The early English novel, part 2: Clarissa, which was too long even in the abridged form

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Last week, class, we discussed how the English novel emerged from the murky soil of class, gender, and (gasp) sexuality, although you shouldn’t spend too much time on that image. I’m reasonably sure it’ll come apart. (If you weren’t taking notes, you can find the post here.) Among other things, I said the early novels depended on the intensity created by the collision of (a) society’s limits on sexuality and (b) the possibility of transgressing those limits. No limits, no transgression. No transgression, no thrill.

So let’s look at one of the novels of the period. You thought you’d get out of here without having to do that, didn’t you? No such luck. We’re going to drag ourselves through Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.

Why Clarissa? Because I had to read it in high school, and even though it was, mercifully, an abridged version it was still endless and until now I haven’t been able to redeem the time I lost to that book.

Your bad luck.

Irrelevant photo: a rhododendron

Clarissa tells the story of a virtuous young thing (VYT) sequestered by a louche older man (LOM) who threatens her virtue–repetitively and all because she strayed off the path and couldn’t tell the difference between Grandma and a wolf, the silly girl. It wasn’t entirely her fault—someone had set out diversion signs—but still, she took that first fatal step and it doesn’t matter whose fault it is: if it happened to her, and that moved her beyond redemption.

Admittedly, her parents (not her grandma, who as far as I can remember doesn’t appear in the story) have been unwise, insisting that she marry someone repellent. But they had to be or they’d never set the book in motion.

So: the sequestered VYT writes letters to her one and only friend (OOF) because letters are the social media of the day. Occasionally she tells LOM, “Wait, my quill just beeped,” which is enough to keep his hands off her for another hundred or so pages. The letters are the novel. VYT writes to OOF. OOF writes to VYT. LOM writes to his friend, clarifying his wickedness and VYT’s saintly stupidity.

It’s more than a little stilted, but hey, it was an early novel. Writers were still figuring out the form. Hell, I came along hundreds of years later and am writing what I hope will be my sixth novel and I’m still figuring out the form.

You want to know how the story ends, right? Clarissa loses her technical virtue (in other words, her virginity), which leads her to become even more genuinely virtuous, but she dies because how could a woman robbed of her technical virtue live to the last page? Decent society has no place for her, and decent women can’t survive outside of decent society. Decent authors kill them off. Decently.

I had to look up the ending. I not only didn’t remember it, I don’t remember much of what led up to it. What I did remember is that it all happened over and over, and in letters.

In hindsight, the idea that a woman’s virtue consisted of something more than an unnecessary bit of flesh was forward-looking. As was Richardson’s attitude toward money marriages. When I read it in high school, though, I was in possession of all the historical perspective of most teenagers–in other words, I didn’t get it–and his attitude toward women, sex, and morality offended (and bored) the hell out of me, even though this was back in the dark ages of the early 1960s, when we were supposed to accept absurd limits on women’s sexuality, even if we were past arranged marriages. I was one of those forward-thinking young people who was bored and offended before my time.

The book was a great hit when it was published, among other things because it gave young girls an example of how to write a letter if they were ever sequestered by an LOM who threatened their virtue.

The point, however, is that the earliest English novels balanced on a social tightrope. Whatever respectability they had–and it was pretty tenuous (see last week’s post)–depended on promoting conventional morality, while their readability depended on the thrill of transgressing it. Daniel Defoe wrote rogues who rollicked along sinfully for pages and pages only to find remorse and respectability by the end of the tale, at which point they became too dull for the book to go on. And Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones caroused his way across many a page before finding a way back into society and family because a man’s virtue didn’t depend on a disposable bit of flesh or a spotless past.

I’m sure you can still find people who’ll swear the culture’s been going downhill ever since the novel came along, but (or maybe that should be because) it opened up a space where women could discover themselves, and crucially women did this not only as readers but–and this was shockingly new–as writers.

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I’m looking for topic suggestions, especially for odd corners of English history or culture that might be interesting to explore. I can’t promise to take them–some topics just don’t work, however promising they look at first–but I’d love to hear from you.

29 thoughts on “The early English novel, part 2: Clarissa, which was too long even in the abridged form”

  1. How about looking at how we appointed a ‘Witchfinder General'(self appointed’) and how we decided just which wise women were witches with familiars and which were harmless old ladies with cats who used herbal remedies?You could mention the fun days out they had wearing a scold’s bridle and how the ducking stool could prove their innocence.

    Huge Hugs

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    • I can’t say I’d recommend it, but then I read it as a kid because I had to and that’s not the best way to approach a book. I have a hunch that teenagers should be told they can’t read certain classics until they’re at least 20. That way either they’ll run right out and read them or they’ll wait and approach them with a better sense of the world they were written in.

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      • What wonderful tips you suggested, Ellen! Encourage young people to read the classics by telling them that they can only do so as adults.
        I think curiosity would yield great results👍
        Thank you so much for your lovely reply

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  3. Clarissa ? Oh dear. Modern in form, because one of – if not “the” ? – first Briefroman, before Werther, Sara Sampson, Liasons Dangereuses. Clarissa gets raped, but refuses to opt for marriage etc, starves herself, victory of virtue etcetc. Sara Sampson refuses to leave the convention of christian marriage etc while she is in an illicit relation. No wench tossing, sorry.

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    • Oh, well, it fits well enough with our image of the time–fallen woman driven out into the snow etc. Yes, we oversimplify, but what the hell.

      I hated the book. I can still work out a good amount of residual hatred for it. I wonder who thought it was a good book to assign a bunch of teenagers.

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  5. Despite being an English major (and because of a transfer of universities I ended up with 86 hours of English/American lit when the major required abut 55) I never read this. As high school sophomores we read “Great Expectations” which is sufficiently – weird . But it seems (at least over here) curriculum is likely to have only gotten weirder. (I was a senior when To Kill a Mockingbird was published, but certainly not before Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn.)

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    • My brother’s class read–oh, hell, what’s the novel about the weaver who adopts and raises the little girl? He complained all the way through. My class read something else instead and I didn’t read whatever it is until I was in my thirties, by which time I was ready to think, Wow, what a novel. That’s the origin of my theory that kids should be told they mustn’t read the classics until they’re in their twenties or older. I’m grateful not to be in charge of deciding what high school English classes should read. I’d shatter. Half of me thinks, Hey, anything that makes them think and convinces them that they’ll get something out of reading is good, and the other half thinks they should maybe know some of the classics are at least out there, lurking in the weeds and possibly even waiting to be read.

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      • I once had a discussion about this with someone in Spain. It’s the same everywhere. Spanish kids are forced to read Don Quixote at school. Italian kids are forced to read Dante’s Inferno. We were forced to read Shakespeare and Dickens. I’m not sure why people think it’s a good idea – it put me right off Shakespeare!

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        • I actually understand the reasoning behind it: this is your culture and you should learn something about it. The riches of the language are at your fingertips. This will expand your mind. Etc. And I do know a person or two who that worked for. I still think it’s counterproductive.I wonder what English classes (or Spanish or Italian or whatever) would be like if kids had a choice of books to read and then write something interesting about.

          Oh, hell, the educational system being what it is, they’d find a way to mangle that (she said cynically).

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  7. I once attempted to read this massive tome many years ago, I can remember nothing about it except the painting on the front of the book (nice lady with big C18th hair) and that I gave up on it. I feel sorry that you had to read it for your studies.

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  8. Perhaps you could explain why so many (non-Brits) think that Yorkshire was once part of Scotland when it’s not even on the border. I thought it was just a geographical error of mine until I looked it up on Google to discover there are a lot of us out there

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