Why Lovelace Must Die

When Lovelace is frustrated out of his play, Clarissa finds her medium. Her death frees her tongue; her legacy is her story, and by co-opting Belford to compile it, she ensures that Lovelace will have no one to speak through or to. Even when she is not a letter's author, Clarissa's language rings through the novel's last section, as can be seen in Belford's description of Clarissa's death. His first instinct is to imitate Lovelace, to acknowledge the event with the kind of indirectness Lovelace used in admitting to the rape, writing, "I have only to say at present-Thou wilt do well to take a tour to Paris; or wherever else thy destiny shall lead thee!!!-John Belford" (L479). Lovelace, now on the receiving end, refuses to be satisfied with such circumlocution. Although fellow-rake Mowbray tells us that he "won't bear the word dead on any account," Lovelace still thirsts for the "particulars of her departure" (L480). So Belford rejects his Lovelacian "Roman style" and writes a minute and earnest account of Clarissa's death. This death-bed narrative is a study in contrast from his earlier, almost gothic, detail-oriented description of the rake Belton's horrible death (L424), a contrast Belford makes explicit when he recognizes part of Clarissa's dying speech as "the words I remember to have heard in the Burial Service read over my uncle and poor Belton." Clarissa's final speech comprises her own funeral sermon. Curiously, Richardson does not employ the tactics of sentimentality for the novel's most pathetic moment. Tears, broken speech, and mutely expressive glances are the hallmarks of Belton's emphatically physical death, which is anything but composed. Belford writes: "He has given me some hints of what he wanted to say; but all incoherent, interrupted by dying hiccoughs and convulsions" (L424). Clarissa's final moments find her short of breath, forced to speak in "elevated strains but broken accents" (L481). But the dashes sprinkled through her speech add emphases to her sermon, drawing out its message rather than breaking it up. It is all of a piece. Belford tells us "she looked what she said": her mind at rest, her soul at peace, and her text composed. In this letter, Belford ventriloquizes Clarissa's voice perfectly. But he closes his account of Clarissa's death with a modest denial of his authorial ability and a nod to Lovelace's:

A better pen than mine may do her fuller justice-Thine, I mean, oh Lovelace! For well dost thou know how much she excelled in the graces both of mind and person, natural and acquired, all that is woman. And thou also canst best account for the causes of her immature death, through those calamaties which in so short a space of time from the highest pitch of felicity (every one in a manner adoring her) brought her to an exit so happy for herself, but that it was so early, so much to be deplored by all who had the honour of her acquaintance.

This task, then, I leave to thee: but now I can write no more.... (L481)

But it is Belford, not Lovelace, who will write more. Clarissa asks him to record and publish her story, to create the literary equivalent of her tombstone, even calling the text her "monument." As able as Lovelace's pen may be, his wickedness has excluded him from the edifying scene of Clarissa's apotheosis; raping her forced him into exile and reliance on Belford's narration of events. Lovelace complains, "Forbidden to attend the dear creature, yet longing to see her, I would give the world to be admitted once more to her beloved presence" (L463). But he cannot approach and must become a reader rather than the author of Clarissa's story. Like the novel's readers, Lovelace awaits the inevitable news of Clarissa's death; like readers, he is desperate but powerless to avert it. Indeed, Lovelace's mad imaginings could almost have been taken from Lady Bradshaigh's first letter to Richardson. As Clarissa's death approaches, Lovelace begs Belford, "Whether it be true or not, let me be told so, and I will go abroad rejoicing and believing it, and my wishes and imagination shall make out all the rest" (L472). Likewise, anticipating the publication of Clarissa's fifth volume and the unfolding of the tragedy, Lady Bradshaigh writes, "after you have brought the divine Clarissa to the very brink of destruction, let me intreat (may I say, insist upon) a turn, that will make your almost despairing readers half mad with joy" (4:179).