One Great Family: Domestic Relationships in Samuel Richardson's Novels. Simone Höhn

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СКАЧАТЬ However, this opens the possibility of the body turning traitor, betraying parts of the mind which reason would have remain hidden – Lovelace acts out this aspect when he describes to Belford his ‘murder’ of his embodied conscience, which has so frequently ‘betrayed’ him into tears while confronting Clarissa (848). Moreover, if body and mind are connected, the former can turn traitor in another sense, by infesting the soul with the taint of physical desire.

      The idea that the body can attest to the reality of emotion can be found in writers very far from Richardson’s outlook. Bernard MandevilleMandeville, Bernard, for example, notoriously argues in his Fable of the Bees that women’s blushing is a public reaction, which will not occur when they are alone: “[L]et them talk as much Bawdy as they please in the Room next to the same Virtuous Young Woman, where she is sure that she is undiscover’d, and she will hear, if not hearken to it, without blushing at all, because then she looks upon herself as no Party concern’d” (65).1 Blushing is thus not a sign of wounded modesty, but of shame, caused by a fear that the woman’s innermost immodest thoughts have been guessed at. Mandeville’s description of the young woman highlights the treacherousness of physical reaction: the blush, bodily proof of real emotion, can be misread. Moreover, as in a conjuror’s trick, it signifies both ‘virtue’ and ‘hypocrisy’. The blush is the public symbol of modesty, but because it vanishes in private, it cannot be ‘real’. Mandeville can deny the reality of virgin modesty because he connects it with a sign – the blush – which he already ‘knows’ to be treacherous.

      Paradoxically, the body can testify to hypocrisy only because its reactions are also connected to real mental processes. In a passage almost immediately following, MandevilleMandeville, Bernard argues thus on pride and shame:

      That these two Passions, in which the Seeds of most Virtues are contained, are Realities in our Frame, and not imaginary Qualities, is demonstrable from the plain and different Effects, that in spite of our Reason are produced in us as soon as we are affected with either.

      When a Man is overwhelm’d with Shame, he observes a sinking of the Spirits; the Heart feels cold and condensed, and the Blood flies from it to the Circumference of the Body; the Face glows, the Neck and Part of the Breast partake of the Fire: He is heavy as Lead; the Head is hung down, and the Eyes through a Mist of Confusion are fix’d on the Ground: No Injuries can move him; he is weary of his Being, and heartily wishes he could make himself invisible: But when, gratifying his Vanity, he exults in his Pride, he discovers quite contrary Symptoms; His Spirits swell and fan the Arterial Blood; a more than ordinary Warmth strengthens and dilates the Heart; the Extremities are cool; he feels light to himself, and imagines he could tread on Air; his Head is held up, his Eyes roll’d about with Sprightliness; he rejoices at his Being, is prone to Anger, and would be glad that all the World could take notice of him. (67–7)

      Following his statements concerning the blush of modesty, MandevilleMandeville, Bernard’s description of the visible effects of shame and pride gains an ambiguous quality. The man overcome with shame “observes” his bodily symptoms; the man feeling pride, however, “discovers” them, a word which can mean both to ‘find out’ and to ‘display’ (OED, “discover, v.” 5 & 6). Mandeville’s drift in this passage is to demonstrate that shame and fear are real because each man can feel their effect in his very body, in contrast to virgin modesty, which vanishes when a woman is alone.2 However, like the virgin’s blush, the man’s symptoms of pride are displayed, that is, observable, to others than himself, and thus vulnerable to the same kind of public (mis-)reading.3

      Lovelace’s probing of Clarissa’s mind via her body is subject to the same paradox. If the ‘public’ testimony of the body is untrustworthy (the virgin blushes when, and because, she is seen), he must penetrate to a deeper level. In one sense, Lovelace can never reach this ‘private’ body, for while he is with Clarissa, he also constitutes her audience (perhaps another reason why he is shaken with Sally’s “aping” of Clarissa – she reminds him of his position as spectator). Indeed, as Tassie GwilliamGwilliam, Tassie has observed, he bases his boasted knowledge of women not only on his direct experience of them, but also on his experience of himself (59). Like a woman – like the virgin who blushes in public but not in private – he was once “bashful”. Paradoxically, however, this self-knowledge does not help him with Clarissa. If she is like him – like the other women he thinks he understands – then she is not the paragon he took her for, but if she is unlike him, then the ‘essence’ of her being may well be beyond his comprehension.

      Furthermore, like MandevilleMandeville, Bernard, Lovelace has defined the set-up of his testing of Clarissa in such a way that he can never prove the existence of that virtue he appears to be looking for. Having associated ‘love’ with ‘conquerability’ and ‘virtue’ with ‘coldness’, Lovelace has made it impossible for Clarissa to prove herself both truly virtuous and capable of love – though she must do both to satisfy him. If she responds with the least show of desire, then her virtue must be fake, mere masquerade – identical with the hypocrisy which, he thinks, all his previous victims have displayed. If she does not respond, however, the essence or ‘heart’ of her being (cf. 1.3) must indeed, as Mowbray suggests, “be either iron or marble” (1382), rather than part of a living body. Clarissa’s death, which obviates all difference between public display and private motive/emotion, may be the only definite answer to this dilemma. It is only then, too, that her body might be opened – something which she expressly forbids in her will (1413) but which Lovelace desires. In his temporary madness, he demands Clarissa’s heart as a physical token that his “charmer’s” essence is neither cold marble nor living desire. A final irony of Lovelace’s attitude is that this search after an ‘essence’ – either ‘cold’ or ‘desiring’ – locates Clarissa’s virtue in the body itself rather than in her mind’s control of her impulses. Searching for the ‘truth’ of sexual desire, he becomes oblivious to the truth of her virtuous intentions.

      Lovelace is not alone in his troubled attitude to the relationship between body and mind. Not long after he has tricked Clarissa into living at Mrs. Sinclair’s brothel, he invites his four friends, Belford, Belton, Mowbray and Tourville, to see her. The following day, Belford writes a letter to urge Lovelace to marry Clarissa: “I write to tell you that we are all of one opinion with regard to her; which is, that there is not of her age a finer lady in the world, as to her understanding” (555). His commendation of Clarissa’s intelligence is followed by “poorer praise” of her beauty. At the centre of the letter comes a strangely disturbing passage which, judging from later letters by Mowbray, is far from anything he could have written:

      You may think what I am going to write too flighty; but, by my faith, I have conceived such a profound reverence for her sense and judgement that, far from thinking the man excusable who should treat her basely, I am ready to regret that such an angel of a lady should even marry. She is, in my eye, all mind: and were she to meet with a man all mind likewise, why should the charming qualities she is mistress of, be endangered? Why should such an angel be plunged so low as into the vulgar offices of domestic life? Were she mine, I should hardly wish to see her a mother unless there were a kind of moral certainty that minds like hers could be propagated. For why, in short, should not the work of bodies be left to mere bodies? (555)

      Belford’s flight of fancy is indeed strange. In the very letter designed to urge his friend to marriage, he regrets that “such an angel of a lady should even marry”. In this paragraph, Clarissa’s body seems strangely divided from her mind.4 At the same time, it is Belford’s “eye” that perceives her “mind”; confusingly, Belford mixes up the terms belonging to the body and mind respectively even while trying to keep separate Clarissa’s body and mind. For Belford, the metaphor of the “angel” materialises into a ‘literal’ truth: like the spirits she resembles, Clarissa has no body, or at most one that seems foreign to her essential quality. Insofar as it exists at all, it exists as a threat: the mother’s body that reproduces mankind can kill her in childbed. In his first (extant) letter to Lovelace, he had urged him СКАЧАТЬ