CLARISSA AND EMMA AS PHEDRE
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eye, a large number of associations are excluded that might operate
in an erotic context-as color-modulations, tactile impressions, nature–
sounds, etc. Clarissa's seductiveness is for the narcist, the voyeur, and
the sadist; she is the love-goddess of abstractionists and of a society
gone abstract. In her perfect exclusion from sense-life, she offers the
powerful ideality of the debile woman, thin and ever smart-shop.
She "only eat a little bread." She refuses toast and is induced to
drink a glass of water. Her diet is prescribed: water-gruel, weak
broths, a dish of tea with milk. She is "like a half-broken-stalked lily."
She wears white clothes only, whose dirt-resistance is set off by a
horrid garret. She is
ill
"in a white satin nightgown, ever elegant!"
After the rape, she gives all her clothes away, except for the suit with
the everlasting laundry-guarantee, and Lovelace says, "Some disap–
pointed fair ones would have hanged, some drowned themselves. My
beloved only revenges herself upon her clothes." Phedre finds her orna–
ments and her veils an encumbrance and a clumsy irrelevance:
"Que
ces vains ornements, que ces voiles me pesent!))
Knowing herself as
flesh consumed by sensual passion, she would tear off her clothes
because her moral honesty cannot tolerate that she should be disguised
to others. Emma Bovary's garments are an aesthetic system for the
refinement, elaboration, and enlargement of sense-life. Clarissa's are
a part of, and as abstract as her anatomy; they represent the maiden–
head entrusted to her by her father, who invested in six expensive
suits of it in anticipation of her marriage to Solrnes, who was going
to add some jewels; getting rid of the clothes is a ritualistic reenact–
ment of the rape.
The optical image in
Clarissa
does not delay in the field of sense,
even in the relatively abstract field of vision, but converts immediately
to sexual idea-but to the sexual idea not as sensuality but as open–
ing, tearing, cutting, stabbing, with its complement in the patience of
the rent tissue, the flowing liquid (feminine tears) , and the limp body.
Clarissa temptingly brandishes keys; Lovelace obtains the key, and
Clarissa absurdly says, "All my doors are fast, and nothing but the
key-hole open, and the key of late put into that . . . , " suggesting
the violent Picasso-like simplification of anatomy which is both her
own portrait and a symbolic projection of the action of the book as
it is endlessly repeated in detail. The dagger sinks constantly into
the heart in metaphor before the phallus does, and the love-death is
