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PARTISAN REVIEW
her own innocence; and with a majesty in her person and manner that
is natural to her; but which then shone out in all its glory!" What we
feel most strongly while she strikes villainy dumb is Clarissa's power,
her queen-like command in innocence as well as in desirability. She
enters the brothel precisely as does Marina in Shakespeare's
Pericles,
and like Marina she dominates men's minds by both her virtue and her
sexuality-for such a scene would be meaningless if the heroine failed
to
inspire the lust she overcomes.
Clarissa's virtue, then, provokes unreason in men like Lovelace.
But the idea goes further.
In
Archetypal Patterns in Poetry
Maud
Bodkin pointed out two archetypal expressions of women in literature,
sometimes located in the same character at differem moments in the
same work (Eve in
Paradise Lost,
who is both temptress and chaste
lady), sometimes shown separately (Artemis and Aphrodite in
Hippo–
lytus:
Beatrice and Francesca in
The Divine Comedy).
In
either case the
image of a woman takes a powerful hold on the male passions: "The
tyrannous grasp upon man's emotion possessed by the dynamic image
of woman in its aspect of cherishing, satisfying, exalting, adds to the
terror of its other aspects as enslaving, betraying," she writes. The
virgin forever being abducted in eighteenth-century fiction may be
understood in part as a disguised image of that irrational, passionate
woman who both enslaves and degrades. We have on ly to think of
Swift and Pope to recall the eighteenth-century contexts of this view of
woman, but we can also look past them.
In
Fielding's
Amelia,
for
example, the hero has been sent unjustly to prison:
A very pretty girl then advanced towards them, whose beauty Mr.
Booth cou ld not help admiring the moment he saw her; declaring, at
the same time, he thought she had great innocence in her counte–
nance. Robin son said she was committed thither as an idle and
disorderly person, and a common street-walker. As she past by Mr.
Booth, she damned his eyes, and discharged a volley of words, every
one of which was too indecent
to
be repeated.
The Tatler
is even more plainspoken:
The
Prude
and
Coquet
(as different as they appear in their Behav–
iour) are in Reality the same kind of Woman; The Motive of Action
in both is the Affectation of pleasing Men. They are Sisters of the
same Blood and Constitution, only one chuses a grave, the other a
light, Dress.
(We may also be reminded of that unsettling resemblance between
another set of polar opposites, criminals and cops, which sociologists