Abstract

As an inquiry into the moral life of the individual in 18th-century society, Richardson's Clarissa reflects the novelist's engagement with a central topic in the ethical and political thought of the Enlightenment: the individual's pursuit of esteem, power, and even dominion over others. Moralists of the 17th and 18th centuries explored this particular structure of consciousness and experience, which I call a type of vanity, under such diverse headings as "pride," "the lust of praise," and amour-propre. Vanity was both a subject and a problem for the novel form which Richardson pioneered, because it originated in the same cultural epoch that gave rise to the novel--the development of bourgeois individualism. ;In the social world of the opening of Clarissa, Richardson shows how the envy and materialism of the Harlowe family and the aristocratic and masculine pride of the rakish villain Lovelace draw them into a sterile rivalry in which Clarissa functions as both a weapon and a prize. The novelist also probes the vanity that underlies the virtue of his moral heroine Clarissa; "proposed as an Exemplar," she too is ensnared in a profound dependence on the regard of others, and strives to prove her superiority both to her family and to Lovelace. ;Clarissa and Lovelace love each other, but they bear into their relationship opposed ideals of love that are equally rooted in vanity. The exemplar appropriates Richardson's model of a domestic heroism founded in an ideal love as a means to proving her own purity and moral supremacy. According to a degraded heroic code, the libertine regards the seduction of the paragon as a test of masculine valor. And so their love becomes a struggle for power. ;By presenting Clarissa's long dying as a purging of pride, Richardson tries to complete the perfection of his moral heroine. But the novelist's moral project--to reform society by Clarissa's example--rebounds on him; for as an exemplar, Clarissa remains dependent on the homage of other people, in her own world and in the world of Richardson's readers, on her deathbed and beyond