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Clarissa's Relics and Lyric Community

Samuel Richardson's Clarissa is, at core, a novel about the limits of emotional intimacy. From letter to letter, page to page, Richardson explores models of consensusÂ—literally, of feeling together, the true correspondence of hearts and minds. From the beginning, however, Clarissa is a story of intimacy thwarted and correspondence violated. The novel records Richardson's attempts to mold a language that can make his heroine's inner experience available to those outside, a language of feeling composed of words and images, patterns of expression and of thought, ways of imagining emotional communication and its lapses. As other critics have demonstrated, the novel's crisis develops from the emotional and physical isolation of its heroine. She is deprived of direct communication, shut off from the presence of her father and mother, her aunt, her nurse, all those closest to her. Believing that if "they did but know [her] heart" all would be well, Clarissa attempts to create a complete correspondence with her familyÂ—as Lovelace's false etymology would have it, a union of the heart.1 Desperate, afraid, she sends letters designed to show the extremity of her plight, to represent her emotional experience so that it can be felt and understood. But as the novel progresses, at moments of high emotional intensity, a true correspondence seems impossible. Letters fragment and are replaced by relics: the ten quasi-epistolary papers she writes in near-mad-