Sexual Remembrance in Clarissa

Abstract

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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“…"The novel instructs readers to find compelled sex everywhere in Clarissa's world," argues Kathleen Lubey, "as a set of exploitations of women's bodies in social practices-like rape, but also courtship and marriage-that disregard their volition." 12 Doreen Thierauf makes a similar argument about the historical contexts of another "problematic" Victorian text, Daniel Deronda (1876), arguing that by 1876, Victorians broadly understood conjugal rape to be a medically regrettable but otherwise regular and inevitable feature of marriage, one that Eliot makes legible to "authorized interpretation" through Gwendolen's various bodily symptoms, her psychological breakdown, her failure to reproduce, and her eventual "imperfect reconstitution as a moral subject" (263, 247). 13 "Rape occurs in plain sight because elite respectability and its attendant legal fictions are revealed to be a sham," Thierauf concludes, underscoring the way that the New Rape Studies asks not that we dig deeply for sexual violence that is hidden or obscured in any given text, but that we recognize its widely overlooked dispersal throughout the literary canon.…”