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Clarissa’s Painter: Portraiture, Illustration, and Representation in the Novels of Samuel Richardson (review)

seducer into marriage. In these cases, the seduction narratives themselves construct knowledge of the heart as necessary for protecting the heart and demonstrate that the self is dependent on the knowledge of prior narratives of seduction, contradicting the traditional dictum that reading novels of seduction can lead women astray. In her final chapter on the melodramatic tales of seduction that became popular during the 1790s, Binhammer traces the role that such narratives played in court trials. Such tales helped established the affective significance of a man having won a woman’s heart (whether or not he had physically seduced her) and influenced key court decisions offering financial compensation for women whose jilting suitors had broken their hearts. On the other hand, melodramatic seduction narratives also “point towards a new landscape of seduction for nineteenth-century women where,” as in the abridged versions of Clarissa, “the first step outside the path of virtue becomes imagined as also the last” (175). Binhammer’s work effectively counters Nancy Armstrong’s earlier Foucaultian analysis of the domestic woman choosing her own “sexual and domestic confinement” (2), although Binhammer does not refer to the portion of Armstrong’s analysis in which she argues that “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman” (Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], 8). Nevertheless, Binhammer’s book has implications that reach across the lines of gender and lay the groundwork for future studies, not only of the changing perceptions of women’s selfhood in the nineteenth century but also of parallel developments in male selfhood and emergent notions of the modern individual.