• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 613 0

tag.) Consequently, when Lovelace wishes "soft slumber" to his Clarissa, he knows well that her slumber will be rudely interrupted this very minute, and yet he endeavors to sound as if he did not know it. Similarly, when Lovelace perks up at the noise and asks anxiously, "What's the matter? "What's the matter?" and then, when he does not hear anything else for a couple of seconds and notes with relief that "the uproar" has apparently "abated," he is faking the natural reaction of the person disturbed by strange sounds around the house but then lulled back to the feeling of security by the temporary quiet. When the "confusion's renewed," Lovelace responds as a man frightened and surprised anew ("What! Where!—How came it!"), moreover as a man who is so dedicated to his "beloved" that her safety is the

10: Richardon's Clarissa

first thing that comes into his mind even when his own life is apparently in danger ("Is my beloved safe!") and who is determined to spare her any unnecessary anxiety upon this life-threatening occasion ("Oh wake not too roughly my beloved!").

This sequence of spontaneous and noble emotional responses is, of course, the exact opposite of what must be really going on through Lovelace's head, for the whole point of the "fire" plot is to terrify and disorient Clarissa to such a degree that she would have no strength to withstand his sexual attack. But again, as in the earlier episode, in which Lovelace contemplates sending an assassin to Hannah, the text offers us no reassurance that he is consistently aware of his role-playing. He might be so in the beginning of the scene, when he comments first on his nervousness and then on his ability to "coolly" enjoy his "reflections in a hurricane"; but toward its end ("What! Where!—How came it!"), he has, as far as we know, completely taken on his make-believe personality. It might be that by the time Lovelace begins to implore some figment of his imagination ("Oh wake not too roughly my beloved"), he is thinking to himself, as it were, "I pretend that I am a perfect lover caught unawares by fire"— a metarepresentation with himself as a source of representation. But as readers we get very little indication that he is thinking this, and we see instead a man who appears, at least for the time being, to sincerely believe his own lie, an unreliable narrator par excellence.

One of the most striking instances of this elimination of himself as a source of his fantasies comes when Clarissa, shortly after the fire episode (which, indeed, frightens but does not subdue her) escapes the hateful brothel and breaks free of Lovelace. Though desperate at first at having lost the object of his obsession, Lovelace is soon cheered up by finding out that she is residing in the neighboring town of Hampstead (Clarissa cannot simply go back to her family because she has completely antagonized them by eloping with the rake). Lovelace is even disappointed at the ease with which he has located his victim: had she concealed herself better, his game of pursuit would have been more exciting.

As he is getting ready to go to Hampstead to retrieve Clarissa, Lovelace calls for the assistance of one of his numerous agents, a "vile and artful pander" to his "debaucheries" (38), Patrick MacDonald, a wanted criminal, kept from prosecution only through the intervention of the rich and well-connected Lovelace. MacDonald has earlier appeared before Clarissa in the guise of a respectable gentleman, one Captain Tomlinson, presumably sent by her uncle, Antony Harlowe. As the fake "Captain Tomlinson" claims, Mr. Harlowe wants to see his niece respectably married to the man (i.e., Lovelace), who, for all that the world knows, has already seduced her, as a prerequisite to negotiating the truce between Clarissa and her estranged parents. Mr. Harlowe has thus asked his dear old friend, the Captain, to meet with Mr. Lovelace and Clarissa and find out how the matters stand between them. All these are lies, of course, invented by Lovelace to subdue Clarissa. Lovelace brings in the sham Captain because he desperately