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Abstract
I take as my starting point Richardson's reference to John Norris of Bemerton (1656–1711) as “famous.” By tracing the effects of Norris's thought on Richardson and on figures with whom Richardson is often associated, I am able to place the novelist within a line of Christian-Platonist thinkers who shared important assumptions regarding the human being's relation to God. These assumptions, I contend, should not be relegated to the margins of scholarship, for they have important ramifications for our understanding of Richardson's masterpiece Clarissa (1747–48).
The first chapter focuses on Clarissa's implicit critique of a strictly Lockean empiricism. By bringing to bear on Clarissa Norris's neoplatonic distinction between the spiritual “senses” (which can lead to truth) and the physical “senses” (which tend to deceive), I suggest that Clarissa, like Mary Astell (1666–1731) before her, can be a “woman of sense” only by disavowing physicality.
The second chapter offers a historical defense of Clarissa's radically anti-secular Christian-Feminism. Clarissa's theologically empowered version of selfhood contrasts markedly with that of the ostensibly self-reliant, and ultimately disenfranchised, Lovelace. Richardson's Cartesian ideas about subjectivity led, not surprisingly, to his faith in the intellectual abilities of women, a faith he shared with women like Astell and Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806) and with men like Norris and William Law (1786–1761). Indeed, Richardson's interest in Elizabeth Carter's heavily Platonic “Ode to Wisdom,” which he inserted into the second volume of Clarissa, can be explained by his mistaken belief that the “Ode” had been penned by a female descendant of Norris.
The final chapter seeks to explain the problematic Providence of Clarissa by way of Norris's principle that all human beings exist, whether they know it or not “in” God, and God “in” them. Critics of Clarissa have often pointed to the lack of direct Providential intervention in the novel, or to what Leopold Damrosch has called the “deus absconditus” of Clarissa. By reading Clarissa in the context of the theological writings of Norris, Astell, and Law, and by considering Richardson's careful selection of like-minded Biblical passages to support his novel's theological import, a more complex understanding of God's “presence” in the world of the novel emerges, as well as an explanation for Richardson's decision to end the novel not with Clarissa's death, but with that of Lovelace.
