One Great Family: Domestic Relationships in Samuel Richardson's Novels. Simone Höhn
that it will comfort her to know that her family believe they have good reasons for their severity (1291). Belford at first fears that she will suffer from the slur on her reputation rather than be comforted, but he does as Lovelace requires him – and indeed, Clarissa finds more comfort than grief in this letter. These hopeful appearances, however, are put into question by Lovelace’s inability to transfer his veneration of Clarissa into a new conception of women – or, indeed, mankind – in general.
This is exemplified, among other things, in a strange scene of impersonation which takes place as Lovelace comes to London in order to force a visit to the dying heroine. He is staying at Mrs. Sinclair’s (for reasons of practicality which are not entirely convincing). To “pacify” Lovelace’s reproaches, the bawd offers to show him “a new face that would please [him]”, and Lovelace accepts with some curiosity – only to encounter Sally, who greets him with caresses and then impersonates Clarissa: “I’ll be virtuous for a quarter of an hour and mimic your Clarissa to the life” (1217). The entire scene is surprising, although hardly detailed enough to be shocking at this stage. There is a gratuitous quality to it. As a last bid by the prostitutes to win round Lovelace, it seems a hopeless scheme, and as mockery, too audacious for women who had been made to cry even by the less threatening Belford for their behaviour to Clarissa (1067). Nor is the scene detailed enough to move the reader in a similar way as Mowbray’s callous letter does after Clarissa’s death. For that, there is too little detail; Lovelace sums up Sally’s performance in a single sentence. Despite his curses for her insults to Clarissa, “the little devil was not to be balked; but fell a crying, sobbing, praying, begging, exclaiming, fainting, so that I never saw my lovely girl so well aped; and I was almost taken in; for I could have fancied I had her before me once more” (1217). This description can hardly persuade the reader who has gone through pages of the heroine’s moving “crying, sobbing, praying” that Sally’s performance is similar; it can neither highlight Clarissa’s authenticity through her enemies’ affectation, nor can it question it by showing the reader that exclaiming and fainting of the virtuous and the wicked are actually indistinguishable. What, if any, effect does this little scene have, then?11 And what does it mean to “ape” Clarissa?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word can mean imitation both in an absurd and in a good or neutral way; Lovelace seems to use the word in the latter sense (OED, “ape, v.”). Yet mere imitation of Clarissa’s general manners is not at stake here; indeed, at Colonel Ambrose’s ball and elsewhere, Lovelace had rejected as insipid and soulless the beauty and behaviour of other women, and throughout the novel, he had been eager to find explanations for virtuous women’s behaviour as different from Clarissa’s as possible. When he describes the women at Hampstead, for example, he interprets Miss Rawlins as curious rather than concerned for the heroine, and he speculates that Anna cautions Clarissa against him out of jealously rather than out of concern for her friend’s welfare (cf. 2.5). This despite repeated reports that Clarissa’s skill and virtue have a tangible influence on her environment – thus demonstrating both the force of virtue and women’s potential to recognise and imitate good things. Anna Howe mentions, for instance, that Clarissa’s example has made it habitual for women to do needlework while visiting (1471), and Brand reports that she “gave the fashion to the fashionable” (1190). While these are minor improvements, they still indicate that Clarissa has an impact both on the inside and the outside of her acquaintances.12 Yet when faced with a “little devil’s” personification of his “angel”, Lovelace shows peculiarly little resistance, and although he at first claims that he “could not bear such an insult upon the dear creature” (1217), he ends up fancying the absent “angel” embodied in the “devil” before him.
Revealingly, Lovelace continues his summary of Sally’s “aping” not with his own immediate reaction to it (we in fact never learn whether he continued cursing her or whether the performance really “pacified” him), but with pondering the nature of women:
Oh this sex! this artful sex! There’s no minding them. At first, indeed, their grief and their concern may be real: but give way to the hurricane, and it will soon die away in soft murmurs, trilling upon your ears like the notes of a well-tuned viol. And, by Sally, one sees that art will generally so well supply the place of nature, that you shall not easily know the difference. Miss Harlowe, indeed, is the only woman in the world, I believe, that can say, in the words of her favourite Job (for I can quote a text as well as she), But it is not so with me. (1217)
Instead of spurning Sally’s performance as meaningless mockery, then, Lovelace accepts it as authentic – if not of Clarissa’s, then at least of ‘woman’s’ nature.13 He thus implicitly subscribes to the prostitutes’ earlier claims that Clarissa’s virtue is essentially of the same quality as their own was, that it is a habit which can be broken once and for all. He acknowledges Clarissa’s special status only to separate her from other women. Despite his earlier claims that “the sex” in general are concerned in Clarissa’s trials, he still subscribes to the dichotomy of ‘woman’ and ‘angel’, and a woman who cannot be turned into a ‘devil’ must be an angel, rather than simply virtuous. What an indifferent or virtuous observer would have seen in Sally’s performance, then, does not matter – the point is that Lovelace still recognises ‘art’ as the essence of femininity. He has come to acknowledge Clarissa’s virtue, but this has not changed his essential view of the world: “Seeing Clarissa as angelic—a saint, not a woman—allows Lovelace to avoid altering his perception of women” (GwilliamGwilliam, Tassie 82). This becomes apparent in his reaction to her allegorical letter as well, where he enthusiastically states that he will agree to any conditions that are set him before he may unite with her (1233–4). Lovelace is perfectly serious, thinking mainly of Clarissa’s disputed estate and other worldly matters. Yet when it becomes clear that his repentance and reformation, rather than economic generosity, are demanded for a reunion in heaven, Lovelace does not even momentarily consider this condition – his repentance is confined to Clarissa herself, and to worldly punishments or rewards.
1.4 Masquerade, truth and hypocrisy
The complex relationship between authentic feelings and feelings as performance can be exemplified with the topos of the masquerade. At a masquerade, anything bad can happen. Pamela’s Mr. B. starts an affair there – although he claims it never really passes the limits of “Platonick Nonsense” (Pamela in her Exalted Condition 457) –, Harriet Byron is abducted from one, and even Henry Fielding’s Tom JonesFielding, Henry, who can find trouble anywhere, is entangled worse than ever when he follows Lady Bellaston home from a masquerade. “[F]oolish, irrational, and corrupt” (CastleCastle, Terry, Masquerade and Civilization 2), a masquerade in early eighteenth-century fiction constitutes a gathering of the weak and the wicked. The best which a virtuous person can hope for if she (rarely he) attends one inadvertently is to escape with a sense of disgust and boredom. Curiously, the frequent denunciation of masquerades as a diversion that can offer no real pleasure seems to fit ill with the danger they are assumed to pose to virtue. Harriet’s assurance that the masquerade which proved so nearly fatal to her never gave her pleasure (1:426) is psychologically plausible. However, such accounts raise the question as to what the attraction of masquerades is in the first place, and why they can exist at all so as to entice innocent people to their own ruin. More sympathetic accounts emphasise the unusual freedom a masked ball provides, especially for women:
It is delightful to me to be able to wander about in a crowd, making my observations, and conversing with whomsoever I please, without being liable to be stared at or remarked upon, and to speak to whom I please, and run away from them the moment I have discovered their stupidity. (Harriette Wilson, qtd. in CastleCastle, Terry, Masquerade and Civilization 44)
Pamela in her Exalted Condition illustrates this freedom (and the risks it entails) in more detail – not in the person of the heroine, but in that of the Countess Dowager who all but initiates the ensuing flirtation with Mr. B., a married man (366–8, 441–3).
The liberty to move and speak freely comes attended with dangers. Sir Charles’s somewhat awkward statement that “[m]asquerades […] are not creditable places for young ladies to be known to be insulted at them” (Grandison 1:143) expresses them,