Putting Michael McKeon to the "Question": Is Clarissa Harlowe a Prude or Saint?

Michael McKeon, in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, sets forth a theoretical study of a large canon of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury works, based upon the dialectic of genre formations, which attempts to analyze certain "instabilities" in generic and social categories- "instabilities" that McKeon identifies as "Questions of Truth" and "Questions of Virtue." In this paper, I argue with McKeon's optimistic reading of Samuel Richardson's work, Clarissa, or The History of Young Lady (1740), which concludes that-unlike Pamela's "manifest material and social empowerment"-Clarissa acquires "manifest discursive and imaginative empowerment" and "wins" (to use McKeon's terms) the "battle" with her antagonist, Robert Lovelace. What is difficult to accept in this reading of Clarissa is McKeon's claim that the "success" of Clarissa's resistance to Lovelace, despite the tragic rape, is evident in her "new-found power" which is represented in the heroine's spiritual "conversion"- her decision to die to protect her "version of truth and virtue." McKeon's spiritual "conversion" not only forces Clarissa to surrender her legal right to prosecute her rapist but also forces her to seek the shelter of her "father's house" in the afterlife because she can no longer "make others accept [her] own version of events as authoritative." Thus, in contrast to McKeon, I claim that Clarissa represents the necessary conditions for its heroine's "empowerment" primarily in language that suggests her manifest social invalidation; language which in particular emphasizes that her rape and torture by Lovelace forces Clarissa's spiritual "conversion" to seek her reward in the afterlife-thereby concluding that Clarissa's discursive and imaginative empowerment does not and cannot exist in the secular, material world.