Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [54]
On the morning after the failed Miss Partington scheme, Lovelace asks Clarissa what it was that Miss Partington and Mrs. Sinclair wanted from her last night. He then reports in his letter to Belford that Clarissa "artfully made lighter of her denial of Miss for a bedfellow than she thought of it, I could see that; for it was plain she supposed there was room for me to think she had been either over -nice, or over-cautious' (552; emphasis in the original).
Note, first of all, the multiple levels of intentionality embedded in this sentence. We can map them as follows:
Lovelace intends Belford (and with him, the readers) to be believe that
10: Richardon's Clarissa
Clarissa did not want him to think that she did, in fact, suspect that he had some ulterior motives in having Miss Partington spend a night in her room.
Depending on how we count, this sentence embeds from four to six levels of intentionality. This, as I have argued in Part I, makes it somewhat more challenging for the reader and, subsequently, subtly heightens our admiration of the ease with which the clever and observant Lovelace can figure out what other people, including Clarissa, are thinking.
It is the tragedy of both Lovelace and Clarissa, however, that their occasionally accurate readings of each other's states of mind never translate into the actual meeting of the minds. Paradoxically, the better Lovelace "reads" Clarissa, the more persistently he misinterprets her and the more assuredly he embarks upon the course of action destined to destroy any chances for their happiness together. In this particular case, Lovelace uses his insight into Clarissa's fear and her reluctance to let him see her fear to justify his intensified plotting against her. As he reasons now in his imaginary conversation with her, "[S]ince thou reliest more on thy own precaution than upon my honour; be it unto thee as thou apprehendest, fair one!" (553).4
Needless to say, the more Lovelace plots, the less Clarissa wants to marry the heartless liar. This effectively renders impotent the main lever that Lovelace could hope to use to control her (and any other woman): his alleged intention to be "reformed" and to make the heroic woman who succeeds in reforming him his wife. Feeling how the source of power is slipping away from him, Lovelace grows both more desperate and cruel in his treatment of Clarissa, which, of course, makes her even more adamant in her decision to escape him.
Richardson's novel thus articulates, with a hitherto-unprecedented intensity and detail, the theme of the correlation between arduous mind-reading and tragic misunderstanding. Remaining prominent in the later-day novels adhering to what I call the Quixotic tradition, such as Lolita, this theme is inextricably bound with our metarepresentational ability. Mind-reading is a crucial aspect of our everyday existence, but a character too occupied with figuring out other people's states of mind, and, worse, flaunting his ability to "see though" other people, runs a grave metarepresentational danger: he can easily lose track of himself as the source of his representations of the other person's mental world. He may take what really is a ^^representation with himself as a source tag—for example, "/ think that Clarissa is blushing in response to my half-hearted marriage proposal because she badly wants to marry me, poor dear, but is ashamed to acknowledge it" (to paraphrase one of Lovelace's typical sentiments) as a representation without