Christian Form and Anti-Feminism in Clarissa
Lois A. Chaber, American Intercontinental University
Volume 15, no. 3-4, April-July 2003
©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
Twenty-five years ago, in the radical days of the 1970s, when I was teaching Clarissa in Albany, New York, I had made for myself a T-shirt emblazoned with the feminist logo of the clenched fist combined with female sex sign, and the words “Write On, Clarissa,” which I proudly wore to class, a gesture that epitomized my conviction then that Samuel Richardson’s novel was the ultimate feminist text of the eighteenth century. My present views on Clarissa are much more ambivalent. Although I do not agree with Jerry Beasley’s asseveration that “Clarissa is in fact the most authoritative and doctrinaire affirmation of patriarchal ideology not only in Richardson’s body of work but in all of eighteenth-century fiction,” and although I do not deny that space is given in the text to an exposure and (partial) condemnation of the repressive, anti-feminist tenets and practices in the family, in society, in the law, and in the Church, I do feel that Richardson built into the plot and characterization of the novel a considerable vein of Christian patriarchal authoritarianism, which has not yet been fully illuminated and traced in the text.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Epistolary Fiction” include:
“Piety and Popishness”: Tolerance and the Epistolary Reaction to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison
by PATRICK MELLO (ECF 25.3, Spring 2013)
Jane Austen as Editor: Letters on Fiction and the Cancelled Chapters of Persuasion
by KATIE GEMMILL (ECF 24.1, Fall 2011)
(Love) Letters: Madeleine de Scudéry and the Epistolary Impulse
by JOAN DEJEAN (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
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