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and her confidante, Anna Howe, Lovelace and his confidante, John Belford, and the occasional letters from and to their respective families, the novel is simultaneously claustrophobic and boundless. The protagonists are mostly confined to their writing-desks, reporting to their respective friends in painstaking detail their endeavors to guess, second-guess, plant, anticipate, and interpret each other's thoughts. The outcome of this obsessive mind-reading is such that Clarissa and Lovelace stop communicating altogether and die, or, rather, commit what could be considered thinly veiled acts of suicide. Clarissa wills herself to die (figure 2), possibly out of commitment to her developing view of herself as a tragic heroine—indeed, a martyr—who moves inexorably toward her terrible and instructive end,2 possibly from depression induced by Lovelace's manipulation of her reality, a manipulation that makes her feel that none of the mainstays of her moral world—familial love, compassion of the strong for the weak, communal ties—can survive when confronted with playful but determined evil. Lovelace dies because he came to be so emotionally invested in her that he cannot go on after she passes away.

Before I turn to examining Richardson's experimentation with our metarepresentational capacity, let me make a point that may sound like old news to you by now. This point, however, cannot be repeated often enough in a book that hopes to put the cognitive-evolutionary concept of the Theory of Mind on the map of contemporary literary studies. Clarissa and Lovelace may be preternaturally adept at planning and deflecting each other's mental gambits, an intellectual one-upmanship that marks them as exceptional among other characters in the novel and justifies the appellations of "genius" generously bestowed upon them throughout the narrative. And yet the truly amazing and sustained feat of mind-reading takes place not when Clarissa "sees through" Lovelace's new contrivance or when Lovelace anticipates her seeing through it and prepares a plan B. It takes place when we as readers of Richardson's novel attribute the generous capacity for thoughts and desires to each fictional character, however tenuously delineated, and then proceed to interpret his or her behavior in terms of his or her underlying mental world, supplying a myriad of absent

10: Richardon's Clarissa

links, assumptions, and tacit explanations that allow us to see the story as a rich and emotionally coherent whole. In our interactions with Clarissa (or any other work of fiction), we take our own mind-reading capacity completely for granted and notice it no more than we notice oxygen when we wake up in the morning, an obliviousness which does not, however, render either oxygen or our ToM less important for our everyday life.

Back to Clarissa and metarepresentationality. One of the central premises of Richardson's novel is that its male protagonist is a consummate liar. The intellectual one-upmanship between Lovelace and Clarissa that I have just mentioned is set in motion by his constant endeavors to deceive her. He plots behind her back to set her own family against her; he introduces to her as seemingly respectable people a bevy of prostitutes and criminals; he forges her letters; he dons disguises and draws unsuspecting strangers into assisting him in tricking her.

But, you may point out, a lying protagonist is hardly news for a fictional narrative. How is Lovelace different, say, from Milton's Satan, who manipulates his fellow fallen angels, assumes different identities to deceive the guardian angels of Paradise, and, finally, lies to Eve?

The difference between Milton's and Richardson's antiheroes is Satan's ability to keep track of himself as the source of his representations of the world. That is, when he lies, he (mostly) knows that he lies. Moreover, Milton's poem features an omnipresent narrator who provides a running commentary on Satan's misrepresentation of reality. For example, when Satan approaches Eve in the garden in the guise of a snake, he is said to begin