (731, emphasis in text). The essence of Clarissa’s misfortune is captured in this offhand remark, for, as novelist, Richardson wants us to understand that as they persist and persevere, all living things necessarily deviate from the straight path. The tragedy of Clarissa, as Christine Roulston suggests, is that her inclination would appear to have no play outside “the terms on which Lovelace offers it.”59 Materialism and the Death of Clarissa In the end, despite having swerved, Clarissa manifestly fails to act as things in nature do (on Lovelace’s reckoning, at least).60 Indeed, after the rape, Clarissa appears to behave most unnaturally: far from seeking the perseverance of life and desire, she welcomes death and does so with legendary persistence, as suggested by Johnson’s oft-cited grumbling of her “unconscionable time a-dying.” Yet it is precisely this persistence that alerts us to this novel’s gravest embrace of materialism. Such a claim admittedly seems perverse at first glance, for Richardson is explicit that Clarissa is formed on a “religious plan” (1495) The Persistence of Clarissa 185 and a “Christian system” (1498) that requires the death of his heroine: “And who that are in earnest in their profession of Christianity but will rather envy than regret the triumphant death of Clarissa, ... whose Christian humility; whose forgiving spirit; whose meekness, whose resignation, HEAVEN only could reward?” (1498).61 Yet it is crucial to remember that this defence of the unity of art and orthodoxy follows from accusations by Richardson’s early readers that Clarissa’s death in fact smacked of heterodoxy. For Colley Cibber, her death implied Richardson’s questioning of Providence despite the author’s protestations to the contrary.62 Modern critics have perhaps been too quick to dismiss Cibber’s skeptical reading of the “end” of Clarissa. Richardson claims that his design in Clarissa was “to inculcate upon the human mind, under the guise of an amusement, the great lessons of Christianity” (1495), yet as Cibber’s comment suggests, on another level, the “guise” of Christianity also provided cover for the author to explore philosophical thinking about death that had little truck with religious consolations. For all of Lovelace’s libertine aplomb, in fact he voices the conventional view on this matter much as Richardson’s readers do. There is something about Clarissa’s attitude towards death, Lovelace insinuates, that’s not quite fit or proper. “Tell the dear creature,” he writes to Belford, “she must not be wicked in her piety. There is a too much, as well as a too little, even in righteousness. Perhaps she does not think of that” (1308). Clarissa may invoke “Honest Job” as a safeguard, yet no actual Christian, Lovelace contends, looks at death without fear. To be sure, as critics have long shown, Clarissa approaches death like a Christian: she trusts in the release of her immortal soul from her suffering body.63 Yet at the same time, she also looks at life and death with a stark frankness worthy of the best of the Epicureans: “What,” she asks Anna, “is even the long life which in high health we wish for?” (1318). And later she reflects skeptically, “We flutter about here and there, with all our vanities about us, like painted butterflies, for a gay but a very short season, till at last we lay ourselves down in a quiescent state, and turn into vile worms: and who knows in what form, or to what condition, we shall rise again?” (1318, 1337). Indeed, in devoting more than a quarter of his novel to the excruciatingly protracted death of his heroine, Richardson seems to challenge his readers to face up to Lucretius’s enduring challenge: “And will you hesitate, will you be indignant to die?”64 Through the death of Clarissa, Richardson thus unexpectedly invokes Lucretius’s most haunting question: “What is this great and evil lust of 186 Sarah Ellenzweig life that drives us to be so greatly agitated amidst doubt and peril?”65 Hobbes argued that our innate impulsion to keep going is, in its most fundamental form, the impulsion to avoid death, yet Lucretius emphasized that our lust for life is in a certain sense always based on an illusion of our perpetual persistence, at least in this life. Death, he explains, merely returns us to the earth from which we came, where our bodies disperse and form new combinations, only “in a moment of time [to] yield it up again.” To the materially unmystified, then, death is not to be feared and perhaps not necessarily to be avoided.66 As we know, Freud later took up the centrality of death to the moment in time that is life, arguing in his theory of the death drive for a sort of libidinal force in death that is “instinct with life, the very source of life and life’s strivings.”67 Yet, beginning with Lucretius, materialism had its own prior version of this story, one in which, in the eternal cycles of matter, the tireless progress of matter’s perpetual striving takes us beyond our individual death by transcending any particular life’s activity.68 The Epicureans faced death with equanimity for this very reason: not only is there no desiring self who continues after death to seek pleasure (rewards) and avoid pain (punishment), but matter also endures, and, across its endless formations, never stops striving.69 The truest materialist, then, is one who is not afraid to die. Poor Lovelace thus recognizes with horror that it is in fact through “woo[ing]” (1098) and “mak[ing] court” (1097) to death that Clarissa best shows herself, paradoxically, to be a desiring, aspiring participant in the natural world, embedded in its order of things, at last the “forward ... girl” (1098), the “blooming, glowing charmer” he thought he wanted her to be, one who, following Lucretius, swerved to life and therein started on a course bound inexorably towards decline yet also towards infinite futures beyond his grasp. “Strange and perverse,” Lovelace complains, relishing the illicit pun despite himself, “that she should refuse and sooner choose to die – oh obscene word!” (1107).70 In eroticizing Clarissa’s choice to die, Lovelace – and the reader with him – intuit Clarissa’s “strange subversiveness,” her “outlaw” attempt to seek the futurity of matter beyond the individual as, in Diderot’s words, a space of “growth still to come.”71 Richardson turns the screw on us again with Lovelace’s mock-prudish reaction to Clarissa’s “encouragement” of death as a lover (1096), for we see here what we have long suspected: Lovelace is more vulnerable to idealist illusions than Clarissa is.72 As the truest materialist, Clarissa, bound for death, emerges at the end of the novel in the full paradoxical light of her libertinism. The The Persistence of Clarissa 187 “fancy” of “gadding after a rake” here finds its logical endpoint in the equally subversive refusal to “get sons and daughters” (970), to “keep her own secret” (1149, also 1084), or to “recover” the “overwhelmed path for the sake of future passengers” (1044). If Clarissa, as Stevenson argues, indeed finds “her true identity” in death, what looks to be a flight from the body, from desire, in fact asserts her inclination – her endeavour – with a vengeance, in a body’s most inevitable natural act.73 Clarissa is as long as it is in large part because Lovelace [and Richardson] notoriously resists fruition – preferring “preparation and expectation” – though both know that “nature will not be satisfied without it” (163, also 616).74 While Clarissa’s death might be said to mark the satisfaction of nature in a way that rape cannot, it actually calls our attention to the ghostly persistence of a desire about which we still know almost nothing, even after 1,500 pages. To drive home the point, Richardson leaves us to brood over the mysterious and suggestive devices on Clarissa’s infamous coffin, devices that, showing “more fancy than would perhaps be thought suitable,” demand explanation yet keep interpretation at once open-ended and indeterminate (1306).75 As Terry Castle has shown, everyone strives to decipher the coffin’s message, but no one really understands what it means. Its provocative ambiguity entices us to puzzle over it again and again. Clarissa’s coffin thus brings us back, in microcosm, to the novel’s vital persistence, to the lesson that the story is never finished, the meaning of a life and death unlimited.76 This essay has made the case that materialism permeates the world of Richardson’s novel more fully than scholarship has tended to grant. Clearly Richardson was immersed in materialism’s problems and tensions and was fascinated by its implications for narrative form, where persistence would appear to be an informing principle. Critics have not fully appreciated the significance of Diderot’s powerful esteem for Clarissa, and particularly for the novel’s treatment of its heroine’s death. Is it a coincidence that Diderot’s letters speak to his mistress, Sophie Volland, of the profound poignancy of “Clarissa’s will and funeral” and of his materialist belief that “whatever lives has always lived and will live for ever”? “Re-read him, my friends,” Diderot urges in his Éloge de Richardson, “read Richardson; read him without ceasing.”77 It is here that we discover Richardson’s voice behind Lovelace’s roguish query: “What is the enjoyment of the finest woman in the world to the bustle of a welllaid plot?” (92).78 Patricia Meyer Spacks argues that Lovelace “conceives of plotting as capable of forestalling even death, as a way of fulfilling the 188 Sarah Ellenzweig desire of the self,” and there is a way in which Spacks’s insight captures a truth about Richardson’s novel at its most primal level.79 In directing our attention to this narrative that persists through motions that are decidedly aesthetic, we find Richardson offering the new novel form as an imaginative answer to the ongoing problems of life. NOTES 1 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 35, 1499. Future page references to Clarissa will be cited parenthetically in the body of the essay. 2 As Tom Keymer observes, each revision of Clarissa “casts its predecessor as provisional or transitional only.” See “Assorted Versions of Assaulted Virgins; or, Textual Instability and Teaching,” in Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Samuel Richardson, ed. Lisa Zunshine and Jocelyn Harris [New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2006], 24). On Richardson’s multiple revisions of Clarissa, see also Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 20–3. Eagleton aptly observes that “the Richardsonian text, like the Brechtian theatre script, can never be definitive” (Rape of Clarissa, 12). 3 See Corrinne Harol’s assertion that “though a short summary of the plot [of Clarissa] might revolve around seduction and tragically early death, the real action of the narrative revolves around anxiety about time and delay.” Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-Century Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 169. 4 James Edwin Miller, Jr, ed. Theory of Fiction: Henry James (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 172. 5 For an early example of the significance of Hobbes for the eighteenthcentury English novel, see Carol Kay, Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, & Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, & Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), esp. 25–33,159–93. 6 Jocelyn Harris argues persuasively that Richardson was far better and far more widely read than critics have assumed; see “Richardson: Original or Learned Genius?,” Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, eds. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 188–202. On Richardson and Hobbes, see James Grantham Turner, “Lovelace and the Paradoxes of Libertinism,” Samuel Richardson, Doody and Sabor, 70–88; Jocelyn Harris, “Protean Lovelace,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2.4 (1990): 327–46; Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, “Clarissa’s Cruelty: The Persistence of Clarissa 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 189 Modern Fables of Moral Authority in The History of a Young Lady,” Clarissa and Her Readers: New Essays for The Clarissa Project, eds. Carol Houlihan Flynn and Edward Copeland (New York: AMS Press, 1999), 45–67; R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan 1974), 172–3; Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 119, 123–4, 342, 344; Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 104–5; Leopold Damrosch, Jr, God’s Plot & Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 246–9; Christine Roulston, Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 35–6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Notes on Tom Jones,” Coleridge’s Essays & Lectures on Shakespeare & Some Other Old Poets & Dramatists (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1909), 363. John Allen Stevenson, “‘Alien Spirits’: The Unity of Lovelace and Clarissa,” New Essays on Samuel Richardson, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 95. Ibid. On the subversiveness of Clarissa’s resistance to marriage, see also Harol, Enlightened Virginity, 170, 174. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1968), 130. Hobbes, The Answer of Mr. Hobbes to Sir William Davenant’s Preface Before Gondibert, in The Collected Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. William Molesworth, 12 vols. (London: Thoemmes Press, 1994), 4:446. D.H. Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters,” Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (New York: Viking Press, 1969), 105, 106–7. See Gilles Deleuze, “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” in Dialogues: Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 36–76; Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1–6; Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters,” 107, 106. Sandra Macpherson suggests that the problem of inertia is “an important and underexamined feature” of the plot of Clarissa. Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 61. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 60; Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four 190 15 16 17 18 19 20 Sarah Ellenzweig Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 39. For the classic treatement of fiction’s complex relationship to narrative ends, see Frank Kermode, The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 200), esp. 3–24, 166–7, 174–80. On the novel’s formal open-endedness, see also J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative and History,” ELH 41 (1974): 460–12. Most recently, as Michael Schmidt affirms in his new “biography” of the novel form, for most readers, novels “possess an enchanting presence,” a tendency to resist conclusion at book’s end. The Novel: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2014), 4. Schmidt’s decision to call his study of the novel a biography reflects this present-ness, this peculiar and unique tendency for novels to feel like people, like living things. For the view that the novel is “less mediated” than other literary genres, see Michael Holquist and Walter Reed, “Six Theses on the Novel, and Some Metaphors,” New Literary History 11 (1980): 419. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1984), xi; Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 38. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 38, 55, 54. See also D.A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), xi. For the view that “the archetype of all fiction is the sexual act,” see Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 26; also Judith Roof, Come As You Are: Sexuality & Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Miller, Narrative and its Discontents, xi. Scholes associates the novel’s latent tendency to want to keep going with its link to sex: “In the sophisticated forms of fiction, as in the sophisticated practice of sex, much of the art consists of delaying climax within the framework of desire in order to prolong the pleasurable act itself” (ibid.). Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 6. See Lukács’s well-known assertion that “the novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (Theory of the Novel, 88). For him, this sense of abandonment predates the Enlightenment, let alone the nineteenth century. The first great novel of world literature is Don Quixote (1605, 1615), which “stands at the beginning of the time when the Christian God began to forsake the world; when man became lonely ... ; when the world ... was abandoned to its immanent meaninglessness” (Theory of the Novel, 103). For a brilliant discussion of non-mechanistic readings of Hobbes’s materialism by his contemporaries, see J.G.A. Pocock, “Thomas Hobbes: The Persistence of Clarissa 21 22 23 24 191 Atheist or Enthusiast? His Place in a Restoration Debate,” History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 737–49. Pocock’s essay is an important counterpoint to the standard source on the reception of Hobbes: Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), esp. 30–1, 63–79. For other challenges to the predominant view that Hobbes was a stark mechanist, see William Sacksteder, “Speaking About Mind: Endeavor in Hobbes,” The Philosophical Forum, 11 (1979): 65–78; Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), esp. 1–14; Gary B. Herbert, Thomas Hobbes: The Unity of Scientific and Moral Wisdom (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989), esp. 113–14. For a recent revisionist study in history of philosophy that also complicates Hobbes’s mechanist legacy, particularly his distinction from Spinoza, see Daniel Garber, “God, Laws, and the Order of Nature: Descartes and Leibniz, Hobbes and Spinoza,” The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 45–66. Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. Ronald Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1.992–3; 1.995–6. Hobbes, Leviathan, 87. Hobbes, Collected Works, 1:412; Lucretius, De rerum natura, 2.1091–3. On Hobbes’s exclusion of “the doctrine of God” in his philosophy, see also Collected Works, 1:10–11. On the role of God in Descartes’s laws of motion, see René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1:2.36 (240). Hobbes refutes the possibility of man’s self-motion in De Corpore (see Collected Works, 1:510), yet as C.B. Macpherson suggests, while “the apparatus was not, strictly speaking, self-moving, ... in a looser sense it was self-moving, because it had, built into it, a desire or endeavour to maintain its motion. This same impulsion to keep going could be said to determine the whole activity of the individual system” (“Introduction,” Leviathan, 28). Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy. The First Section, Concerning Body, in Collected Works, 1:72. The connection between the behaviour of inorganic and human/animal bodies became canonical for materialist philosophy. See, for example, Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, ed. and trans. Clemens Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 35. As Alfred North Whitehead puts it, “the energetic activity considered in physics is 192 25 26 27 28 29 Sarah Ellenzweig the emotional intensity entertained in life.” Modes of Thought (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 168. Lucretius, De rerum natura, 3.1084–5. As James I. Porter explains, “Epicurus’s view is that the best artists of life … will give up on their longing for life while loving life in the mere practice of living: they stand impartially, as it were, toward the desirability of living per se and reap what there is to enjoy in life.” “Love of Life: Lucretius to Freud,” in Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, ed. Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 123. For a brilliant examination of Epicureanism’s contradictory attitudes towards love of life, see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 192–238. See Hobbes’s De Corpore for the argument that “inanimate bodies have no appetite at all.” Collected Works, 1:510. For Hobbes’s theory of endeavour, see Leviathan, 118–19; Collected Works, 1:206–7, 1:216–17, 1:406–8. Hobbes is inconsistent about the difference between animate and inanimate bodies. In his account, while inanimate bodies do not have appetite, they do endeavour, and to the extent that Hobbes makes appetite co-extensive with endeavour, the distinction between animate and inanimate bodies begins to break down. For a useful discussion of these tensions, see Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 76–8. Hobbes, Leviathan, 118–19, 119. On Hobbes’s concept of endeavour as suggestive of an active force inside bodies, see Sacksteder, “Speaking About Mind,” 70, 74, 76–7. As James explains the process, “since the internal motions that constitute endeavour persist as long as the body continues to function in the manner that qualifies it as existing, we can never be without a susceptibility to passion. When the internal motions that are our appetites and aversions cease, we die, and become corpses rather than human beings. But as long as they continue, we are subject to passion, to short-term satisfaction allied to lifelong insatiability.” Passion and Action, 131. Hobbes makes the point famously in De Cive when he declares that man shuns death “by a certain impulsion of nature, no less than that whereby a stone moves downward.” Collected Works, 2:8. What follows is “the first foundation of natural right,” namely that “every man as much as in him lies endeavours to protect his life and members.” Collected Works, 2:9; see also Leviathan, 189. This conviction in nature’s innate impulsion to keep going is definitive for materialism. Lucretius’s foundational first The Persistence of Clarissa 30 31 32 33 193 principle – the certainty that nothing comes from nothing – grows logically out of the prior confidence that things in the natural world exhibit a fundamental drive to be and to remain what they are, to defend and continue to express their “distinct power” (1.172), their “character” (1.190), their “fixed material” (1.204), their “nature secret and unseen,” (1.779). Hobbes, Leviathan, 130. For a useful account of the centrality of desire in Hobbes’s materialism, see Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, esp. 85–116. Hobbes, Human Nature, in Collected Works, 4:33; Hobbes, Leviathan, 160. See also the starker version of this position in De Corpore: “All endeavour, whether strong or weak, is propagated to infinite distance; for it is motion.” Collected Works, 1:216. My reading of Richardson’s use of Hobbes differs from the tendency in eighteenth-century literary studies to assume that contemporaries read Hobbes as a mechanist. See, for example, Damrosch’s references to Lovelace’s “grossly mechanistic theory of behavior” and his assumption that “Hobbesian psychology is both reductive and predictive.” God’s Plot & Man’s Stories, 247–8. In linking the novel’s engagement with life to what I have called “materialism,” my argument draws from recent debates in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century studies on mechanistic vs. more vital understandings of matter. Broadly speaking, most historians now agree that by the 1740s, contemporaries concerned with understanding the nature of life grew dissatisfied with Descartes’s passive conception of matter, a conception seen as insufficient to explain organic processes. By the middle of the century, living matter was increasingly understood to function less like a machine and more like an interlocking system of vital, active forces, animated from within rather than without. This is not to suggest that more vital forms of materialism were absent before the 1740s but rather to gesture towards a general trend. On the transition from mechanism to vital materialism in the eighteenth century, see, for example, Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), 328–64; Minsoo Kang, “From the Man-Machine to the Automaton-Man: The Enlightenment Origins of the Mechanistic Imagery of Humanity,” Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death, ed. Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 148–73; Theodore M. Brown, “From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-Century English Physiology,” Journal of the History of Biology 7 (1974): 179–216; Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in An Age of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University 194 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Sarah Ellenzweig Press, 1970), esp. 191–232; Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1–16, 42–7; Thomas L. Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 113–45. Diderot, Éloge de Richardson, in Clarissa: The Eighteenth-Century Response, 1747–1804, 2 vols, ed. Lois E. Bueler (New York: AMS Press, 2010), 1:395, 393. Diderot seems to have understood Richardson’s aim with notable discrimination, writing in his Éloge that “the passions he paints are those I detect in myself; they are moved by the same objects and have the very energy that I know them to have; the characters’ setbacks and afflictions are such as ceaselessly menace me” (1:393). Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa, 92. In “Literature and Life,” Deleuze describes the significance of writing to life in a way that Richardson would have embraced: “Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived ... The shame of being a man – is there any better reason to write?” Essays Critical and Clinical, 1. On libertinism as a style of writing as well as a sexual or philosophical stance, see Turner, “Lovelace and the Paradoxes of Libertinism,” Samuel Richardson, Doody and Sabor, 75–8. On Clarissa’s anxious references to her writing as the act of a “roving pen,” see Clarissa, 65, 82, 112. As Eagleton argues of Lovelace, “Linguistic lawlessness is the other face of his sexual libertinism: a writing which brooks no closure is a desire which knows no mercy.” The Rape of Clarissa, 83. It is for this reason that early in the novel, Anna’s lively teasing about Clarissa’s barely conscious “prepossession in [Lovelace’s] favour” (49) leads Clarissa to worry about “what turn my mind had taken to dictate so oddly to my pen” (72). As Roulston argues, on Lovelace’s account to Belford, “the authentic narrative of Clarissa’s escape collapses into a story of seduction desired by her, thereby proving the ambivalent nature of female virtue.” Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self, 35. Lovelace never abandons hope for Clarissa’s submission: “What once a lady hopes, in love matters, she always hopes while there is room for hope” (1108). See Lovelace’s famous question to Belford, “This must be all from education too – must it not, Belford? Can education have stronger force in a woman’s heart than nature? – Sure it cannot” (695). The Persistence of Clarissa 195 43 As Hobbes argues in ch. 6 of Leviathan, entitled, “Of the Interiour Beginnings of Voluntary Motions; commonly called the Passions,” “The best signes of Passions present, are either in the countenance, motions of the body, actions, and ends, or aimes, which we otherwise know the man to have” (129). On the period’s view of pregnancy as a subsequent expression of desire in the prior act of conception, see Frances Ferguson, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” Representations 20 (1987): 103–4. 44 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 118–19. 45 On appetite and aversion, see Leviathan, 119–21; Collected Works, 1:406–8. 46 Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia, ed. and trans. Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 30. 47 See Clarissa’s complaint to Anna: “You would imagine, by what he writes, that I have given him reason to think that my aversion to Mr Solmes is all owing to my favour for him!” (345). On the Harlowes as Hobbists “at [their] core,” see Doody, A Natural Passion, 123. 48 Leviathan, 128; see also Collected Works, 1:408–9. 49 Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 204, 225. On Clarissa’s inaction, see also Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 107. Clarissa’s preference for an inertial model of human psychology and action is perhaps best represented through her aspiration for “the single state” (281) or what she elsewhere refers to as living “sole” (78, also 358). The fantasy of living “sole” bespeaks Clarissa’s wish to be a self-contained, self-sufficient entity, one whose passive course never intersects with another body. We see this preferred logic of self-containment in play most powerfully when Clarissa anxiously relinquishes possession of her letter to Lovelace agreeing to leave Harlowe Place under his protection. Upon depositing the letter in the brick wall, Clarissa understands with horror that she has rendered both the letter and herself “out of my power” (352). Her subsequent letter of retraction, expressing her wish “to suspend, for the present, my intention of leaving my father’s house” (362–3), (which Lovelace crucially never receives), displays Clarissa’s attempt to freeze time and motion at the instant of her suspended intention, clinging hereby in vain to a worldview in which “sole” actors exert themselves across discrete and disconnected moments. In a desperate attempt to hold on to this logic of autonomous self-containment at the moment of the abduction, Clarissa refuses the fact that the first letter has already contributed to creating a fuller, more 196 50 51 52 53 Sarah Ellenzweig multi-faceted reality than the fixity of her revised intentions – marking a particular stopped instant in time – wants to grant: “Oh Mr Lovelace, ... I cannot go with you! – Indeed I cannot – I wrote you word so! – Let go my hand and you shall see my letter. It has lain there from yesterday morning till within this half-hour” (374). See Keith Hutchison for the view that mechanism’s passive conception of matter served as a safeguard for a Christian, law-bound, world view. “Supernaturalism and the Mechanical Philosophy,” History of Science, 21 (1983): 297–333. The trajectory from Descartes’s inert conception of matter to Spinoza’s vital one is a crucial instance in the history of materialism’s thinking about motion. In Spinoza’s legendary 1676 letter to Tschirnhaus, he confronts the viability of matter’s supposed passivity, assumed by Descartes’s version of the law of inertia, head-on: “from Extension as conceived by Descartes, to wit, an inert mass, it is not only difficult, as you say, but quite impossible to demonstrate the existence of bodies. For matter at rest, as far as in it lies, will continue to be at rest, and will not be set in motion except by a more powerful external cause. “Spinoza to Tschirnhaus, 5 May 1676,” Spinoza: Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), esp. 81, 956. Susan James cites inertia among the phenomena that tended to push back against mechanism’s wholly passive view of bodies, as Spinoza’s letter to Tschirnhaus demonstrates. Passion and Action, 76–81. When Newton later asserts that by the principle of inertia alone – the passive principle by which bodies persist in their motion or rest – there never could have been any motion in the world, his assertion betrays the anxiety of its opposite claim: matter’s immanent motion. See Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 98; also Jacob, “John Toland and the Newtonian Ideology,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 321. Lucretius, De rerum natura, 1.779; 1.790. On things remaining constant, see also 1.167–207; 1.174; 2.249–50. On the secret, hidden nature of the vital force in bodies, see also 3.273–81. Clarissa uses the term herself when imagining the chance to speak to her father in her distress: “Oh my dear papa, ... had you known how I have been punished, ever since my swerving feet led me out of your garden doors to meet this man!” (650). James Harlowe observes that Clarissa is “The most admirable young creature that ever swerved!” (1380). Anna urges Clarissa to consider herself as “a prudent person” who “endeavours to mend her error, and ... to recover the path she has been rather driven The Persistence of Clarissa 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 197 out of than chosen to swerve from” (578). Lovelace also refers to Clarissa’s “sliding” step (431) or “fall” (440, 450). See Natania Meeker for the view that “the Epicurean clinamen ... becomes the emblem of a libertine freedom that inheres not only within human bodies but as part of the structure of the material world itself. “Libertine Lucretius,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 2 (2012): 227. “Take care,” Clarissa warns Anna on the subject of their forbidden letters, “how you fall into my error; for that began with carrying on a prohibited correspondence; which I thought it in my power to discontinue at pleasure” (408). The pedantic clergyman, Mr. Brand, writes to Clarissa’s Uncle “that one false step generally brings on another; and peradventure a worse, and a still worse ….” (1292). Brand’s sentiments are relayed to the women in the Milliner’s shop across from Clarissa’s final lodging with Mrs. Smith, who confirm to Belford that “it was but too natural to think that where a lady had given way to a delusion, and taken so wrong a step, she would not stop there” (1296). Hobbes, Collected Works, 1:123; see also Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, 59. On causation as a process of “intra-action” between mutually embroiled agents, see also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 132–88. See Kramnick, Actions and Objects, 229; Tom Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 218–44. Alluding in particular to the complexities of desire, Anna Howe speaks to epistolarity and the intricacy of experience thus: “for I may venture to affirm, that anyone who should read your letters, and would say you were right, would not on reading mine, condemn me for being quite wrong” (276). Significantly, it is upon Clarissa’s mistaken claim to indifference that her fatal correspondence with Lovelace is first grounded (47). No one around her buys it: “With what ap-pa-rent indifference,” James Harlowe teases (58). Roulston, Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self, 37. See Lovelace’s gloomy lament that “my charmer has no passions; that is to say, none of the passions that I want her to have” (897). Criticism has been largely unanimous in taking Richardson at his word here, particularly in relation to the death of Clarissa. See, for example, Allan Wendt, “Clarissa’s Coffin,” Philological Quarterly 39 (1960): 481–95; Peggy Thompson, “Abuse and Atonement: The Passion of Clarissa Harlowe,” Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson, ed. David Blewett (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 152–69); 198 Sarah Ellenzweig James Bryant Reeves, “Posthumous Presence in Richardson’s Clarissa,” SEL 53 (2013): 601–21; Chad Loewen-Schmidt, “Pity, or the Providence of the Body in Richardson’s Clarissa,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22 (2009): 1–28; E. Derek Taylor, “The End of Clarissa,” Reason and Religion in Clarissa: Samuel Richardson and “the Famous Mr. Norris of Bemerton” (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 1–32; Alex Eric Hernandez, “Tragedy and the Economics of Providence in Richardson’s Clarissa, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22 (2010): 599–630. For notable exceptions to this trend that seek to explore the physical, organic nature of Clarissa’s death, see Raymond Stephanson, “Richardson’s “Nerves”: The Physiology of Sensibility in Clarissa,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 267–85; Clark Lawlor, “Long Grief, dark Melancholy, hopeless natural Love”: Clarissa, Cheyne and Narratives of Body and Soul,” Gesnerus 63 (2006): 103–12. Both Stephanson’s and Lawlor’s discussions of Richardson’s friendship with the eighteenthcentury physician and physiologist George Cheyne (1671–1743) suggest the influence of a non-mechanistic vital materialism on Richardson, an influence worthy of further scholarly investigation. On Cheyne and eighteenth-century vital materialism, see Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism, 57–62; Shirley A. Roe, “The Life Sciences,” The Cambridge History of Science: Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Vol. 4, 401–2. 62 See Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 6 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), 2:128. For a discussion of early readers’ outrage at the death of Clarissa, see Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa, 199–244; Adam Budd, “Why Clarissa Must Die: Richardson’s Tragedy and Editorial Heroism,” Eighteenth-Century Life 31 (2007):1–28. 63 Richardson tells Aaron Hill that his decision to make Clarissa die fearlessly grew from his ambition to flout “vulgar” prejudice and “attempt what I have the Vanity to think was never yet attempted.” Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 87. Yet even putting materialism aside, strictly speaking, the attempt to make his contemporaries think better of death was not as new as Richardson claims it to be. By 1747, much of Richardson’s bold embrace of death had been well rehearsed in Charles Drelincourt’s wildly popular The Christian’s Defence against the Fears of Death, which appeared in its sixteenth edition at the time of Richardson’s publication of Clarissa. Here Drelincourt proclaims that good Christians who rely on God “look [death] in the face ... with an undaunted countenance.” The Christian’s Defence (London: Davies & Eldridge, 1800), 58. To fear death, Drelincourt suggests, is thus to show one’s infidelity: namely one’s distrust in the providence of God and The Persistence of Clarissa 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 199 “the felicities which God hath promised to all those that shall come into his presence.” The Christian’s Defence, 71, 74. Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. Ronald Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3.1045. Ibid., 3.1076–7. Hobbes, Collected Works, 2:8, 4:82–3; Lucretius, De rerum natura, 2.1006. See also La Mettrie’s Epicurean meditation on death: “Do we know any more of our end than of our beginning? Let us submit ourselves, therefore, to an invincible ignorance on which our happiness depends. Whoever thinks in this way will be wise, just, and tranquil about his fate, and consequently happy. He will await death neither fearing nor desiring it.” Man A Machine, trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994), 75. As Kramnick demonstrates, this is precisely Clarissa’s attitude at the end of the novel. Actions and Objects, 219–29. Porter, “Love of Life: Lucretius to Freud,” 129. For the canonical (and later) expression of this view, see in particular Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream, in which the figure of D’Alembert asserts the ongoing participation of each being in all other beings through the eternity of matter, asking, “Does this mean that I shall never die? ... Well, of course, in that sense I shall never die, neither I nor anything else for that matter ... Being born, living, dying – these are only changes of form ... And what difference is there between one form and another?” Jacques Barzum and Ralph H. Bowen, trans. Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 124–5? On Deleuze’s reading of Lucretius, the illusion of infinite pleasure and the illusion of infinite rewards or punishments are two linked “false infinites” that materialism seeks to dismantle. See “Lucretius and the Simulacrum,” The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), esp. 272–8. In his own perverse way, Lovelace registers materialism’s version of the eternity of matter in his desire to embalm Clarissa’s body and preserve her heart “in spirits” (1383–4). Richardson may have been influenced by vitalism’s theory of death as a process and progress in which the boundary between life and death is inexact and variable, the heart seen to endure the longest. See Reill, Vitalizing Nature, 171–6. Diderot, Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature and Other Philosophical Works, trans. David Adams (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999), 75.See also La Mettrie, Man Machine, 75; Stevenson, “Alien Spirits,” 95. For a Marxist materialist reading of Clarissa’s death as a political condemnation 200 72 73 74 75 Sarah Ellenzweig of “patriarchal and class society,” see Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa, 73–7. Clarissa’s “refusal” as an alternative, and for Lovelace, deeply threatening, version of an open futurity here stands as her “line of flight” from the oppressive stagnation of Lovelace’s fantasy future, one in which a pregnant Clarissa will assure the rapist’s identity and repetition: “a Twin Lovelace at each charming breast” (706). The fact that Lovelace imagines his progeny as doubled versions of himself epitomizes his desire to close off the future at its supposed moment of opening out. What looks to be a futural life orientation, in other words, is merely an inertial perpetuation of the same. Looking to death, Clarissa once again breaks out from inertia, though this time more on her own terms, following a drive that persists beyond the biological rhythms of generation and corruption. See Lovelace’s (only partially ironic) opening letter to Belford in which he blames the poets, “with their celestially-terrene descriptions,” for “fir[ing] my imagination and set[ting] me upon a desire to become a goddessmaker” (142). Stevenson, “Alien Spirits,” 91. I here adopt Deleuze’s concept of the “line of flight” to indicate his Epicurean interest in a clinamen-like trajectory or course of movement that seeks new and alternative pathways for desire. See “Literature and Life,” in Smith and Greco, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1–6; “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” Dialogues: Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 36–76. In book four of De rerum natura, Lucretius argues powerfully against the joys of fruition, maintaining instead that “in the very time of possession, lovers’ ardour is storm-tossed, uncertain in its course” (4.1077–8). Nature, Lucretius urges, denies us satisfaction, taunting us with “the hope that the fire may be extinguished from the same body that was the origin of the burning” (4.1086–88). For the view that “pleasure ... interrupts[s] the immanent process of desire,” see also Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure,” Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 189. See Mrs Smith’s comment to Belford on the devices and inscriptions on Clarissa’s coffin: “Lord bless me! Is a coffin a proper subject to display fancy upon!” (1305). Ian Watt argues for an erotic impulse in Clarissa’s preparations for death as well as in the principle device on the coffin, the crowned serpent with its tail in its mouth. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 234. On the animacy suggested in Clarissa’s will to die, see also Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, 107–8. The Persistence of Clarissa 201 76 Terry Castle, “The Death of the Author: Clarissa’s Coffin,” Clarissa’s Ciphers: Meaning & Disruption in Richardson’s “Clarissa” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 136–46. 77 Peter France, ed. and trans., Diderot’s Letters to Sophie Volland (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 93, 37; Diderot, Éloge de Richardson, in Clarissa: The Eighteenth-Century Response, 1:394, 395. On Diderot and Richardson, see Rita Goldberg, Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 128–45; June S. Siegel, “Diderot and Richardson: Manuscripts, Missives, and Mysteries,” Diderot Studies 18 (1975): 145–67. See also Arthur M. Wilson’s speculation that Diderot likely appreciated the “suspenseful sort of prurience and eroticism” of Clarissa: “Perhaps Diderot recognized this for what it was, though he does not say so; perhaps he was taken in by it.” Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 428. 78 Lovelace elsewhere asserts similarly: “And so able is fancy or imagination ... to outdo fact” (1334–5). 79 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in EighteenthCentury English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 75.