826
PARTISAN REVIEW
preparatively and afterwards reminiscently imitated in fainting-fits,
cutting of laces, and the scenting of linen with hartshorn. In the
fire-scene, with "nothing on but an under petticoat, her lovely bosom
half open," Clarissa picks up a "sharp-pointed scissors" and makes as
if to stab herself. Again, having disordered her headdress and tom her
neck-ruffles, she takes a penknife; "holding the pointed knife to her
heaving bosom," she says, "Approach me, Lovelace ... I dare die."
And again, she implores him to do away with her, "baring, with still
more frantic violence, part of her enchanting neck,-Here, here,
said the soul-harrowing beauty, let thy pointed mercy enter!" Love–
lace, using decent censorship, does it with drugs. After her death, he
makes the final ritual necrophiliac gesture: he wants to "open" her,
take out her heart.
The scene in the death-room is an astonishing one. The room is
crowded with people, all pressing around the dying woman to obtain
her blessing and receive some portion of her
mana.
The mourning is
as public as possible; every sigh, every groan, every tear is recorded.
one is given to understand that nothing could be a greater social good
than Clarissa's death, nothing could be more enjoyable than to watch
her in her charmingly performed death-throes, nothing a greater priv–
ilege than to be present at this festival of death and to sniffle in the
common orgy. The
pieta
is purely feminine (Clarissa insists in her
will that only members of her own sex touch her body), the appro–
priate dues of women to that woman who has miraculously managed
to eat her cake and keep it. Though absurd, Clarissa has an archetypal
greatness and a secret, underhanded, double-dealing association with
the seeds of things, for she takes upon herself a social dream: the
sterilization of instinct, the supremacy of the "Father," the consolida–
tion of society in abstraction, the cult of death; and while, through
her, the systematic inhibitions of a culture are gratefully removed, and
the forbidden allowed mysterious indulgence, at the same time she
gives supernatural sanction to those inhibitions, confirming them as
the order of the universe, .and provides a whipping-post for the in–
dulgence. Her classic significance as love-goddess lies in the fact that
she dies to promote not fertility but sterility, and her myth
is
still
vigorous in her two epigones, the ghost-woman of
Vogue--debile,
expensive, a smoke of clothes without skeletal support-and the many–
breasted woman of
True Confessions
and
True Detective Stories,
in
