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

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

Richardson qualifies Lovelace's libertinism and Clarissa's perfection, thereby discarding Manichaeanism.13 Both vice and virtue lie at the heart of Lovelace's actions. Anna explains that his libertinism should be traced back to the thwarting of his initial purity. His unrequited love led him to cross geographical borders and transgress moral barriers because "the lady really used him ill... it affected him so much at the time that he was forced to travel upon it; and, to drive her out of his heart, ran into courses which he had ingenuity enough himself to condemn" (247). He often confesses to Belford how painful his pangs of consciousness are (522, 535, 569). Far from being an arrant rake, he is a split character who complains of "such a war in my mind ... gratitude, and admiration of the excellent creature before me, combating with villainous habit" (651).

Similarly, Clarissa is not perfectly virtuous. On top of never confessing her love openly, she cannot really hide that her fear of meeting Lovelace is but a thin cloak covering her fear of herself and her passion (266). Brigitte Glaser interprets Clarissa's dread and disgust of Mrs. Sinclair for that very reason-the woman being what the heroine could become were she to go through the looking-glass: "in her Clarissa has seen her counter-image and recognized it as part of herself, as the shape and the existence into which she would gradually be driven, were death not to take her" (51). Arabella may therefore not be wrong when she describes her sister as "a two-faced girl" (195), able to be alternately "so silly and so wise, so young and so old, so gentle and so obstinate, so meek and so violent" (230). Glaser aptly sums up Richardson's paradoxical treatment of his protagonists: "neither follows consistently the codes of conduct to which he or she supposedly adheres but rather each occasionally enters the territory of the other" (107), thereby revealing how much they depend on each other and how much they are independent of tradition.14

Such crossing of borders is to be linked to the closeness Richardson creates between his characters, which is revealed through repetition. When Clarissa compares her compunctions to having "a dagger in my heart" (380), she foreshadows the episode in which she bares her bosom to Lovelace and entreats him to "let thy pointed mercy enter" (913), as well as the penknife scene, when his "heart [is] pierced as with an hundred daggers" (951). Similarly, the rake boasts, "I trod the air, and hardly thought myself a mortal" (399)-words that announce his description of Clarissa, who "seemed to tread air" (949). The characters also share the same (metaphorical) language. Playing with onomastics, Lovelace stresses Clarissa's dependence on him and calls her "a lady whom once I had bound to me in the silken cords of love" (1144), and she speaks of herself as "one of those designed to be drawn by the silken cords of love" (1375).

Border crossings that hint at the characters' dependence on each other extend to Richardson's confounding of the distinction between the sexes, although he offers no cross-dressing in Clarissa (unlike in Pamela). Arabella is so shocked by Clarissa's obduracy that she exclaims "she has ... perhaps, a soul of the other sex in a body of ours" (309-10). As for Lovelace, he is endowed with feminine characteristics: "[I] am of the true Lady-make" (648), he says, offering to "tear [his heart] out in her presence and throw it at hers, that she may see how much more tender than her own that organ is" (1184). Richardson reaches the apex of invasion through ventriloquism when, in a process that may be interpreted as the reverse of the rape, Lovelace exclaims that his victim speaks through him: "she has a friend here (clasping my hand on my breast) that pleads for her with ... irresistible eloquence" (837)-the ultimate form of dependence, crossing, and invasion, since through this process, Richardson suggests that Clarissa has invaded Lovelace's body and mind so that he is no longer in control of his thoughts or of his spoken or written words. Shortly afterwards, using the pronoun "she" to talk of both his own conscience and Clarissa, he complains that "she had stolen my pen ... and thus she wrote with it, in a hand exactly like my own" (848). The rake ends up on the verge of madness, completely obsessed with and metaphorically invaded by Clarissa, as well as dispossessed of himself.