Enclosing Clarissa (1987)

E N C L O S I N G C L A R I S S A A PRIL LONDON University of Ottawa M u c h of the recent critical commentary on Clarissa has focused on the subjectivity of meaning and interpretation for both the readers of and the participants in Richardson’s novel.1 The emphasis on the hermeneutic strug­ gle the text enacts is often made, however, at the expense of acknowledging the contrary context within which epistemological debate was conventionally located in eighteenth-century narrative. The subjectivism which modern criticism celebrates, and which received its classic philosophical expression in Locke’s Essay, was, in fact, regarded by Richardson and many of his con­ temporaries as highly suspect. It tended to be associated with the economic form of radical individualism, the amorphous “monied interest,” and so acquired the taint of hysteria and unreality. Countering this volatile subjec­ tivism was the stolidity of the landed interest which justified its cultural pre-eminence by means of a straightforward analogy: since land is perma­ nent, attachment to the land assures continuity, tradition, and stability.2 The formulation of such an analogy supposes a transparent, reciprocal relation between figurative and literal readings of place of the kind celebrated in Pope’s Epistle to Burlington. There the exemplary figure of “ Wealth and Quality,” who possesses “Good Sense, which only is the gift of Heav’n,” realizes the virtues of his high estate in the cultivation of the landscape.3 Such ability is a function not only of class but, clearly, also of gender, and the likelihood of a woman approximating a similar balance between the metaphorical and real meanings of estate is consequently severely limited. For the assumption that female chastity guarantees the sanctity of property is expressed not in the terms of analogy, but rather in those of metaphor: women are not like property, they are property. For them, the easy corre­ spondence of an inner “Good Sense” to an outer “Genius of the Place” 4 is discounted. Instead, the terms of real property are made to describe their subordination; they must be enclosed and their passions bounded in order to secure primogeniture. These are, of course, the metaphors that most per­ fectly describe the course of Clarissa’s history, when her family’s decision to impose on her an equivalence to real property is terribly and ironically E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x iii, 3, September 1987 realized in her death. But throughout the novel more positive connotations of the estate as a model of potential wholeness are set against her singular tragedy. This paper will explore the ways in which Richardson counterpoints the multiple meanings of place in order to set the disruptions and discon­ tinuities of his text within a finally unrealized, but nevertheless ideal, order of the estate. Contemporary commentators were quick to recognize the vein of political implication in the struggle which victimizes Clarissa. The anonymous author of Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa and Pamela thus writes: The pride of wealth in the Harlowe family, and the pride of titles and descent in the Lovelace family, can nowhere be found, save, in a monarchial and commercial state, where there is a hereditary noblesse, and a great inequality among the fortunes of the citizens. Neither can such characters as Lovelace and his associates, or mother Sinclair and her nymphs, display themselves, or such a place as the mother’s brothel, subsist anywhere but in a city like London, the overgrown metropolis of a powerful Empire, and an extensive commerce; all these corruptions, are the necessary and unavoidable consequences of such a constitution of things.5 This “constitution of things” devolves from a model of the English social order in flux — the formerly impenetrable authority of the “monarchial” eroded by the arriviste assumptions of the recently wealthy “commercial” Harlowes. London itself becomes the physical embodiment of this budding corruption, an “overgrowth” of transactions which finds its incarnation in the buying and selling at Mother Sinclair’s. As both her early letters and Anna Howe’s eulogy reveal, Clarissa stands apart from this...