MAX BYRD
Behold her then, spreading the whole tumbled bed with her huge
quaggy carcase; Her mill-post arms held up; her broad hands
clenched with violence; her big eyes, goggling and flaming-red as we
may suppose those of a salamander; her matted griesly hair, made
irreverend by her wickedness (her clouted head-dress being half off)
spread about her fat ears and brawny neck; her livid lips parched, and
working violently; her broad chin in convulsive motion; her wide
mouth, by reason of the contradiction of her forehead (which seemed
to
be half-lost in its own frightful furrows) splitting her face, as it
were into twO parts; and her huge tongue hideously rolling in it;
heaving, puffing, as if for breath; her bellows-shaped and various–
coloured breasts ascending by turns
to
her chin, and descending out
of sight, with the violence of her gaspings.
271
The grotesque, "convulsive" sexual rhythms of Mrs. Sinclair's death
here seem part of the narrator's furious moral perception of her, and
his (and our) condemnation mounts in fury as we grow closer, urging
us to anger almost out of control.
'
Clarissa
is structured by oppositions, as commentators have long
understood, by clashes between the virgin and her violator, for exam–
ple, between the aristocracy and the middle-class, between men and
women. From this point of view Mrs. Sinclair's death simply serves
Richardson's purpose of blackening her character in unsubtle contrast
with Clarissa. But at some disturbing level, I think, the opposition
begins to dissolve. Clarissa's and Mrs. Sinclair's hysterical entrapment
in the same prison-like brothel and the sexual connotations of their
deaths actually suggest an identification between them.
In
those angry
descriptions of women which Richardson criticizes, Swift intended to
expose the nature of female deceit and
to
make us hate it, but the
woman so flayed need not be a whore. Both Swift and Richardson
speak for an age intensely distrustful of unreason, especially distrustful
of its ancient "vessel," woman. And although Mrs. Sinclair or an
amorous female Yahoo clearly embodies unreason for any audience, it
is the great paradox of Richardson's novel that the virginal Clarissa,
who meets the same fate of imprisonment and punishment, is just as
certainly linked to unreason. She does not embody unreason in herself,
but she is the cause of it in others. We see her special, subconscious
connection with unreason strikingly in
he~
hold over Lovelace's
imagina tion : she charms, she bewitches, and she drives him, he claims,
to the insanity of rape. And when he has drugged and raped Clarissa
and finally conquered, she then reasserts herself.
In
one of the finest
scenes of the novel, as Lovelace sits drinking among his whores, the
door flies suddenly open and she enters triumphantly, "confiding in
