concerning the individual’s ‘ability’” (66). After all, Clarissa says she cannot honestly marry Solmes; her family say she can – but who is to judge? And how can Clarissa voice her opposition with due respect if her parents do not allow her to speak? The difficulty of doing so is, ironically, highlighted by comments of sympathetic critics who admire her resistance. Janet ToddTodd, Janet, for instance, approvingly notes that “[i]t seems that she is overtly obedient then, while covertly recalcitrant” (12). Clarissa would not have been comfortable with this assessment of her behaviour, for it implies that she is a rebel, just as her family claim – not an obedient daughter faced with an impossible command, as she herself argues.
In order to justify her resistance to hierarchy, Clarissa draws on the network of duties. Within the novel that bears her name, she is the most determined spokesperson for general duty. At one point – disgusted by the selfishness she perceives both in Solmes and in her own relations – she writes wistfully: “And yet, in my opinion, the world is but one great family; originally it was so; what then is this narrow selfishness that reigns in us, but relationship remembered against relationship forgot?” (62). Her statement is based on the system of duty, with its insistence on the mutual ties which bind all men to each other, but it is also a daring revision of it. If “family” is just another term for “mankind”, then there is no place for absolute (human) authority, no justification for privileging the demands of one person over the interests of all others.
Such a conviction puts into question not only the attitude of the Harlowes, but that of others who wish to claim a privileged position with regard to the heroine – including Lovelace and Clarissa’s best friend Anna. Thus, ToddTodd, Janet notes with some regret that “Clarissa cannot wholeheartedly return Anna’s love, seeing it detracting from the primary love of family” (54). She identifies “a coldness here that speaks not only of Clarissa’s distress at Anna’s awkward aid but of her uneasy fear of ‘unbridled’ friendship” (55). Despite these misgivings about Clarissa’s apparent lack of fervent friendship, Todd also suggests that the heroine’s death is in part a response to a world which does not accept single-minded devotion to a friend. Clarissa, according to her, “now understands that to live is to live for more than her friend and to be forever in conflict” (58). However, the heroine has always known that she must live for more than either her friend or her family. Indeed, the fervency of her friendship with Anna takes such prominence precisely because she is cut off from most of her other relationships in the course of the novel. Far from wishing to confine her sense of duty and relationship to any one person, Clarissa yearns for a world where all relationships can work together, rather than against each other.
At least one of Richardson’s early readers clearly recognised this aspect of Clarissa and spelled out the implications of diversity of duties. In a letter dated 22 April 1750, David GrahamGraham, David, correspondent of Richardson, then a student at Cambridge (Schellenberg 11 n.1), writes about misreadings of Clarissa’s behaviour. Readers who criticise her for disobedience, lack of self-assertion, prudery, or coquetry, fail to appreciate her, he thinks, because her behaviour
is not leaven’d with their [own] infirmities: Their mistake proceeds from their ignorance of the grand rule of morality; which seems to consist in an unreserved obedience to the divine will: In which, as in a fix’d point, all the duties resulting from the several relations of social life, like lines drawn in a circle, so as not to interfere with each other, should ultimately center. But ’tis the privilege of few to be able steadily to keep their Eye on that mark, without being misled by those delusions, which education and custom have sanctified by the name of Virtue […]. (Schellenberg, Correspondence 14–5)
In accordance with moral writers, GrahamGraham, David, correspondent of Richardson notes that at the centre of one’s conduct stands not any single human relationship, however important, but the “divine will”. In contrast to them, however, he continues to show that in order “to keep one’s eye on that mark”, the individual herself needs, as it were, to take a step back from any single relationship as well as from “those delusions” attached to common conceptions of virtue. Besides implying that the performance of duty necessitates not only good intentions but clear perceptions, he includes the impediments to truly moral behaviour: false preconceptions, but also, if only by implication, the possibility that the “lines drawn in a circle” might, despite everything, “interfere with each other”. If one reverses Graham’s image by putting into the centre the individual who needs to act, rather than the (sun-like) God, and if one combines this with a parallel image of other individuals, a network forms – and, almost inevitably, the lines will indeed “interfere with each other”. GrahamGraham, David, correspondent of Richardson’s imagery, moreover, puts all duties on one level; they all equally derive from God. The logical implication – which, unsurprisingly, he does not spell out – is that unlimited human authority cannot easily coexist with diversity of duties. Thus, the necessity of judging for oneself, rather than obeying blindly, is justified on an abstract conceptual level.
However, once the individual leaves this abstract level to deal with a specific situation, matters become complicated. Within the system of duty, Clarissa must obey any command by her father that is not in itself “unlawful”. If her situation is perceived to be mainly about filial duty, her options shrink to the simple binary opposition of obedience or rebellion. If, in contrast, her dilemma is interpreted as a conflict of duties, the situation becomes more complex. As she repeatedly argues, she cannot marry Solmes without disregarding the just claims of many others. For example, Solmes proposes to settle all his money irrevocably on her and her family. This would deprive his own relations of “their just expectations”; therefore, she is justified in refusing him (81). In addition, since “he is not only narrow, but covetous”, he would interfere with her charity to the poor (153). More importantly, her avowed fear that she will be unable to love and respect Solmes – and thus to fulfil her marriage-vow – in her view even compels her to resist marrying him. MulsoMulso, Hester, correspondent of Richardson agreed with her: the very weight of the marriage vow, she thought, calls for female self-determination before marriage. In her debate with Richardson, she at first argued that marrying a man one does not love is a breach of the marriage-vow and therefore sinful (206). In this specific case, she could even have drawn on The Whole Duty of Man for support, for AllestreeAllestree, Richard explains that, if someone thinks erroneously that the action he is going to commit is a sin and does it nevertheless, this “may make an indifferent action that is in itself no sin, become one. For though my Conscience should err in telling me such a thing were unlawful, yet so long as I were so perswaded, it were sin for me to do that thing” (74; Sunday III).
Richardson eventually brought MulsoMulso, Hester, correspondent of Richardson to partly retract her statement and concede that the marriage vow is not a statement of present love, but a promise to “endeavour to love” (219). In a world where daughters have little power to evade a forced marriage, it is to some extent reassuring to believe that Clarissa, had she yielded to her parents, would not have been guilty of perjury. On the other hand, this interpretation could be a justification for forced marriage, as Mulso was quick to notice. Richardson seems to have suggested to her that Clarissa would have loved Solmes had she married him.3 MulsoMulso, Hester, correspondent of Richardson reacted with shocked indignation:
[…] I did not expect […] of Mr. Richardson, that however strong your aversion may be to your lover, you can’t fail of loving your husband; as if the ceremony of marriage could […] remove the natural antipathy between worth and baseness, between good sense and folly, between the grovelling, dirty little soul of a Solmes, and that of the almost divine Clarissa. (215)
She therefore still insisted that Clarissa, and in fact “every woman”, “as a rational creature, […] must have a right to refuse to shackle her conscience with a vow, if she does not choose it” (245). After all, Clarissa herself describes the traumatic aspects even of a happy marriage in a moving plea to her uncle John:
To be given up to a strange man; to be engrafted into a strange family; to give up her very name, as a mark of her becoming his absolute and dependent property: to be obliged to prefer this strange man to father, mother—to everybody: and his humours to all her own—Or to contend, perhaps, in breach of a vowed duty for every innocent