822
PARTISAN REVIEW
two kinds of death. A person dies only if he has been alive; Emma's
is this kind of death-the death of the flesh that has felt and desired
and rejoiced. Society is dead
in
having overpassed sensuality and
become abstract-as its advance position is indicated in Homais,
and its usual impotence in Binet, Bournisien, Rodolphe, Leon, even
down to Lestiboudois with his corpse-planted potatoes. Being dead,
this society cannot die. Emma's career has no social articulation
because of the lack of points of possible contact between the sensual
and the abstract, the living-dying and the dead-living. Her career
locates, gives meaning to, and condemns the social death, but it does
not do this at the level of a novel of manners. In the book as a novel
of manners, Emma is a fool, herself condemned by foolishness. It
does it at the level of myth, where she is a love-goddess.
In Richardson's
Clarissa Harlowe,
the death of the love-goddess
exalts to admiration and gives supernatural sanction to the social
abstractness and impotence. The love-goddess herself is, by a curious
inversion of imagination, not the sensual woman but the woman
immune to and irrelevant to sense. In the overthought of the book,
where Clarissa's will to purity and Lovelace's will to defilement are
hypostatized as in universal conflict, Lovelace appears to be an evil
divinity and an anti-social principle: this is in the overt "Puritan
myth" as such, which Richardson used to teach the "highest and most
important doctrines of Christianity" (as he stated his intention). In
the appearance of conflict,
Clarissa
affords a parallel with the ancient
love-stories, where two equal powers, instinct in the individual as
against the social organization, are pitted: here, daemonic sexual
desire, and the representative purity of marriageable daughters, the
market-bait of the financially consolidating bourgeois clan. But this
relationship of conflict between Lovelace and Clarissa is only one
center in a several-centered mythical construction; and even in the
"Puritan myth" deliberately employed by Richardson, the appearance
of a tragic equality of powers is misleading-a dramatic but undi–
gested Manichaean element in the Puritan theology; for the universe
is really a Harlowe-universe and
is
well loaded against Lovelace, as
is shown by Clarissa's apotheosis and the minutely accurate distribu–
tion of rewards and punishments. The center of mythological signifi–
cance that is pertinent to our subject lies in the underthought of the
book and is read in the constant bombardment of sexual imagery even
