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have recently studied.) In a period when old myths are breaking down,
it often happens that an archetypal character, obeying a kind of
survival instinct, takes on its opposite role. The eighteenth century is
emphatically such a period of transition; and there is clearly a way in
which Clarissa, like other virginal figures, suggests her opposite,
releasing a maddening unreason in an already unreasoning male. At
one point, moreover, she asks Lovelace to send her to a private
madhouse, calling it ironically a "happy refuge" from his passion, but
when we recall the association of madhouses and cruel, erotic usings,
we may discern a further, unconscious irony in her request. "You may
observe," Johnson says, "that there is always something Clarissa
prefers to truth."
There is a second way, however, in which Clarissa can be seen
mythologically. Her incarceration can be universalized into that
ancient, still terrifying story of the goddess Persephone and g loomy
Dis, the ravishing abductor who carries her down into dismal confine–
ment in the very kingdom of death. (Marina is another such Perse–
phone.) And since myths are so often stories about the human mind
itself as well as other matters, the internalizing application of the plot
would have been well understood by the eighteenth century: a view of
the human personality in which reason and unreason rock back and
forth in fierce struggle, a struggle whose terms are sexuality and death
and whose boundaries are the rough, inflexible walls of some confin–
ing cell : prison or madhouse or coffin.
In the first half of the eighteenth century the primary meaning of
the incarceration that occurs over and over in fiction is restraint.
Unbalancing, socially destructive passions like greed or lust are simply
pressed into submission by moral and social institutions, by the
madhouse and the prison. In the later eighteenth century the primary
meaning of incarceration becomes, not restraint, but burial, a meaning
already implied in the Persephone myth. The dungeons in these houses
are Tartarus, the deepest recesses of the human mind in which
unreason still clings to life. Toward the conclusion of M. G. Lewis's
The Monk
the hero Lorenzo, searching through subterranean passages,
stumbles upon the following:
in a corner of this loathsome abode, a creature stretched upon a bed
of straw, so wretched, so emaciated, so pale, that he doubted
to
think
her woman. She was half naked: her long dishevelled hair fell in
disorder over her face, and almost entirely concealed it. One wasted
arm hung listless upon a taltered rug, which covered her convulsed
and shivering limbs: the other was wrapped round a small bundle,
and held it closely to her bosom.
