The Heroine's Subjection: Clarissa, Sadomasochism, and Natural Law

Hinton, Laura

doi:10.1353/ecs.1999.0017

Cited by 37 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 21 publications

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“…Hinton intriguingly points out that 'Clarissa uses virginity as a moral weapon', but she sees Clarissa's battle essentially as one for control over herself and Lovelace -a cognate, perhaps, of Lovelace's struggle for control. 29 I would say that a key differentiating factor is the moral value of their respective ends, and that the real issue is the texts' uneasy recognition that even though the ends are different, the means are disturbingly similar. As Mary Yates has it, 'In a sense, Sir Charles is not to be trusted' -yet this does not make him immoral.…”

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Pious Frauds: ‘Honest Tricks’ and the Patterns of Anglican Devotional Thought in Richardson

Latimer

2009

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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This essay identifies a series of apparent deceptions by two of Richardson's iconic moral paragons, Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison. It uses early modern Anglican thought to argue that such deceptions are best seen as 'lies' -but also that the same body of theology allows for 'lying' in certain cases. Drawing on a range of Anglican thought from this period, it identifies in this literature a fascination with using 'indirect means' to bring about the ends of virtue, and concludes that Richardson picks up on this intellectual thread in his staging of morally complex fictional scenarios.

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Pious Frauds: ‘Honest Tricks’ and the Patterns of Anglican Devotional Thought in Richardson

Latimer

2009

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770

Gordon

2002

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Challenging recent work that contends that seventeenth-century English discourses privilege the notion of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient individual, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature recovers a counter-tradition that imagines selves as more passively prompted than actively choosing. This tradition - which Scott Paul Gordon locates in seventeenth-century religious discourse, in early eighteenth-century moral philosophy, in mid eighteenth-century acting theory, and in the emergent novel - resists autonomy and defers agency from the individual to an external 'prompter'. Gordon argues that the trope of passivity aims to guarantee a disinterested self in a culture that was increasingly convinced that every deliberate action involves calculating one's own interest. Gordon traces the origins of such ideas from their roots in the non-conformist religious tradition to their flowering in one of the central texts of eighteenth-century literature, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

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Introduction. “Spring and Motive of our Actions”: disinterest and self-interest

Gordon¹

2002

The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770

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The Heroine's Subjection: Clarissa, Sadomasochism, and Natural Law

Cited by 37 publications

References 21 publications

Pious Frauds: ‘Honest Tricks’ and the Patterns of Anglican Devotional Thought in Richardson

Pious Frauds: ‘Honest Tricks’ and the Patterns of Anglican Devotional Thought in Richardson

The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770

Introduction. “Spring and Motive of our Actions”: disinterest and self-interest

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