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

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СКАЧАТЬ with the individual’s duties as a Christian: The Whole Duty of Man, anonymously published in 1658 and attributed to Richard AllestreeAllestree, Richard, and Fifteen Sermons Upon Social Duties by Patrick DelanyDelany, Patrick, correspondent of Richardson, Church of Ireland Dean, published in 1744. Delany’s sermons lend themselves to such comparison by temporal proximity to Richardson’s writings as well as by the fact that Richardson printed several of his works – including, according to John CarrollCarroll, John, the Fifteen Sermons (Richardson, Selected Letters 23). “[B]y 1739 […], Delany was assuring [Richardson] of his life-long friendship” (EavesEaves, T.C. Duncan and Ben D. Kimpel & Kimpel 173). The Whole Duty of Man, on the other hand, was a “ubiquitous conduct manual” which remained popular throughout the 18^th century (KeymerKeymer, Tom, Richardson’s Clarissa 26).5 Richardson refers to it with approval in Pamela (see below). Hester MulsoMulso, Hester, correspondent of Richardson also testifies to its importance, albeit in a different way, namely by indignantly rejecting it as a guide to social duties.6 In fact, both these writers, especially Allestree, occupied conservative positions. Allestree, a royalist, published his best-known work shortly before the Restoration of the monarchy, and Delany had tory leanings (cf. Spurr and Barnard).

      It would be rash to claim that either of these texts fully illustrates Richardson’s own attitudes. Indeed, the tone of The Whole Duty of Man, in particular, with its frequent references to the hell-fire which threatens the unregenerate reader, is far from Richardson’s preference for reforming villains and for his pained, carefully indecisive indications of the probable fates of some of his worst characters. Moreover, as prescriptive non-fiction, these moral writings differ from Richardson’s didactic novels almost as much as his lists of applications do from the bulk of his stories. Finally, these two works are only two examples of many similar texts known to Richardson. However, the conservative perspective helps to clarify the way in which the discourse of duties differs from modern conceptions of mutual responsibilities, and what challenges it posed to liberal-minded readers.

      The system of duty which is outlined by AllestreeAllestree, Richard and DelanyDelany, Patrick, correspondent of Richardson is a “system of reciprocal obligations, mainly domestic” (Pamela 525, note to p. 3). These obligations are “status duties”, that is, duties on the basis of an individual’s relationship to others (GouldnerGouldner, Alvin W.) – children’s to parents, masters’ to servants, friends’ to friends. To know in what relationship I stand to another person is to know what I owe to that person. For the purposes of these writings, these relationships are envisaged as stable. Children must be born, servants must be hired, and friends must become acquainted, before parenthood, servitude and friendship can exist. However, the focus of the system of duty is not on this dynamic aspect of relationships, but on the static one. While individuals stand in specific relationships with each other, while they assume certain roles vis-à-vis each other, they have corresponding duties which cannot be cancelled. Works like Allestree’s and Delany’s are there to specify what these duties are.

      The system of duty is essentially foreign to our contemporary thinking, even though aspects of it can occasionally still be felt, and it is worth emphasising some of these differences at the outset. One of the central expressions of modern Western ideas of morality is the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. It is easy to forget that this document, which is routinely evoked when questions of morality are at stake, dates only from the mid-20^th century. Indeed, the very concept of “universal human rights” – as opposed to human duties, to the value of benevolence, or to the legal rights of a specified group – may well date back no further than the early modern period: “the concept almost certainly began in 1640s London, in the heat of the English Civil Wars, from which it spread eventually to America and France and then to the rest of the world” (StamosStamos, David N. xii). According to David Stamos, John LockeLocke, John, who was writing in the aftermath of the Civil Wars, played a key role in the dissemination of these ideas.7 Somewhat more cautiously, professor of philosophy John SimmonsSimmons, John A. sees Locke as writing when “a shift in thinking about moral relations […] was still taking place” – a shift from an emphasis on duties to an emphasis on rights (99). The first position sees God “at the center of all moral relations”, and while “[e]ach of us has duties not to harm others, […] these duties are owed to God” (97). The second position, in contrast, acknowledges that “[m]oral relations hold directly between persons as well as between persons and God”; as a consequence, “we have duties that are owed to others, not just duties with respect to others” (98). Both Stamos and Simmons agree that the idea that “all statements about rights are translatable without loss into statements about their correlative duties” (and vice versa) is false (Simmons 116; cf. Stamos 101).

      As the epigraph for this chapter suggests, this point is not simply a philosophical nicety, but was keenly felt at the time when this transition was occurring. Lady Ludlow, the eponymous central character of Elizabeth GaskellGaskell, Elizabeth’s mid-19^th-century tale, fears and deplores the new attention to rights. For her, rights – like the education of the masses – are intimately connected with the “rebellion in the American colonies and the French Revolution” (134). The latter holds particular horror for her, as she not only lived in France before the revolution, but knew and loved some of its victims. It is important to note that Lady Ludlow is a largely sympathetic, if quaint, character. Old-fashioned and headstrong, she is also genuinely kind, has a keen sense of responsibility, and is occasionally capable of overcoming deep-set prejudices. She is thus not a representative of tyranny, but of a past age. From the glimpses that readers receive of her life, it can be deduced that she was born around the time when Richardson’s novels were first published. GaskellGaskell, Elizabeth’s character thus bears witness to a crucial change of paradigm which people felt was happening in the decades around the French Revolution.

      SimmonsSimmons, John A. identifies three crucial consequences which ensue from emphasising rights rather than duties. First, “[r]ights are grounds for self-respect; rightholders are entitled to things […], rather than being entirely dependent on others’ personal decisions about whether or not to do their duty” (118). Secondly, “rights are indispensable for such activities as claiming, demanding, or insisting on actions or outcomes” (119). Finally, rights make for more flexibility than duties, since “[r]ightholders […] may waive [their rights] or invoke them as the situation requires” (120). Of these three points, the first two especially will be shown to be crucial to the value system underlying Richardson’s novels. Indeed, Richardson (and the fictional Lady Ludlow) would probably have agreed with Simmons, but would have emphasised the flip-side of the points he enumerates. The system of duty asks what obligations the individual has to all others; a focus on rights leads the individual to ask what all others can do for him or her. As Richardson’s statements concerning filial rights imply, he thought it more likely that children would forget their responsibilities than that they would waive their rights.

      It is not my contention that the system of duty was the only way to conceptualise relationships in the mid-eighteenth century. Alternatives existed; I will discuss some of them in part II of this study (including LockeLocke, John’s Two Treatises of Government). Moreover, then as now, some people simply flouted the dominant system of morality; then as now, they might even be proud of it. This attitude is exemplified in the figure of the rake or libertine, who is neither “restricted by convention or tradition” nor “restrained by morality” (OED, “libertine, n.”). I argue, however, that the system of duty is vital in order to understand some of the dilemmas in which Richardson’s heroines find themselves, and to contextualise some of the solutions which are offered to these problems. In the following sections, I will, thus, first describe the system of duty as outlined by AllestreeAllestree, Richard and DelanyDelany, Patrick, correspondent of Richardson. I will then show how this system figures in Richardson’s novels, particularly Clarissa, which features the most extended and destructive conflict of duties in his work. In the process, I will discuss further problems raised by this system, notably the relationship between duties regarding mental processes and outward action, respectively – or, to put it differently, between true virtue and СКАЧАТЬ