Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson

Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson is a collection of fourteen essays that first appeared in Eighteenth Century Fiction from 1989-1999. In spanning this decade of ECF's publication, the scope of the compilation is at once wide-ranging-as it provides a variety of perspectives on each of Richardson's novels and a sense of some of the major arguments in recent Richardson criticism-and narrow in that the essays contained in the book are primarily contextual or historicized interpretations, with less literary theory informing the readings than one might hope to find. However, this quality does not diminish the significance of the collection to the rapidly growing field of Richardson studies as much as it broadens the scope of its accessibility and usefulness; the complex and often fascinating essays not only offer students a better sense of the eighteenth-century context in which Richardson produced his novels, but also provide students and scholars with complicated, engaging arguments by several influential recent Richardson scholars. While there is a greater concentration on Clarissa scholarship in the volume, the collection includes intriguing essays on Pamela, one study of Pamela II, and several essays on Sir Charles Grandison. Beyond the collection's other merits, the latter section on Grandison offers a much-needed critical revival of Richardson's final novel that significantly complicates Richardson scholarship.

The collection considers Samuel Richardson's novels chronologically, the first section accordingly focused on Pamela. Two essays in this section examine Pamela's relationship to the politics of print culture. Through an analysis of Pamela's remarkable literacy and her "textual authority" -specifically the text's empirical claim to historicity, its emotional veracity and the moral authenticity created by frequent allusion to the Christian bible and to Aesop's Fables-John Pierce explores the power Pamela gains as both reader and writer in emergent print culture. In "'Ciceronian Eloquence': The Politics of Virtue in Richardson's Pamela," John Dussinger examines Richardson's career as a London printer, particularly the years during which Richardson printed "the chief organ of propaganda for the Walpole government-the Daily Gazetteer" - hypothesizing a distinct connection between the political "power of the written word" in Richardson's career and Pamela's story (35, 51). Through an analysis of the dynamics of desire and resistance in the novel and in Richardson's life, Dussinger shows how virtue becomes profitable for both Richardson and Pamela. In a fascinating and highly convincing argument, Albert Rivero examines the placement of the 'poor Sally Godfrey' episode in Pamela, reading the novel's conclusion against the grain Richardson "auspiciously" offers us-the crystalline lessons of Sally's errors in judgment and a smooth resolution of the plot through her quiet, appropriate disposal-preferring instead to be "suspicious" of the ideological underpinnings inherent in its providential closure and the eleventh-hour revelation of the affair. Finally, Betty Schellenberg's "Enclosing the Immovable: Structuring Social Authority in Pamela 2" attempts to recover Richardson's sequel to Pamela from critical disfavor, arguing that what may appear as a lack of vitality in the sequel is in fact Richardson's formal attempt to "[stabilize] Pamela's comic plot" and "resolve tensions its author has most often been seen to avoid or mismanage" (75). Schellenberg's compelling analysis argues that "[t]his purportedly plot-less, directionless" novel functions conservatively to reinvest authority in the figure of Pamela and thus to "[control] the forces of individualistic desire by drawing the other characters into an admiring and imitative orbit around her" where "[p]otentially disruptive social energies . . . are either concentrated according to the terms of Pamela's discourse or deflected and excluded from her circle" (75-6).

The first three of six articles in the collection's Clarissa section are primarily concerned with overt political and economic issues of passion and virtue, while the latter three examine the more implicitly ideological religious themes in the novel. In "Protean Lovelace," Jocelyn Harris sees Clarissa as Richardson's portrait of two competing philosophies, "Hobbism and Christian Platonism," drawn between the mutability that characterizes Lovelace and the stability of Clarissa. Harris's intriguing study analyzes Lovelace's character through both the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and the libertine life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and connects Clarissa with ideologies present in the work of Mary Astell and Edmund Spenser. For Rachel Carnell, it is the political debate between social contract theorist John Locke and divine right apologist Robert Filmer that aptly characterizes Clarissa's struggle over the tyranny of Lovelace and the Harlowes. In Carnell's reading, Clarissa's public, epistolary revelation of both her rape and her family's hypocrisy allows her to "[redefine] the public sphere not merely as a means of criticizing tyranny in the state but as a means of protesting against abuses of power in the household as well" (133). Ultimately, Carnell argues that Richardson's novel questions the exclusion of women from the public sphere at the same time that it obscures the fundamentally political nature of "both domestic fiction and the literary public sphere" (134). In a groundbreaking article titled "Is Clarissa Bourgeois Art?," Daniel Gunn complicates the longstanding critical perception of the novel as an ideological struggle between middle-class and aristocratic values, most prominently asserted by Christopher Hill and Terry Eagleton. Rather, Gunn contends that Clarissa's morality is best understood in terms of her station as a member of the ruling-class elite and that "Richardson's achievement, as an ideologue, was to equivocate between two repressive moral ideologies" through which he "helped the eighteenth-century ruling class to reimagine itself, during a period of economic change, without breaking sharply with its most valued traditions" (149-50). Gunn's engaging argument clearly represents the dynamic nature of Clarissa studies in recent years.

The latter three essays in the Clarissasection pay close attention to religious themes, considering broadly the ways that religion operates ideologically in specific gender and class-related modes. Peggy Thompson explores the ways in which the novel engages several contemporary theories of Christian atonement, concluding that Clarissa's development as a Christ figure reflects an anti-feminist reinscription of female identity Ellen Pollak calls the "myth of passive womanhood." In a less innovative essay titled "'Written in the Heart': Clarissa and Scripture," Robert Erickson examines Richardson's literary and religious influences, finding that the unique posture of a suffering Christian hero who is at once a woman and a writer and the novel's deployment of the 'heart' as a trope rework conventional Old Testament doctrines. Margaret Anne Doody loosens the long-standing traditional reading of the novel as flatly morally didactic and a wholesale endorsement of status quo Christianity. In "The Gnostic Clarissa," Doody locates a radical Gnostic strand in the novel. Exploring an extensive array of Gnostic source elements within Clarissa, Doody compellingly argues that, "Only by incorporating such a powerful choke-pear as the Gnostic symbolic system could Richardson's work resist the pressure of what convention and custom had made of Christianity as a set of rules making the poor and women know their place. . . . [T]his cosmic counter-story . . . fights against translating spiritual light into repressions defined as 'duty'" (224). Doody's inventive argument considerably revises the conventional assumption that the novel is an unambiguous type of Christian conduct manual.

Critics have long contended that "passion" is a far less prominent theme in Richardson's final novel Sir Charles Grandison than it is in Pamela and Clarissa, finding in Grandison a "lower emotional pitch" (Blewett 6) than Richardson's earlier works, due especially to the paradigmatically virtuous male protagonist and the novel's overt moralizing. The final section of this collection significantly complicates such criticism of the novel, making a case instead for Grandison's complex engagement with human passions. The titles of the final four essays collectively echo their original contributions to Richardson scholarship-phrases such as "body and character," "anxiety," "dialectic of love," and "language of nature" signal the way in which these essays challenge former critical estimations of Sir Charles Grandison. In "Sir Charles Grandison: Richardson on Body and Character" Juliet McMaster makes a case for Grandison's popularity among nineteenth century authors such as Jane Austen and George Eliot. McMaster gives detailed textual evidence from the novel to convincingly argue that not only is there an explicitness about the body and desire in Grandison, but that the emphasis is on the desire of female characters such as Harriet and Charlotte. Likewise, Lois Chaber attempts to revise formerly held critical assumptions about the novel, estimations that found Grandison to contain little psychological depth, simple optimism, and flat moral didacticism. Chaber stresses the presence of a sharp anxiety toward "the precariousness of human fate" (279) in Grandison, an anxiety she likens to the Anglican homiletic literature of Richardson's day, and through her reading effectively refutes traditional criticism of the novel.

In "The Dialectic of Love in Sir Charles Grandison," Wendy Jones finds that Grandison maps various types of love-romantic, erotic, companionate, sentimental-ultimately representing these categories as a dialectic resolved in the "rational passion" of sentimental love. Jones suggests that the novel is ideologically subversive because Richardson does notendorse emergent companionate marriage wholesale-rather, Richardson shows that the "completely 'voluntary passion'" of class-based companionate marriage "could never alter the social order" (308). Through the various types of love he portrays in the novel, Richardson sanctions the "erotics of virtue" intrinsic to sentimental love as a kind of marital love that contains the power to subvert rigid social structures. While erotic passion works integrally with personal merit in Jones' reading of Grandison, George E. Haggerty insists that passion is a virtue only when characters recognize and verbalize such private emotion. Haggerty argues that in learning "the language of nature," Grandison's characters are able to "redirect" the private pain or anxiety of their imaginations outward to a public realm, through which act deception is erased and community enhanced (331).

If there is anything lacking from this sweeping examination of contemporary Richardson criticism, it is perhaps less engagement with contemporary literary theory than characterizes much of the other recent work in the field. This does not, however, diminish the quality and significance of its contribution to Richardson scholarship, and in fact enhances its audience significantly-making the text a complex but accessible tool for undergraduate as well as graduate students. Thus, this unique and valuable collection offers a multifaceted, engaging picture of recent Richardson studies and will be an indispensable resource for scholars, teachers and students.