Why Lovelace Must Die

Significantly, Clarissa's post-traumatic disorder manifests itself in generic confusion. She cannot write in her "familiar" style; her text becomes fragmented, disordered, dislocated. Paper X, the most fragmented of her essays on the rape, is a collage of tags taken from Restoration authors like Nat Lee, Dryden, and Olway-Lovelace's favorites. The "delirium" she experiences after the rape is the only time in which she falls into Lovelacian quotation, threading together lines from Restoration dramas in a vain attempt to express herself and explain her situation. She "comes to herself" shortly before her "trial," ensuring that she does not act as Lovelace would have her-her returning spirits signal a retreat from the tropes of she-tragedy. Curiously, Doody, who notes the rhetorical parallels between the penknife scene and one in Rochester's Valentinian, among other Restoration tragedies, does not question either the sentiments or speeches attributed to Clarissa. She merely argues that "Lovelace's use of the dramatic rhetoric highlights Clarissa's heroic situation.... [The scene] is Richardson's version of a scene often enacted upon the stage" (118-19). Since Clarissa is not allowed to speak in her own voice, the scene belongs entirely to the playwright Lovelace who has so painstakingly stage-managed every particular of it.

Fantastic in every sense of the word, Lovelace's correspondence is unilateral and monologic. As he tells Belford, "And have I not, as I went along, made thee to say all that was necessary for thee to say?" (L223). More sinisterly, he promises to tell his friend "her [Clarissa's] thoughts, either what they are, or what I'd have them to be" (L321). But despite all of Lovelace's "pre-determination," despite his best efforts to commandeer her text and rewrite her story, Lovelace is "beaten out of his play." Even though he has possessed her body and controls her speech, he cannot make her act as he wants. Just as Lovelace's character doesn't belong in a domestic novel, Clarissa's character is too pure for Restoration tragedy. This is Clarissa's triumph. Lovelace can place a penknife at her bosom and Lucretia's words in her mouth, but he cannot make her act in his play. Lovelace confesses:

By her taking out her key, when she came out of her chamber to us, she no doubt suspected my design: which was to have carried her away in my arms thither, if she made such force necessary, after I had intimidated her, and to have been her companion for that night.... [B]ut, from the moment she entered the dining-room with so much intrepidity, it was absolutely impossible to think of prosecuting my villainous designs against her. (L281)

Although effectively rendered speechless by Lovelace's generic manipulations (since the words she speaks are not her own), Clarissa still imposes her voice on the text. By raping Clarissa, Lovelace thought he could force his play into reality, but in this letter, he is forced to admit that his play has failed, that he cannot graft a "happy ending" onto the tragedy he has spawned.24 The failure of his plot causes Lovelace's letters to degenerate into incoherent raging, but Clarissa's post-rape reflective and meditative letters are less flippant and less naïve than her early correspondence with Anna Howe; Clarissa comes into her mature voice and the novel perfects its tone as a result of Lovelace's villainies. The rape makes Clarissa meditative; her frequent recourse to bible verses throughout the novel's second half matches and challenges Lovelace's dramatic tags.