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Before I read Clarissa I was nobody: Aspirational reading and Samuel Richardson's great novel
Hudson Review, The, Summer 2003 by Pascoe, Judith
No one who reads all of Clarissa can like what Sherburn did because reading all of Clarissa, as opposed to skimming quickly through the first several volumes in which everything that happens could (according to one of Richardson's contemporaries) be condensed into a single page, is a test of intellectual fortitude, a way of separating the chosen people from the churls who go about incising their names into paperback book covers, of distinguishing mature readers from youth with their limited capacities. As a person who finds few opportunities to feel smugly superior as I wander the halls of academe, or as I scarf goldfish crackers at department parties, I can count on my having read Clarissa (five times!) partly to compensate for my not having read Ulysses (which I carried across Europe on my honeymoon, and in which an obsolete franc note marks my failure to read past page twenty) When a visiting scholar who claims to be a specialist in the eighteenth century confides that he has never actually read Clarissa, I feel like lurching backward into the nonalcoholic punch bowl and shouting, "WHAT!! Never read Clarissa?" But instead I smile understandingly and turn my attention to the spinach dip. Whenever I read the latest academic effort to explain the rise of the novel in new terms, that is, to unseat Ian Watt, who wrote The Rise of the Novel in 1957, I notice that Richardson's Pamela gets thirty-five pages while Clarissa gets only the occasional passing reference, and I think, "Here is another person who hasn't read Clarissa." Leslie Fiedler wrote about Clarissa at length; in fact, Clarissa was the most important precursor text for his study Love and Death in the American Novel Fiedler regretted that of Richardson's three novels, only Pamela is still read, "the other two now left to gather dust in libraries, though all Europe once wept over Clarissa." He went on to castigate "a living authority on the American novel" for wrongly characterizing Clarissa as wicked, calling the critic's ignorance of the novel unpardonable. But Leslie Fiedler, just before wagging his finger at his fellow critic's error, ended a summary of the novel's plot by wrongly claiming that Lovelace is killed in a duel by his closest friend. Fiedler let the mistake stand in his book's second edition, either because he had been humbled by his own scholarly error and was determined to let future generations know how the mighty had fallen, or because he was uncowed by the tiny number of people who had read to the end of Clarissa and so were likely to notice his mistake.
These days, I read Clarissa so that I can teach the novel to undergraduates. I justify teaching a whole class on Clarissa, urging students through the novel at the rate of one hundred pages per week, by making grandiose pedagogical claims in my course description. I say I will use the novel as a window onto eighteenth-century culture; I suggest its critical reception will allow me to delineate the major schools of twentieth-century literary theory. But that's just to impress the curriculum committee. The way I draw undergraduates in is by suggesting they will be initiated into the exclusive coterie of people who have read Clarissa in its entirety. You wouldn't think that this kind of bald elitist appeal would play very well at a state university in Iowa. My students are geographically unassuming. When asked to say where they hail from on the first day of classes, they mumble the names of their hometowns, and even when I try to whip up some feeling of civic pride-"Washington? the town with the new outdoor pool? with the giant slide and the tilty buckets?"-they still defer to the kids from the suburbs of Chicago. It can be a humbling experience to be an English major at the University of Iowa, to arrive with your reputation as a high school poet or prize-winning editorialist behind you, lured by the distant twinkle of the Writers' Workshop, only to find yourself taking "Reading Short Stories" in a grim classroom with misspelled signage: "Please do not adjust thermostat. If to hot or cold call maintenance."
