Hester Chapone as a Living Clarissa in Letters on Filial Obedience and A Matrimonial Creed

Thomason, Laura E.

doi:10.1353/ecf.0.0070

Cited by 2 publications

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“…A recent critic reads Richardson as supporting total parental control and sees The Whole Duty as placing a woman 'in the condition of "an Indian screen" to be bought and sold'. 20 Richardson stoutly declared in the Preface to his first edition that his novel should 'caution Parents against the undue Exertion of their natural Authority over their Children, in the great Article of Marriage'. 21 Clarissa does not want to marry against her parents' wishes; she merely refuses to take their choice of spouse as the single binding consideration.…”

Section: Clarissa: Non-generational Thinking As Tyrannymentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagining the Child: Bad Parents in the Mid‐Eighteenth‐Century English Novel

Paxman¹

2014

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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The British novel's history is partly one of discovering the child. Novels of the 1720s depict neglected or abandoned children as a backdrop for adventure and scandal. Three mid‐century novels illustrate the growing interest in generational thinking (a concern for children's welfare and future). In Richardson's Clarissa, the Harlowes' rigid authority blinds them from ‘recognising’, in Ricoeur's sense, Clarissa. In Tom Jones, Fielding shows a deep interest in generational thinking, which guides even Bridget Allworthy, in spite of her other hypocrisies. In Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless, Betsy faces constant moral risk because her surrogate parents ignore or misperceive her developmental needs.

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Section: Clarissa: Non-generational Thinking As Tyrannymentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagining the Child: Bad Parents in the Mid‐Eighteenth‐Century English Novel

Paxman¹

2014

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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Sexual Remembrance in Clarissa

Lubey¹

2017

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

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This article proposes that a primary concern for Samuel Richardson in composing Clarissa (1747–48) was to represent women’s personhood as entirely constituted by sexual relations, with penetrative rape standing only as the most violent manifestation of a systematic instrumentalization of women’s bodies upon which eighteenth-century social institutions depended. Contrary to much critical commentary, I argue that the rape is widely detailed in a model of narrative dispersal: building narrative accounts of self-estrangement into other scenes of imposition against Clarissa’s body, Richardson continually shows readers the atomization of his heroine’s personhood that results from the pressures of heterosexual coupling. Richardson calls on readers to identify as sexual violation, and therefore as an act that devalues personhood, the sum total of incursions made on women, since courtship, marriage, property, seduction, and rape sort women into finite and rigid social positions based on their sex. Richardson’s feminist commitments are made apparent by his revelation that full personhood is only ever aspirational, and is in fact tragically unavailable, to women within a coercive heterosexual order that operationalizes their bodies.

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Hester Chapone as a Living Clarissa in Letters on Filial Obedience and A Matrimonial Creed

Cited by 2 publications

References 11 publications

Imagining the Child: Bad Parents in the Mid‐Eighteenth‐Century English Novel

Imagining the Child: Bad Parents in the Mid‐Eighteenth‐Century English Novel

Sexual Remembrance in Clarissa

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