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By Root 608 0

Hannah, physicians, and blustering weather something to the effect of, "or so I tell myself as I sit here and figure out how to subdue this proud beauty" (i.e., Clarissa). Because he does not say anything like it, we as readers have two options. We can make our lives easier and insist—in spite of the absence of any clear textual evidence—that Lovelace is ironic and knows it. We can remind ourselves that, after all, he is writing a letter to one of his friends and admirers and thus has to sustain his tone of swaggering self-assurance in order to impress his addressee. We can hope that this addressee, John Belford, is such a close friend that Lovelace can count on Belford's knowing which of his bizarre claims should be taken at their face value and which should not. Thus, with a bit of effort, we can read all this comforting information into the text and decide that Lovelace is joking. Alternatively—and much less comfortably—we can remain suspended in a state of uncertainty, not quite understanding how seriously we should take anything that Lovelace says at this point.

Moreover, as the story goes on, Richardson begins to downright ply us with similar instances of Lovelace's conflating his version of reality with reality itself and forcefully imposing his conflation on his audience. (One effect of such a conflation is that we begin to experience a feeling of mental vertigo not dissimilar to the one induced upon Clarissa, who is not able to tell, at least for a while, what is really going on around her.) Soon after the failed Miss Partington ploy, Lovelace conceives of another stratagem, different in design but tending to the same end. The women of the house are instructed to start a small, manageable fire in the middle of the night, a fire that could be easily put out, but not before the terrified and half-dressed Clarissa unlocks her door and steps out, afraid of being burned. Then Lovelace can enter her room on the pretence of saving her and calming her down, and stay in that room for the rest of the night.

At the appointed hour, as Lovelace sits at his writing-desk rereading a letter from his friend, he hears a commotion outside his rooms, the first stirrings of the "fire" scenario that he had himself carefully planned with the women of the house. Here is Lovelace's account of his immediate reaction:

Soft, oh virgin saint, and safe as soft be thy slumbers!—

. . . But, what's the matter! What's the matter! What a double—But

the uproar abates! What a double coward am I?—Or is it that I am taken

in a cowardly minute? for heroes have their fits offear; cowards their brave

moments; and virtuous ladies, all but my Clarissa, their moment

critical—

But thus coolly enjoying thy reflections in a hurricane!—Again the

confusion's renewed!—

What! Where!—How came it!—

Is my beloved safe!—

Oh wake not too roughly my beloved!—(722)

To understand how the passage works our metarepresentational ability, we first need to realize that Lovelace is uncharacteristically nervous about the immediate prospect of forcing himself into a young woman's bed. Hence every mention of "confusion," "hurricane," and the "uproar" can be read as describing both the fake turmoil among the inhabitants of the house prompted by the fake fire and the real turmoil in Lovelace's soul.

Lovelace is surprised by his feelings—"What's the matter? . . . What a double coward am I?"—and wants to rally his spirit. One way of psyching himself up for going through with his plan is to work himself into the state of mind of somebody who is as surprised and frightened by the fire as Clarissa herself is. If Lovelace can convince himself that he and Clarissa were thrown together in the middle of the night by the accident and not by his premeditated plan, it would be easier for him to act more naturally in Clarisssa's room, thus taking some edge off his presently unbearable anxiety. (Believing in one's own lie could be cognitively liberating because it frees up the energy spent on processing that extra level of metarepresentational framing stipulated by oneself as a source