(or even the dominant) partner; it may require only obedience or “cheerful obedience”. A network, however, always demands that the individual balances his or her diverse duties. Even the most obedient, admiring, humble subject must, according to AllestreeAllestree, Richard, check whether “active obedience” to his prince is in accordance with divine laws. Indeed, Pamela’s despicable Mrs. Jewkes illustrates the dangers of the system of duty without this kind of individual judgment: “Look-ye,” she tells an indignant Pamela, “[Mr. B.] is my Master, and if he bids me do a Thing that I can do, I think I ought to do it, and let him, who has Power, to command me, look to the Lawfulness of it” (110).
Unlike a hierarchy, a network thus invests the individual with more responsibility and with agency. This agency, in turn, may be open – admitting of debate with all parties concerned – or secret, taking place entirely within the individual consciousness. In its most extreme forms, moral duties like the obligation to love and honour may even demand that the individual hide his or her own thought processes, once completed, from themselves, remembering only their result. In The Whole Duty of Man, both extremes are present. On the one hand, it contains pages of advice on how to bring oneself to true repentance. For example, AllestreeAllestree, Richard advises us “sometimes to abridge our selves somewhat of our lawful pleasure” in order to practice the self-denial we need to resist temptations to sin (29; Sunday I). Similarly, he explains with what spirit we should approach the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and how to induce the proper mood in ourselves. For example, in order to feel contrition, we should not only come to a sense of fear of God’s punishment – instead,
the sorrow of a true Penitent must be joyned also with the love of God, and that will make us grieve for having offended him, though there were no punishment to fall upon our selves. The way then to stir up this sorrow in us, is first, To stir up our love of God, by repeating to our selves the many gracious acts of his mercy towards us […]. (78; Sunday III)
And “at the holy Table”, he advises us to “meditate on those bitter sufferings of Christ […] for the increasing thy Humility and Contrition: then in the second place think of them again, to stir up thy Faith” (90–1; Sunday III).
The aim of such carefully-managed thought processes is absolute control of one’s feelings: after all, it “is the peculiar property of God’s Laws, that they reach to the heart” (270–1; Sunday XIII). Thus, as children “we”
must not upon any pretence of infirmity in [our parents] despise or contemn them, either in outward behaviour, or so much as inwardly in our hearts. If indeed they have infirmities it must be our business to cover and conceal them […] and that in such a manner too, as even themselves might not behold it. We are as much as may be to keep our selves from looking on those nakednesses of our Parents, which may tempt us to think irreverently of them. (297; Sunday XIV)
This leaves little space for the managing of interiority to take place. Ultimately, implicit obedience must come from the heart, and mere outward respect is not enough. Interior thought-processes are necessary for the discharge of one’s duty. However, these same processes, if not managed properly, turn only too easily into the seeds of rebellion against the system of duty.
Many critics have discussed interiority with regard to Richardson’s novels. Often, these discussions centre on the characters’ hidden motivations. Thus, Pamela notoriously delays her departure from her predatory master (cf. KeymerKeymer, Tom, Richardson’s Clarissa 20). Clarissa, although the heroine of a much more sophisticated novel perhaps informed by the Pamela controversy, has similarly been detected to be a less than transparent character. In this regard, Samuel JohnsonJohnson, Samuel, correspondent of Richardson’s remark that “there is always something which she prefers to truth” is probably the most often-cited contemporary example (Johnsoniana 72).1 John DussingerDussinger, John A., who opens his essay “Truth and storytelling in Clarissa” with Johnson’s quotation, sums up the reasons as follows: “Clarissa’s sincerity as storyteller, we have seen, is in doubt not only because she may have something to hide but, more significantly, because language inevitably leaves something out” (49). Indeed, as Keymer has shown, Clarissa’s thoughts remain inaccessible in the absence of an omniscient narrator, for her letters are, he argues, “more immediately concerned with influencing her readers than with representing the truth” (Richardson’s Clarissa 133). It seems that few critics can envisage a heroine who is both truthful and assertive. Thus, ScottScott, Sarah Paul GordonGordon, Scott Paul argues that Clarissa “protects her actions from the taint of self-interest by eliminating her will entirely, by denying that she has an interest to pursue” (Power 209). Wendy Ann LeeLee, Wendy Anne, meanwhile, is one of the few critics who credits the heroine both with active purpose and with truthfulness. She argues that Clarissa, in fact, aims at absolute objectivity. In her view, the coldness of which this heroine is accused as often as of hypocrisy is, in fact, the result of her aiming at Lockean “indifferency”, a detachment which allows her to judge with impartiality.
Each of these accounts elucidates important aspects of Clarissa. However, one aspect of the novel seems curiously absent from these discussions. Assembling evidence that “Clarissa’s narrative is misleading” (134), KeymerKeymer, Tom draws attention to several places where the heroine defends herself from Anna’s suspicion that she secretly loves Lovelace but hides this from her friend:
When she talks of keeping in mind as she writes ‘what it became a person of my sex and character to be and to do … where the imputed love is thought an undutiful, and therefore a criminal, passion’, or of her ‘desire of appearing … the person I ought to be; had I no other view in it, but to merit the continuance of your good opinion’ […], she inspires little confidence. Her letters seem determined not by ‘reality’ but by the self-image she prefers to project, and they are based on a model of daughterly exemplariness that is increasingly at odds with her actual state. (Richardson’s Clarissa 134–5)
As a denial of love, the claim cited above is indeed less than satisfactory. However, in the light of the system of duty, Clarissa’s reflection on “what it became a person of my sex and character to be and to do”, as well as her “desire of appearing” so, need to be reconsidered. KeymerKeymer, Tom is right that Clarissa’s highest priority is not “reality”, at least not in the sense of an uncensored expression of thoughts and emotions – just as JohnsonJohnson, Samuel, correspondent of Richardson is right that there is “always”, or at least often, “something which she prefers to truth”. So she must. There is at least one case where truth must be suppressed: children, according to AllestreeAllestree, Richard, must not perceive their parents’ faults. In order to be a good daughter, then, Clarissa needs to censor her thoughts, especially those most at odds with the system of duty – her love (if it is that) of a rake and her perception of her father’s faults. In the former case, she denies love but “[thinks] it but justice to put in a word for” Lovelace when others criticise him more than is his due (49). In the latter case, her last resort is to “lay down [her] pen” (65) before she succumbs to the urge of criticising him in a letter to Anna.
This is not to deny conscious manipulation on the heroine’s part; indeed, Clarissa herself is uncomfortably aware that she is “driven to have recourse to […] artifices” in her own defence (365). My focus here, however, is not to discover the ‘true’ Clarissa or to conclude that she cannot be ‘discovered’ by the reader. Instead, I am interested in the implications which the demands of the system of duty have with regard to characters’ interiority. Whether or not Clarissa “wrote [her] heart” (176) to Anna is, in this context, less relevant than what this heart ought to feel, and how such feelings can be controlled in cases where attractive rakes or despotic fathers provide temptations to lust, anger, and other sins.2
In general, the implication of Richardson’s novels is that improper impulses can best be restrained when the individual acknowledges the system of duty but is otherwise left to his or her free agency. Both Clarissa and Grandison thematise individual processes of self-control and their results.3 In both, methods of self-restraint range from the suppression of inner conflict to its open display. However, while the constraints put on the heroine in the former lead to tragedy, Grandison shows how individual agency –