Why Lovelace Must Die

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by McGirr, Elaine

My divine Clarissa has puzzled me, and bent me out of my play.

I

Samuel Richardson designed, composed and published Clarissa in the shadow of the failed 1745 Jacobite uprising; the fate of his villain, Lovelace, is intricately connected to the fortunes of the Jacobite prince. Charles Edward Stuart does not haunt the margins of Clarissa as he does Tom Jones, but the novel, like Fielding's, is designed to rout the Young Pretender. Clarissa works more allusively than Tom Jones, casting the struggle between Stuart pretensions and the Georgian establishment in terms of rival cultural productions rather than rivals: Richardson pits the theater against the novel, Lovelace versus Clarissa. Rather than focusing narrowly on gender, I argue that Clarissa's crisis can be best expressed in terms of genre, as the mid-eighteenth century found the Georgian novel struggling for legitimacy, demanding the cultural respect and ideological power the Restoration had accorded to the theater. This generic tension means that "play" becomes an immensely overfreighted term in Richardson's text: it denotes Lovelace's amorous intentions, his "sexual play"; gambling, or "deep play"; and his plot against the entire Harlowe family, which he styles the "playing out" of his revenge. "Play" also and primarily means drama. The novel's biggest "play" is the Restoration drama Lovelace has been composing since his character's introduction, for Lovelace embodies an ideologically and aesthetically corrupt genre; he is a product of the heroic mode that Stuart apologists like John Dryden used to celebrate absolutism and Stuart Restoration. The surprising early successes of the recent Jacobite rebellion, coupled with the personal charisma of "Bonnie Prince Charlie," who was still at large, demonstrated the continued appeal of the Stuart aesthetic and ideology.1 The Georgian establishment reacted to the events of 1745-46 by systematically extirpating every last vestige of Jacobitism. Clarissa is part of that reaction.

Richardson's novels, like his conduct manuals, are overtly concerned with the improvement of morals and manners. But unlike the Society for the Reformation of Manners and other, similar, eighteenth-century reform movements, Richardson directs his attention to words rather than deeds. The Familiar Letters teach his possibly unlettered, definitely uneloquent readers how best to express themselves in a variety of social situations. Richardson believes that the right words will inspire correct conduct. His novels, like the Familiar Letters, provide readers with the right language for Georgian London and thereby model how one should behave in the mid-eighteenth century. They also demonstrate the performative power of language, from Pamela's journal's surprising effect on Mr. B.'s character to the power of Sir Charles Grandison's admonitory letters to correct congenital character flaws. The novelist's rejection of the theater and the heroic mode therefore becomes the cornerstone of his reformation project, for Richardson believed that the unnatural language of the theater's heroic mode produced unnatural actions, both onstage and off. Hyperbole and rant, double entendre and bawdy songs inflamed the senses and encouraged (Jacobite) rebellion. Even beyond its incendiary nature, stage language celebrated an aesthetic and ideology at odds with mid-eighteenth-century social reality.

While the Hanoverian Succession had erased the last vestiges of the culture of Stuart rule, the Georgian stage was still reenacting the Restoration, even though the recent rebellion had made the idea of a second Stuart Restoration an immediate and real threat. Dryden's heroic celebrations of the Stuart monarchy were still in the standard repertory, although they were somewhat counterbalanced by the slough of farces and parodies of the Jacobite myth produced during the 1740s.2 By exposing the aesthetic and ideological inadequacies of Restoration heroic drama, Richardson brings the genre, its characters, and the king and culture it supported, into question.

Because Richardson, as both novelist and moralist, wanted to destroy the Restoration stage and his contemporaries' taste for its productions, Lovelace could not be rehabilitated-à la Pamela's Mr. B.-but must be made to pay for his crimes with his life.3 Lovelace the dramatist functions as the novelist's scapegoat for all the excesses and evils of the stage, particularly those of the heroic, as delineated by the Whig and anti-Jacobite propagandists of the preceding sixty years. Having created this effigy, the novelist then ritually sacrifices his rival author, clearing the stage for Clarissa's sublime tragedy and novel heroism. Thus, Clarissa enacts the succession from Stuart theatrics to the Georgian novel. The elevated language of heroic drama and dramatic novels like Congreve's Incognita (1691) promoted and upheld a courtly Restoration ethos; conversely, the natural and idiomatic language of Richardson's novels places them squarely in Georgian London. Richardson combats the mythic sweep of Dryden's heroic spectaculars with the minutia of reported speech and dress: his is the epic of the everyday.