CROSSING BORDERS IN SAMUEL RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA; OR, THE "LADDER OF DEPENDANCE" REVISITED

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2003 by Dachez, Hélène

Although the crossing of social barriers is not of paramount importance in Clarissa, the text is a borderline novel, wherein Richardson revisits and displaces Fielding's "Ladder of Dépendance" as he insists on spatial, emotional, psychological, and literary borders that the characters strive or refuse to cross in order to become independent of others or to make others dependent upon them. The binarity at the core of Clarissa-opening and closing, imprisonment and escape, success and failure, distance and closeness-derives from its epistolary form. However, through these motifs, Richardson reveals the extent to which he plays with conventions and crosses literary thresholds, becoming independent of them and thereby creating paradoxical characters whose only real meeting space is language and who can be ranked in no pre-established categories.

Université de Toulouse II, Le Mirail, France

NOTES

1 The rake uses the same image on page 418 when he describes himself as "the self-circumscribed tyrant, [who] winds round and round the poor insect ... and when so fully secure that it can neither move leg nor wing, suspends it, as if for a spectacle to be exulted over."

2 "L'hésitation devant la ville est une hésitation devant la femme ... Londres devient Clarissa, que Lovelace ne peut pénétrer (c'est-à-dire comprendre et posséder)." I have provided all English translations within the text.

3 "Le viol est l'effet d'une brutalité imposée par les circonstances, encouragée par la Sinclair et par son entourage, que ne prépare aucunement la finesse extrême des calculs patients du chasseur."

4 "Le violeur se met hors les lois, hors du groupe, hors de lui-même. Avec sa victime, il se trouve rejeté de toute symbolique consensuelle."

5 One should not forget that one of the archaic meanings of "to border" is "to keep within bounds," "to confine" (see definitions given in the SOED).

6 As on page 846, the border and the possibility of crossing it are expressed through the image of the "pivot" on which the characters' fates hinge and which may open up new grounds to them.

7 Other examples are to be found on pages 528 and 595.

8 "... instants de demi-bonheur. Ce que ce roman suggère peut-être de plus poignant, c'est le sentiment d'une idylle viable et assassinée."

9 "... d'une part l'isolement du rêve, son exclusion entière de la vie réelle et vraie, d'autre part l'empiétement constant de l'un sur l'autre, la constante dépendance entre l'un et l'autre."

10 A parallel may be drawn between that dream, in which liminality looms large, and Henry Fuseli's painting The Nightmare (1782), which depicts a horse's head emerging through a curtain surrounding the room in which a naked woman lies stretched out and asleep, penetrating the sleeper's intimacy in a metaphorical rape. The Nightmare cannot but remind the reader of Lovelace's horse, ironically doomed to remain on the margin. See Jean Starobinski's excellent commentary on the painting in "La Vision de la dormeuse."

11 The examples are numerous: "above him" (1301); "above fortune and above you" (796); "how the God within her exalted her, not only above me, but above herself" (853); "my soul is above thee, man" (646).