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COPYRIGHT 2005 University of North Texas
In its barest narrative terms, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747-1748) is a novel in letters about bow a notorious libertine kidnaps and rapes a young woman to seek revenge on her family and test her virtue. The young woman, exceptional in almost every regard from the transcendental to the mundane--in beauty, writing, wit, needlework, French, housekeeping, chastity and worship of God--unknowingly walks into the charming libertine's schemes by writing to him in an attempt to reform him, and rebelling against her parents, who want her to marry someone else. Despite her subsequent "fall," the loss of her virginity, she recovers her virtuous identity through starving herself and thus wasting the body that has been defiled against her will. In death, able to "return to her native skies," she is more glorious than ever. Throughout this tale, raised to epic proportions in its development of intrigue over that eighteenth-century obsession female virtue--the status of Clarissa's body remains central, and to the very end, elusive. Within this elusive rendition, the details of such body parts as her heart and hymen become all-important not only to the libertine character, but also, to the novel's construction of femininity.
According to recent histories of sexuality and medicine, we owe our understanding of the sexed body--the idea that a female body constitutes a separate category from a male body--to the eighteenth century (Laqueur, Making Sex and The Making of the Modern Body, and Schiebinger). The eighteenth century is also more traditionally credited for the invention of the novel. In frequently citing Richardson's earlier work Pamela (1740) as the first English novel, standard literary history implicates the novel's beginnings in a male construction of sexual difference and female subjectivity. (1) Presenting the point of view of a servant as she resists her rakish employer's advances, Pamela enforces an emerging sexual ideology that makes ideal femininity contingent on a woman's chastity. In Clarissa, Richardson once again writes a narrative that defines female subjectivity in relation to the body. In this case, however, by depicting and collaborating with Lovelace's male subjectivity in order to help repesent Clarissa's, Richardson renders a more modern construction of sexuality, closer to our own conception of gender systems. Fetishism, the system I propose he animates, enables us to understand the sexually constructivist properties of the novel of sensibility, and in turn, the fictional properties of the fetishized body part.
Within the past decade, several feminist theorists have been preoccupied with discussing fetishism as a paradigm for understanding how female subjectivity evolves as the object of an obsessive male "I"/eye. Indeed, as one theorist notes, fetishism "may be the most apt figure for sexual difference in the [19]90s" (McCallum 24). While nineteenth-century French literature critics such as Naomi Schor and Emily Apter have demonstrated fetishism's roots in the nineteenth-century novel, no one as yet has ventured into our debt to the eighteenth century, though Apter herself has indicated that many of the nineteenth century's "gender cliches" that shaped early psychoanalysis come from a nostalgia for "the extremity-enhanced body of the eighteenth-century woman" and a fascination with her as "fiction, fixture, and even fetish of the feminine" (84, 66-67). In what follows I will reread Clariss--perhaps the preeminent eighteenth-century text with an "exemplary" female character--in terms of more current theories of fetishism. By doing so, I will show that eighteenth century sensibility fosters some of fetishism's most important features, especially through the "perverting" influences of Lovelace's libertinism. I will also show that Richardson apprehends and stresses aspects of fetishism that often disappear from its contemporary accounts. More than simply foregrounding the fictitiousness of the body part, Richardson's novel of sensibility underscores the affective and moral significance of fetishism by revealing the body part as a substitute for love and virtue. Hence in their affective and profoundly imaginative approaches to body parts, Richardson's domestic novel of sensibility and Freud's theory of fetishism share the tendency to regard the female body as the operative and original medium for bracing the tension between the ideal and the real, the apparent and the actual.
The Libertine and the Angel: The Body/Soul Context and "Realist" Narrative
My comparison of fetishism and sensibility hinges on the premise they immediately share, that the body can exhibit features of a person's subjectivity such as emotions, desire, or sexual identity. While sensibility is a moral system for how one sympathizes with an other's feelings, and fetishism is a psychoanalytic paradigm for how one transmutes anxiety over an other's anatomical lack into a sexual perversion, each places the utmost importance on the way their responses become configured in terms of body parts, or objects closely related to those parts. In short, both fetishism and sensibility make exquisitely physical a psychological response. For example--each traditionally inscribed as male subjects in their respective literatures--the man of sensibility may become transported by the sight of a teardrop that reinforces his own inner sensitivity, while the fetishist becomes titillated by a foot, hand, or braid of hair that, for some reason, recalls an imaginary penis that corroborates his sense of empowerment. Before exploring the mechanisms of fetishism and sensibility in more detail, and how they work throughout Clarissa, I would like to point out that in both these examples, fetishism and sensibility are grounded in the philosophical opposition between body and mind. Extremely suggestive, the opposition produces numerous binary pairs that inform the novel's narrative development: inside and outside, absence and presence, self and other, abstract and material, public and private. Throughout, Clarissa stages these tensions deriving from the body/mind opposition by defining Clarissa in terms of her "real" and "ideal" features.
The sexual stereotypes Lovelace and Clarissa exemplify--libertine and angel--most assertively enact the opposition between body and mind (or "soul" in view of Clarissa's Christian beliefs). Lovelace, as sensual libertine, in claiming "the haughty beauty will not refuse me, when her pride of being corporeally inviolate is brought down," aims to disrupt Clarissa's integrity and prove his power by transforming her body from chaste to sexualized, while Clarissa, as ethereal angel, resists and ultimately proves that the soul can transcend the body even when violated (Clarissa 879). In representing opposing sides of the classic mind/body dualism, Clarissa and Lovelace offer different interpretations of what makes a woman a woman.
In Clarissa, we see a woman who becomes an icon for virtuous femininity, despite--and indeed, through--her disturbing need to validate her virtue by dying. Writing the story in such a way that she fulfills her own aims precisely, Richardson secures Clarissa's status as an angelic female through establishing her spiritual transcendence. In other words, her idealizations seem to become reality for her almost too resolutely--and paradoxically, this occurs through her project of becoming incorporeal. Lovelace, on the other hand, working from the viewpoint that the body and all things apprehended through the senses can determine sexual identity, incites more modern questions about the epistemology and representation of sexed subjectivity. By framing his abduction of Clarissa as a quest "to know if she be really angel or woman" (Clarissa 492), he must not only test her virtue, but also, prove that she even has a body through testing the most telling indicators of desire--her heart and hymen. In this quest, we may uncover the paradoxes in eighteenth-century sexual constructions, as well as the inherent collaboration between Lovelace as a libertine character who strives to create femininity according to his own model and Richardson as a moralizing author who struggles to engender the finest example of femininity. These attempts at fabrication encounter resistance in the contradictions produced by the body/soul divide, suggesting that the real question in Clarissa is not so much about virtuousness, but about virtuality. How can a woman, configured as an "angel," have a sexed and "real" body and still represent ideal virtue? Indeed, if we view an exemplar as an ideal--implictly unattainable, implicitly a fantasy--then how can Clarissa be represented at all?
Many of the answers, for both Richardson and Lovelace, lie in parts. Though Richardson treats the mind/body divide as the main ground for Clarissa's and Lovelace's struggle, he registers a need to go beyond this basic dichotomy into a further fragmentation of subjectivity in order to make a more complex and thus truer impression of reality. As he writes in his preface, he hopes to produce a persuasive and vivid object lesson for young girls and their parents by narrating Clarissa's experiences. He relies on a technique--"writing to the moment"--that involves recording the minute details of daily consciousness, capturing private thoughts and sentiments as well as outward actions, or "instantaneous descriptions and reflections" (Clarissa 35). Already well-known for his "keyhole view of life" in his earlier novel, where he "analyses patiently the feelings of thoughts of Pamela" and "takes a feminine interest in her round-eared caps and her mittens," Richardson's agenda of "writing to the moment" was meant to produce a "reading to the moment" in which readers would identify with and feel for Clarissa's harrowing experiences (Birkhead 102). Correspondingly, Lovelace spies repeatedly on Clarissa and writes to his friend Belford, "I know thou likest this lively present-tense manner, as it is one of my particular" (Clarissa 882). Thus working to engender a close identification between character and reader (and himself identifying inadvertently with his voyeuristic male villain) so that a successful education in female virtue and suffering may take place, Richardson turns to a mode of fiction-making that depends on the "realness" of its reality. In doing so, he forms the foundation for what became known as an ingeniously realistic mode of narrative, giving rise to a modern form of literature in which embodying the details of personal experience and psychology plays an important role in reconstructing consciousness.
"I Know My Own Heart": The Sensible Body
In eighteenth-century social life, sensibility produced the following moral equation: the more acute one's sensory responses--tears, blushes, quiverings or fainting--to external stimuli such as the spectacle of...
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