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the effect that Lovelace's peculiar brand of unreflective mind-reading has on the reader of the novel. Strictly speaking, I have already implicitly introduced the reader into the discussion above when I said that Lovelace happens to infer correctly Clarissa's mind in the Miss Partington episode. We know that Lovelace's inference is correct because we have access to Clarissa's letter to Anna Howe—in which Clarissa explains why she did not let Miss Partington share her bed—whereas Lovelace merely thinks that he is right simply because he is convinced that he is never wrong in his assessment of other people's mental states. In other words, we, the readers, are tacitly coerced by the novel into accepting Lovelace's assessment of Clarissa's thoughts as rather accurate, in fact, more accurate on many occasions than the assessment offered by Clarissa herself in her letters to Anna. Clarissa, after all, has to sound invariably proper and virtuous, whereas Lovelace is under no such obligation and can be as cynical and straightforward as he wishes.

Lovelace's fraught tendency to ignore himself as the source of his representations of the world thus becomes our tendency, too, especially in the early parts of the story, when we turn to his letters to find out what has really transpired.

Establishing Lovelace as a relatively trustworthy source of our representations—that is, drawing us into temporarily forgetting that his account of the events should be processed with a source tag, such as, "Lovelace claims that . . ."—is a crucial part of the metarepresentational game that the novel plays with the reader. The more we trust Lovelace as a privileged source of information, the greater is our shock and disorientation when in the second third of the novel we start coming across sentiments that imply that Lovelace may be losing it and, in fact, may have never had it together in the first place.

Here is one such moment. Clarissa's loyal servant Hannah had been earlier taken away from her. Lovelace has just heard that Hannah might be available once more to serve her lady. Lovelace cannot let her come near Clarissa because, to advance his scheme of seduction, he has to keep her friendless and surrounded by his agents. Lovelace muses in a letter to Belford:

I have just now heard that her Hannah hopes to be soon well enough to attend her young lady, when in London. It seems the girl has had no physician. I must send her one, out of pure love and respect to her mistress. Who knows but medicine might weaken nature, and strengthen the disease?—As her malady is not a fever, very likely it may do so—But perhaps her hopes are too forward. Blustering weather in this month yet— And that is bad for rheumatic complaints. (554)

Lovelace has been plotting and scheming, and manipulating everybody before, but this is the first time he contemplates sending an assassin (i.e., a doctor who would administer a poison) to do in an inconvenient person. But perhaps this is just an empty talk: he is simply kidding, keeping up the image of the All-Powerful Rake he's been cultivating in his letters to Belford. But does he know that he is kidding? Reading the passage, we get the unsettling impression that Lovelace might have temporarily lost the ability to experience the difference between the world as imagined by Lovelace—in which he is indeed the most gorgeous, powerful, and dangerous man alive, with corrupt doctors at his disposal and no law to stop him—and the world outside of his imagination. This impression becomes even stronger as we read on and realize that Lovelace implies that God

10: Richardon's Clarissa

himself, by ensuring that the weather stays "blustering," is helping Lovelace along in his plans.

Again, knowing Lovelace's lively sense of humor (of which he is inordinately proud, too), we may hope that he is joking when he makes God one of his agents. The passage, however, gives no positive reassurance to our hopes. Had Richardson intended to provide such a reassurance, it would have been easy enough. Lovelace could have added to his musings about