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to marry, Lovelace rescues her and carries her off to London. But this only places her in his power, so he is free to lay siege to her virtue by every trick and device he can think of. Withstanding all his assaults, she remains a model of the idealised anima, the soul of chaste and sovereign femininity; until, after many hundreds of pages, Lovelace finally manages to drug and rape her. This leaves her so devastated that she begins to lose her reason. She finally escapes, to endure more horrors such as being thrown into prison, but is rescued by Belfort, who represents Lovelace's `light Alter-Ego: Under his care, she recovers her sanity but continues to decline physically, until at last, having made her peace with the world and with God, she dies. This tragic conclusion, showing a virtuous heroine gratuitously destroyed, aroused such horror when the novel was first appearing in successive instalments that readers all over Europe rushed to protest, imploring Richardson to provide a happier ending. But the deed was done. And, after her death, Lovelace is finally paid out for his crime when he is killed in a duel by Clarissa's cousin.

Since it is not concerned with an outward, physical journey, it may seem odd to suggest that Clarissa is shaped by the archetype of the Quest. But, on an inward level, this is what the story is about. As in a more conventional Quest, the suspense which sustains our interest in the story lies all in that one overriding question: will the hero reach that central goal to which everything else in his life has become subordinated? To overcome Clarissa's resistance and take her virginity has become his one all-consuming aim. Yet we are in no doubt that his purpose is entirely dark. As with Ahab, we know the hero is possessed by the desire to commit a deed which symbolically has become the ultimate cosmic crime: the violation of the anima, the destruction of the Self. The story's whole intention is to present the heroine as the hero's absolute antithesis: the shining and selfless `light feminine' being first besieged, then finally destroyed by the utterly ruthless egocentricity of the `dark masculine'.

In this respect we cannot escape the ambiguity of Richardson's own position as the story's creator. Although he built up Clarissa as an idealised personification of the feminine, he did so only in order to fantasise his hero attempting in every way to degrade and defile her; placing her in a brothel, physically assaulting her, raping her, consigning her to prison, finally imagining her death. In this sense, Clarissa became a prototype for what Mario Praz called in The Romantic Agony `the persecuted maiden' who, from the late-eighteenth century onwards, was to become such a conspicuous feature of plays, operas and novels in the age of Romanticism: the beautiful, virtuous heroine whose chief role in the fantasies of so many authors was to be portrayed as imprisoned, persecuted, ill-treated or murdered; or just wasting away through consumption to a tragically early death, as in La Traviata, La Dame Aux Camellias or La Boheme.

Once we recognise the significance of this figure as symbolising the anima, the personification of the soul, what an insight this conveys of what was beginning to happen, spiritually, morally and psychologically, to the culture for which the image of the `persecuted maiden' was to become such a central emblematic figure. Less than fifty years after Richardson created Clarissa, the Marquis de Sade wrote his openly pornographic novel Justine; the Misfortunes of Virtue. And here the unremitting succession of physical cruelties and sexual degradations which its author could enjoy imagining being inflicted on his helpless heroine until she finally met a gratuitously violent death was even more obviously beginning to take storytelling in the Western world towards a wholly new phase of its development. Another story similarly shaped by a hidden version of the Quest archetype was Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus (1979, filmed 1984). The narrator, the eighteenthcentury Viennese composer Salieri,