Why Lovelace Must Die

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

Unlike his other two epistolary novels, Clarissa does not have an authoritative narrative voice like Pamela's in Pamela or Harriet Byron's in Sir Charles Grandison to provide the "normative" lens through which readers are to interpret events.8 Instead, the plot is fractured and refracted through both Clarissa's and Lovelace's perspectives as they explain and interpret the novel's events. Clarissa's double discourse-these separate and competing correspondences-can and has been read dialeclically.9 Following this model, I argue that it is only through the interplay of these antithetical styles that Clarissa can achieve its sublime tragic voice; only in their violation can the novel discover its boundaries. However, it may be less anachronistic to think of the novel's doubled construction as a response to split-plot tragicomedy: Lovelace's letters tell the "low" plot and Clarissa's the "high." Of course, unlike tragicomedies, which squeeze two different stories onto one stage, in Clarissa, both series of letters are about the same events, told in competing, and ultimately incompatible, voices. Instead of confirming one another and establishing harmony-the goal of tragicomedy-the two languages in Clarissa engender discord and death; Richardson uses the alternating structure of tragicomedy to prove the fundamental unsoundness of "mixed" plots and characters. The complete incompatibility of Clarissa's and Lovelace's languages ensures a to-the-death struggle. It is not enough for Lovelace to possess Clarissa, he must silence her, too: he wants the novel to be as monologic as heroic drama. But silencing Clarissa proves impossible. Instead of destroying her, Lovelace's perpetrated villainies ironically give Clarissa's voice strength and authority-she even continues to "speak" long after her death. Lovelace, on the other hand, begins to lose control of both his narrative and voice once he is "beaten out of his play." While his final words-LET THIS EXPIATE!- reverberate through the novel's conclusion, they are transcribed for us by Lovelace's French valet, debasing Lovelace's would-be sublimity of sentiment by emphasizing the foreignness and artificiality of his language. Richardson makes a point of stripping the heroic of its nobility of subject and sentiment; he represents the Restoration's aesthetic as both base and foreign.

Lovelace never fits comfortably or well in the domestic-novel. Readers spend roughly one hundred and fifty pages at the beginning of the novel at home with Clarissa, imbibing her natural, conversational, familiar epistolary voice. Even in Clarissa's straightforward description of the strange man who has put Harlowe Place into such an uproar, Lovelace acts like a character straight off the stage. He blusters, intrigues, fights, and will even speak in rhyme if the situation seems to warrant. His first letter-the novel's thirty-first-cements our opinion of Lovelace's theatricality and anachronism.10 Lovelace does not write familiar letters. His correspondence is in an affected "Roman style" with stilted and archaized diction; his narrative letters, even reported speech, are full of archaisms like "thee," "varlet," and "durst." Unlike Clarissa's "to the moment" literal transcriptions, Lovelace's letters advertise their artificiality, their literariness. In other words, Clarissa's language mirrors the novel's verisimilitude, while Lovelace's repeats the figures of fiction's past. But even beyond the forced diction, and beyond Lovelace's many admissions that he invents both sides of reported speeches and considers dialogue a dramatic exercise, the sheer number of quotations and allusions Lovelace drops into his correspondence suggests the staged quality of his writing.