824
PARTISAN REVIEW
mystery (death), and authority (divinity). And as she says, "Get
thee behind me," she takes ravenously all he gives, for her immensely
important duty as culture-heroine is to experience the most extreme
sexual violence and to remain inviolate, to die for all women through
the sexual assault but to die doubly in the traditional punning sense,
and to become divine for all fathers of daughters and brothers of
sisters as the martyr of a tribal organization in which there must
be no love (remember what happened to Clary Harlowe!). She
screams when she sees Lovelace in the garden, "A man!" "Ah, this
man, my dear!" she exclaims to Miss Howe. "The man, my dear,
looked quite ugly!" she tells her friend, after a predatory approach
on Lovelace's part, and she complains of his "savage kiss" reddening
her hand. Miss Howe confirms her notion of men: they are a "vile
race of reptiles." Miss Howe would not be married to "any man
breathing whom I at present know." Somewhere Joseph Conrad
speaks of "the fascination of the abomination," and the phrase applies
nicely to Lovelace. He is a woman's dream, the infantile imago of
the male, the appealing figure of the sex-murderer (he complacently
enumerates his mistresses who have died in childbirth), and he
is
all
wit, all charm-the aristocrat. Even Miss Howe (whom he schemes,
in fantasy, to abduct, along with her mother, by taking them on board
ship, there to seduce them both), after being present at a party where
Lovelace has fluttered the dove-cotes, confesses that she has begun to
see him in her dreams. With fairy-tale logic, Richardson has the beef–
faced older sister, Arabella, wish on Clarissa that she may be seen a
diseased Cressid begging along London streets- destiny envied by
all Cinderella's sisters, along with captivity in a brothel-, and the
surly brother, over-acting the paternal rapacity, engage Lovelace in
a duel and confine his sister on bread and water.
Because the passion which is the subject of the novel is non–
sensual, the field of sensibility is restricted to what can be
seen.
This
restriction might appear to be an exigency of the letter-vehicle, for
Clarissa can see herself only in mirrors, and others have to write of her
as they see her. But the optical tactic works through devices especially
emphatic of the seen; the image is usually framed, by mirror, key-hole,
or door-frame (the most extreme case in point is the episode of the
rape itself, when the door of the room is left open and "female figures
flit" across it, watching); and by the distancing and framing for the
