英文摘要 |
This paper studies the narrative strategy underlying Samuel Richardson‘s great fictional work—Clarissa. Demonstrating how Richardson puts the rape event to profitable use in his great scheme of moral reform, I contend that Richardson deploys sexual violence and counter advice to extirpate eroticism and to subvert aristocratic libertinism and bourgeois conformism. In so doing, Richardson challenges a long eighteenth-century tradition of abiding by public opinion, which advocates the marriage of the victim to her rapist, so long as the rapist is rich. The violent event of Clarissa‘s rape, long anticipated before the occurrence, reverberates throughout the remainder of the novel and serves as Richardson‘s praxis for the moralizing project of Christian reform. By having Clarissa reject over and over again the advice from her friends and relatives to marry Lovelace in order to superficially patch up an injured reputation post facto, Richardson overhauls predominant ideologies of aristocratic libertinism and bourgeois conformism with the help of sexual violence. The deployment of counter advice that Clarissa rejects repeatedly allows Richardson to establish new moral and behavioral guidelines with Clarissa, our paragon of virtue. Clarissa‘s refusal of Lovelace‘s marriage proposal categorically denigrates a long tradition of the marriage panacea frequently prescribed for violated virginity and proposes a closer match between moral theory and practice. Though Richardson‘s representation of Clarissa‘s rape might seem to be at odds with his moral reform, the presence of sexual violence and repeated negation of counter advice work subtly to exclude eroticism, libertinism, and conformity from his didactic scheme. |