Fragments and Mastery: Dora and Clarissa
Elizabeth W. Harries, Smith College
Volume 5, no. 3, April 1993
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Two of our current critical storms centre on two wronged young women: Dora, the hysteric of the turn of the twentieth century, and Clarissa, the paragon of the eighteenth. Dora and Clarissa have become contemporary critical heroines, subjects of (or subjected to) endless analysis and questions. Both controversies show, in a particularly acute form, the difficulties we encounter in working with texts that work with violence to women (and perhaps do some violence of their own). And both dramatize the struggle of a male writer to contain the potentially disruptive force of fragmentary feminine narratives.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Samuel Richardson” include:
Richardson’s Hands
by JAMES ROBERT WOOD (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
A Case for Hard-heartedness: Clarissa, Indifferency, Impersonality
by WENDY ANNE LEE (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
“Glorious Perverseness”: Stoic Pride and Domestic Heroism in Richardson’s Novels
by ANNA DETERS (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
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