But such blanket condemnation ignores differences between textual and visual media. It is harder to argue for the exploitation of characters who only exist in the virtual realm of reading. The politics of their representation, then, likewise differ. For the moment, let me return to Samuel Richardson and suggest how Clarissa exemplifies some of the differences between cinematic and novelistic representation. Because Clarissa is an epistolary narrative, it allows a wide breach between its story and its discourse, to use Seymour Chatman s terms.
Letter writing only takes place between breaks in the action.
If the plot of Clarissa is a drama, then the story only gets told between the acts. This gap between action and its narration inheres in the limitations of language, certainly. In any novel, no matter the type, readers can only decode marks on the page, interpret them, and fashion a narrative from the raw material. But granting this, the epistolary form, though it gains intimacy in the fresh moment of narration that each new letter provides, cannot, finally, show us any more than can any other novel form. Following Watt, were we part of Richardson s diegetic world, were we in the next room peeping through a keyhole, we might see Lovelace rape Clarissa.