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.