Reading Clarissa by William Beatty WarnerReview by: Michael IrwinThe Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 34, No. 133 (Feb., 1983), pp. 76-78Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/517170 .

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pageantry earlier in the reign, which at first sight appears a bland celebration of Merrie England and the Virgin Queen, on closer inspection reveals more critical elements, and a similar approach to the entertainments of the I 590 might yield interesting results. Dr Wilson is apparently sceptical of the value of closely topical readings, but it would have been useful if she had at least mentioned one of the few critical studies of any of the pageants she prints, Harry H. Boyle's reading of the Elvetham entertainment (Studies in Philology, 68, I97I). The book would have been more helpful as an introduction to Elizabethan entertainments if the bibliography had been more comprehensive. Editing these entertainments must be a frustrating task, for on the one hand they are so lightweight as to make extensive annotation seem cumbersome, but on the other hand they present major difficulties when it comes to details of text and context. But if these entertainments are worth our interest they are worth being edited thoroughly. Dr Wilson has at least made some of the texts more accessible and her lengthy introductory essay assembles a great deal of information about the social context of Elizabethan pageantry. DAVID NORBROOK

Reading Clarissa. By WILLIAM BEATTY WARNER. Pp. xiv + 274. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, I979. ?I2'30 net. To facilitate broad summary Professor Warner's thesis can be separated

into three distinct, if closely related, phases. The first of these outlines his own reading of Clarissa. Essentially he is asserting that the very substance of the novel is made up of conflicting interpretations-most notably those of Lovelace and of Clarissa herself. Each strives for self-justification and for mastery by insisting on the primacy of a single 'reading' of the events that have constituted their relationship: 'Clarissa's chief projection of her self, and Lovelace's displacements of her, have been representations and counter-representations-attempts by each to win a decisive battle in a war of meaning.' Mr Warner argues vigorously against the orthodox view that the heroine's 'representations' must ultimately prevail. Her attempt to pattern her experiences into the form of a book, 'an inevitable-looking cause-and-effect sequence that sweeps her toward death', involves a crucial distortion, a repression of 'the contingent moments of the past, the chancy moments in the genuine proposal scenes where the story of Clarissa and Lovelace suddenly opens out to comedy and love'. As Mr Warner sees the novel, 'the predominance of comedy or tragedy is fundamentally arbitrary and depends upon the force of the interpretive pressures that Clarissa and Lovelace bring to bear on a situation open to both'.

Mr Warner then moves outside the text to describe Richardson's own attempt to control the response to his novel by anticipating and manipulat- ing the reactions of his readers. There is an apt summary of the novelist's exchanges with Joseph Spence, Aaron Hill, and Lady Bradshaigh about the direction and resolution of the work-exchanges which, in Mr Warner's

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view, 'replay the interpretive struggle within the novel between Clarissa and Lovelace, and deepen our understanding of the sources and significance of that struggle'. Lady Bradshaigh, a deft and formidable adversary, proposes a 'happy ending' that can assimilate even the rape. Her suggestion is necessarily 'an interpretation of the text'. Feeling 'that the love, marriage, and good feelings invoked by the novel are more important than the violence and ill will that add shades of darkness to the story ... she constructs her ending accordingly'. In response to what he saw as radical misreadings Richardson revised and later amplified his text. In effect he colludes with Clarissa by sustaining and reinforcing her own interpretation of her history.

Finally, Mr Warner defines and denounces what he calls the 'humanist' interpretation of Clarissa. The commentators concerned range from Fielding and Diderot in the eighteenth century to Ian Watt and Mark Kinkead-Weekes in the twentieth. Such critics wish 'to use literature in general, and Clarissa in particular, to enforce a particular conception of man, and to uplift and "humanize" the reader'. While dissenting from the author's programme on certain points they reassert the partial views of Clarissa and her creator. Mr Warner does belatedly concede that 'it is not easy to move outside the system of knowing and feeling and valuing called humanism'. He could hardly do otherwise, since his own rehabilitation of Lovelace and condemnation of Richardson's revisions depend largely on 'humanist' criteria. None the less he rejects 'the humanist's way of reading Clarissa'-a reading that in his view suppresses certain aspects of the text, is hypocritical, authoritarian, and reductive. Above all the humanist, unlike the frank and fearless Marquis de Sade, timidly refuses to acknowledge the enjoyment he derives from 'the pathos of Clarissa's rape and death'.

This is a lively, combative book, to be welcomed as an attempt to instigate the sort of bare-knuckle critical scrap that used to be waged over Paradise Lost. But Mr Warner would have to dispose of numerous preliminary objections before the dispute proper could commence. His reading-no doubt in the interest of dialectical clarity-is resolutely literal and ahistorical. He refuses to admit as a premiss an acknowledgement of Christian belief. He concedes almost nothing to literary convention, to the peculiar moral demands of an eighteenth-century literary audience, or to Richardson's technical difficulties with a new form. There is an awkward silence about a crucial issue of authorial privilege. He cites the example of 'aggressive restoration' of paintings in the National Gallery, where the 'restoring hand' may 'serve its own idea of an artwork's form and meaning'. But what if the 'restorer' is the artist himself?

Much of the thesis is methodologically dubious. Mr Warner tends to denounce his 'opponents' by the simple subterfuge of pejorative definition, or by the subtler one of translating a complex issue into speciously simple conceptual or metaphorical terms and proceeding to resolve it, thus conveniently redefined, to his own satisfaction. More crucially his un- willingness to accept that the rape is a determining act causes him tacitly to reduce Lovelace's crime to the status of a bad move at chess. When he falls

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back on Lovelace's reading of Clarissa's downfall (Everyman iii. 3I6-I7), his comments display a related tone-deafness. In emancipating himself from 'humanism' he seems to have entered no man's land. The good arguments in this book are not merely obscured but contaminated by the bad ones. MICHAEL IRWIN

Thomas Gray: His Life and Works. By A. L. LYTTON SELLS, assisted by IRIS LYTTON SELLS. Pp. x + 294. London: George Allen & Unwin, I980. ?I2'95 net. This embarrassing book, damaging to both its author and its subject,

should not have been published. Professor Sells died in 1978 well into his eighties, and though this fact should temper criticism his book amounts to such a sustained calumny on the character and writings of Gray that it would be wrong to draw a respectful veil over its ineptness.

It takes the shape of one of Johnson's Lives, the first half biography, the second a consideration of the works (poetry, translations, letters, scholar- ship), but the author writes with one advantage which Johnson did not enjoy: 'undertaking the present work with no great previous knowledge of Gray, and very little knowledge of his verse, I have been able to approach him with an open mind' (p. vii). Sadly, Mr Sells's mind is far from open; all is narrowed down to his assertion that Gray's life and works are one-weak, narrow, and indecisive. To this end the poet's letters are meticulously gutted to present him in an unattractive light, and the poetry is ransacked for 'plagiarism' (the author's word for allusion).

The early Cambridge letters easily yield innuendo and ridiculous wit, but the author's tactics are most audacious when Gray travels through Europe. The romantic Grande Chartreuse is described in a lengthy extract from Walpole, while Gray's own famous letter is ignored as 'more "literary" and calculated'. It is through Walpole's eyes that we reach Italy, and while we learn that Gray was enraptured by his first sight of the Mediterranean it is only a parenthetical joke which is quoted. There is no sense that Gray's Italian visit had changed him in any way, and one must turn back to R. W. Ketton-Cremer's expert biography for a sense of what this event, and the many others of his life, really meant to him. The poet's letter to West (2I

April 74I) assessing the changes in his own character is significantly ignored. Gray has to endure the author's no-nonsense moralizing and is regularly

castigated for his personal failings. We are told that he suffered from 'an aridity of the affections', 'a deficiency of heart', that he 'appears to have felt no love for any one person after the death of West' (p. 247). Consequently Gray's passionate friendship in 1 769-70 with the young Bonstetten is subtly underplayed. (Ketton-Cremer's telling of the same story achieves much more impact.) This supposed heartlessness is glimpsed even in the 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat' ('the death of a pet is not usually regarded as an occasion for pleasantries').

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