Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock

Author(s): JOHN TRIMBLE

Source: Texas Studies in Literature and Language , Winter 1974, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter
1974), pp. 673-691
Published by: University of Texas Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40754289

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 JOHN TRIMBLE

Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock

all readers of The Rape of the Lock will remember clarissa, the
grave pundit of Hampton Court, whose elegant little lecture on good
humor1 touches off a mighty war of clapping fans and cracking whale-
bones. Apart from the delicious situational irony of that speech, we re-
member her chiefly because she is the poem's only character with a brain.
The other inhabitants of her toyshop society we merely laugh at. Clarissa,
though, we feel compelled to listen to. She alone possesses the sense to
discern that "frail Beauty must decay" (V.25), and that coquetry is ulti-
mately self-defeating; she alone understands the irresistible allure of
good humor, the enduring attraction of merit.
But she stands apart in other ways as well. Her unexpectedly solemn,
thoughtful manner, her serene self-assurance, her sensible priorities, her
hybrid awareness of the male and female points of view - all these make
her resemble a grown-up among children, a Houyhnhnm in Lilliput.
Even her very name, Clarissa, with its echo of claríssima, hints at her pre-
eminent illustriousness and clarity of vision. Perhaps the most impressive
credential she carries, however, is the editorial note to V.7, written by
either Pope or Warburton, pointedly identifying her as "A new Charac-
ter introduced in the subsequent Editions, to open more clearly the
Moral of the poem, in a parody of the speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus
in Homer."2

It is not surprising, then, that Pope authorities have reached an un-

usually solid consensus on Clarissa. Almost to a man, they regard her
character as unimpeachable. From this they infer that her rhetorical func-
tion is straightforward and that Pope's own moral viewpoint, all irony
finally aside, is actually rather clear-cut. But for the lone heretical voice

1 The Rape of the Lock, V.9-34. I am following the edition of Geoffrey Til-
lotson, ed., The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, by Alexander Pope, Twick-
enham Edition, II, 3d ed., rev. (London and New Haven, 1962). Line references
will be given parenthetically in the text.
2Tillotson, p. 199, explains that the 1736 edition carried only the last eleven
words of this note. The note as it now reads appeared first in the 1751 edition,
supervised by Warburton as a result of Pope's death in 1744. As Tillotson ob-
serves, the note contains a small inaccuracy: Clarissa was actually present even
in the first, abbreviated version of the poem, but had no speaking part then.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language
XV.4 (Winter 1974)

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674 JOHN TRIMBLE

of Rebecca Price Parkin stubbornly insisting that Clarissa is a fraud,3 they

tend to see her in Athena-like terms. Clarissa is, they assure us confident-
ly, "a true wisdom figure," Pope's "mouthpiece," the character "who
alone speaks only the truth," the poem's "clarifier,"4 and so on.
The representative phrases just quoted are themselves warning bells,
however, that possibly we have been too credulous in our response to
her. Were the poet not Pope, and were the poem not The Rape of the
Lock, such phrases as these might not sound so disturbingly incongruous.
But, on reflection, it is difficult to see how we can square them with the
well-substantiated warning uttered three decades ago by Geoffrey Tillot-
son, Twickenham editor of the poem: "The social mockery of the Rape
of the Lock is not simple, does not make a pat contribution to single-
mindedness. Its world is vast and complicated."5 If this is true, then it
would seem to be a case of supreme wishfulness, indeed of critical
double-think, to believe that at the thematic center of The Rapes vast
and complex world there exists so simply conceived and dependably wise
a moralist as Clarissa is reputed to be.
It becomes still harder to accept this view of her once one has made a
serious attempt to square it with the poem's governing conception of
women. As feminist readers are nowadays quick to point out, women are
consistently treated here with easy condescension. Still more, Pope laces
them into unflattering generic straitjackets - comic forerunners of what
he was later to term "Ruling Passions" - that leave virtually no room for
exceptional behavior. A single couplet will illustrate both points:
For when the Fair in all their Pride expire,
To their first Elements their Souls retire.
(1.57-58)

I shall have more to say about this momentarily. For the present it is
sufficient to remark that nothing in the poem prepares us for a female
"wisdom figure." Quite the contrary, it prepares us only to see women as
vain creatures "wondrous fond of Place" (III. 36).
Finally, one must reckon with the often-forgotten, disconcerting fact
that Clarissa is an accessory to the rape. It is she, after all, who provides
the Baron with the scissors. At the very least, then, her motives are
3 Rebecca Price Parkin, The Poetic Workmanship of Alexander Pope (Minne-
apolis, 1955), pp. 127 and 171.
4 Cleanth Brooks, "The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor, ' The Sewanee Review,
51 (1943), rpt. in The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), p. 83; Stanley
Edgar Hyman, "The Rape of the Lock" Hudson Review, 13 (I960), 411; Aubrey
Williams, "The Tall' of China and The Rape of the Lock" PQ, 41 (1962), 421;
and Murray Krieger, "The Trail China Jar' and the Rude Hand of Chaos," Cen-
tennial Review of Arts and Sciences, 5 (1961), 185.
5 Tillotson, p. 119.

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 Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock 675

doubtful; and if her motives are doubtful, so too might be her reliability
as a moralist.
We arrive, thus, at a critical crossroads. Our two options appear to be
these: either we cling to the traditional view of Clarissa, willingly closing
our eyes to the problems just noted, or else we try scaling down our ex-
pectations of her reliability, our hope being to perceive aspects of her
characterization that make her more consistent with the poem as a whole
and with herself. This essay will attempt to demonstrate the f ruitfulness
of the latter course.
Two recent critics of The Rape, J. S. Cunningham and G. S. Rousseau,
will serve us well as initial wayshowers, not so much for the arguments
they make as for the uncertainties they voice. Neither takes a firm critical
position on Clarissa - being slightly baffled by her, they offer only critical
probes and gropings - but essentially they stand midway between the
army of loyalists and Mrs. Parkin. That is, they accept Clarissa's choric
status in the poem, but they hear, or think they hear, ironic nuances in
her characterization that make her interestingly problematic. Cunning-
ham, for example, concludes his brief remarks with this observation:
"Clarissa's speech undoubtedly carries the 'moral' of the poem, touching
some of its deepest chords, while at the same time exhibiting the radical
limitations of even this degree of maturity in the society in which it is so
firmly set. She is in earnest, but well this side of asceticism."6 Beyond
this point, he does not go. Rousseau, meanwhile, maintains that Clarissa's
preeminent quality is her elusiveness. Pope, he says, leaves us guessing as
to the extent of his agreement with her ("an insoluble question") and
also as to the exact nature of her motives. Rousseau feels prepared to
draw only three conclusions about her characterization. First, much of
the responsibility for the reader's bafflement must be attributed to Pope
himself, who has "not given us any clue to Clarissa's character." Second,
"if she is not the final word, her contribution is no less important for its
not being absolute and final." And last, the poem, ultimately concerned
with defining " 'the true character of a lady,' " implies that, really, "the
perfect woman is a hybrid of Belinda and Clarissa."7
While Cunningham and Rousseau are finally pointing us in the right
direction, I think the poem allows us to make much more sense of Claris-
sa (and Pope's view of her social criticism) than either one of them sup-
poses. I contend that clues to her character are supplied, and that these

6 J. S. Cunningham, Pope: The Rape of the Lock, Barron's Studies in English

Literature, No. 2 (Great Neck, N.Y., 1961), p. 45.
7 G. S. Rousseau, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Rape of the
Lock: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969). All of the
above quotations are from pp. 9-11 of his "Introduction."

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676 JOHN TRIMBLE

clues, once recognized, will enable us to understand the governing princi-

ple of her personality. This in turn will enable us to make dramatic sense
of her inconsistencies and elusiveness, and also to understand why Pope
chose her as the poem's moralist. The end results of our study, I think,
will go well beyond merely a richer understanding of Clarissa. For a
close analysis of her reveals, in addition, not only important insights into
Pope's own moral position in the poem but also new evidence of his
remarkable artistic judgment and cleverness. Careful readers of Pope dis-
cover that he is always surprising them with his subtlety. Clarissa's char-
acterization holds a bundle of such surprises.

One of the chief features of The Rape is its social stereotyping of the
individual characters, a mode Pope first learned from the periodical es-
sayists and one that he was to employ with increasing skill throughout his
poetic career. He had evidently intuited a principle that Henri Bergson
was later to fashion into his major theory of comedy. In Bergson's words:

It is comic to fall into a ready-made category. And what is most comic of all
is to become a category oneself into which others will fall, as into a ready-
made frame; it is to crystallize into a stock character. Thus, to depict charac-
ters, that is to say, general types, is the object of high-class comedy.8

Pope, of course, depicts precisely such characters. Among the poem's

dramatis personae are the Baron, a type of the amorous, trophy-collecting
spark; Dapperwit and Sir Fopling, types of the witling and beau; Belin-
da, a type of the consummate coquette; Thalestris, a type of the "fierce
Virago" (V.37) or termagant; and Sir Plume, a type of the senile, vain
old blusterer. Pope's consistent typing suggests that Clarissa, too, was
probably conceived as a particular comic type. This conclusion becomes
inescapable when one looks anew at Ariel's account of the reincarnation
of women.
All women, he informs Belinda, fall into one of four categories, a doc-
trine analogous to the Renaissance theory of Humors:
For when the Fair in all their Pride expire,
To their first Elements their Souls retire:
The Sprights of fiery Termagants in Flame
Mount up, and take a Salamanders Name.
Soft yielding Minds to Water glide away,
And sip with Nymphs, their Elemental Tea.
The graver Prude sinks downward to a Gnome,
In search of Mischief still on Earth to roam.

8 Henri Bergson, "Laughter," in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher, Doubleday Anchor

Edition (Garden City, N.Y, 1956), p. 157.

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 Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock 677

The light coquettes in Sylphs aloft repair,

And sport and flutter in the Fields of Air.
(1.57-66)

The "first Elements*' of Belinda and Thalestris are transparently clear

from this. Clarissa's first Element, however, does not become apparent
(and then only to the careful reader) until V.7, where Pope tellingly
introduces her as "grave Clarissa" "Grave/* it should be noted, is almost
always a singularly damaging epithet in Pope's poetry. In The Dunciad,
for example, Dulness, daughter of Chaos and eternal Night, is described
as "Gross as her sire, and as her mother grave" (1.14). In the Epistle to
Cobham the foolish and hypocritical epicure, Catius, is described as "ever
moral, ever grave" (1. 136). In his lovely tribute to Mrs. Howard, On a
certain Lady at Court, gravity is linked with pride: "Not warp'd by Pas-
sion, aw* d by Rumour, / Not grave thro' Pride, or gay thro' Folly." In
The Rape of the Lock, as we have just seen, gravity (with its punning
Latinate connotations of "heaviness" and "unwholesomeness" ) explic-
itly marks the prude: "The graver Prude sinks downward to a Gnome, /
In search of Mischief still on Earth to roam."9 But the adjective "grave"
is not the only indicator of Clarissa's first Element. Confirmation comes
when she is called "Prude" (V.36) outright by Thalestris immediately
following her lecture. It is a charge no less accurate for all its undertones
of cattiness. The overriding suggestion of cattiness is strategically essen-
tial, however, if Pope is to keep Clarissa's motives delicately muted, as I
shall explain later.
But why, one may fairly ask, would Pope choose a prude to introduce
the poem's "Moral"? Several considerations probably dictated that
choice. First was the matter of dramatic appropriateness. As he well
knew, accomplished prudes have traditionally made it their business to
trade in the "right" sentiments. They are self-appointed custodians of
propriety and good form, knowing at any point what the canons of deco-
rum require. Moreover, in order to maintain their exalted position (in
their own eyes as well as in others' ) , they find it necessary now and again
to remind us of their wisdom, and gravely remind us that we lack it. If
it was dramatically appropriate for a prude to be the one to instruct wom-
ankind how to think and behave, it was also, Pope surely realized, artis-
tically expedient in this case. This brings us to the second consideration.
A major problem facing him was how to "open more clearly" (as the
note to V.7 puts it) a different moral universe from Belinda's without

9 Lest we ignore the implications of this fate, let us recall the Umbriel is just
such a former prude turned gnome. As a consequence he traffics with Spleen, the
antithesis of the good humor that Clarissa celebrates with such incongruous - but,
from a more knowing viewpoint, apt - solemnity.

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678 JOHN TRIMBLE

violating the studied ambiguity and lightness of manner that he had

adopted. As ironic narrator he plainly could not introduce his Spectator-
type ethic himself. His sole option was to employ a speaking character;
and the only character fitted for the task was a prude, for only a prude
among his beau monde would be both properly "schooled" and out-
spoken.
Still other reasons for his choosing a prude doubtless entered in. For
example, judging from his lifelong abhorrence of the species, one can
imagine his relishing the comic opportunities Clarissa would provide.
Through her he could dramatize prudery in action - showing us, say, the
prude's false piety, her native cunning, her primly self-righteous sermon-
izing, her artfully nuanced discourse with its lethal hints and exclama-
tions. In addition, employing a prude would enable him to open two
related morals that were never far from his mind: first, that intelligence
divorced from good nature is a barren asset; second, that actions speak
more convincingly than words. Finally, if presented with her prudery
discreetly veiled, she would enable him to sustain and enrich the already
richly paradoxical mode of the poem. This last point deserves expansion.
Dorothy Van Ghent, in her discussion of Don Quixote, analyzes the
repeated use that Cervantes made of paradox, "a concentrated opposition
of two outlooks or views both of which [have] to be held in the mind at
once without a discarding of either one." The literary value of paradox,
she observes, is that it honors the felt complexity of experience. So, too,
with parody, which "might be thought of as a vast complicated system
of paradoxes":
Instead of confronting two opposing views with each other, in order that a
decision between them be arrived at, parody is able to intertwine many feelings
and attitudes together in such a way that they do not merely grapple with each
other antagonistically but act creatively on each other, establishing new syn-
theses of feeling and stimulating more comprehensive and more subtle percep-
tions. Parody - except that of the crudest kind - does not ask for preferential
judgments and condemnations. It is a technique of presentation: it offers a
field for the joyful exercise of perception and not a platform for derision.10

Mrs. Van Ghent's observations describe with special aptness, it seems to

me, what we discover in The Rape. Throughout the poem, as critics have
shown, Pope simultaneously celebrates and trivializes. Augustan high
society is felt to be both an accomplishment and a trifle; Belinda is both
a goddess and a silly flirt, and so on. We are plainly not in an either/or
world here. Instead, we are invited to adopt a continuously double per-

10 Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York,
1953), pp. 11, 12, and 13 respectively.

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 Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock 679

spective, to delight in the moral and social ambiguities we elsewhere

tend to close our minds to. Real life and real people, someone once re-
marked, are mixed cases. Pope undertook the task of dramatizing for us
the highly mixed nature of the beau monde.
Given the kind of world he was depicting and the ambiguous attitude
he chose to adopt toward it, it is altogether fitting (as I shall demon-
strate) that the poem's moralist, Clarissa, be touched with both sub-
limity and comicality, that she preach a generally sound moral only to
be herself implicated by it as well, that she inflame as she pacifies. To
see her purely as a saint is to ignore her conspicuous lack of tact, her
hypocrisy, her hauteur, her ill-concealed delight in triumph. Conversely,
to see her purely as a repugnant prude is to ignore her sanity, her grasp
of basic realities such as the transience of beauty, her laudable apprecia-
tion of good sense and good humor, her forthrightness. The careful
reader will find himself maneuvered into seeing her both ways simul-
taneously, a paradox incarnate: unusually discerning and sympathetic on
the one hand, unctuously devious and self-interested on the other.

These general remarks being made, I should like now to follow

Clarissa through the poem and suggest the kinds of responses that her
characterization as a prude and her set speech call for. It is essential, I
might say at the outset, that we view her as a dramatic character in her
own right interacting with the other players in the drama. To view her
otherwise - for example, as a mock-heroic device conceived merely to
point a moral - is to view her artifically in vacuo and to ignore the many
patently dramatic elements in the poem. The Rape keeps insisting osten-
sibly that this whole episode is high drama; ironically, that it is an elabo-
rate comedy of manners. Let us, then, take the characters as the players
they are, keeping in mind that they function within a social and dramatic
context. And since they act, let us assume that this most correct of poets
took care to assign them sound motivation and that he had clear notions
as to their respective psychologies.
The game of ombre, one of the chief metaphors of the poem, vividly
dramatizes the battle of the sexes. At the same time, however, it draws
our attention to the psychological games that are components of the
larger battle - contests of adroitness and craft such as are proper to
gamesmanship. Most of these battles are between belle and beau, of
course, but not all. Here, for example, is the secretly jealous Thalestris,
who would wish her prophecies about Belinda might be self-fulfilling:

Methinks already I your Tears survey,

Already hear the horrid things they say,

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68O JOHN TRIMBLE

Already see you a degraded Toast,

And all your Honour in a Whisper lost !
(IV.107-110)

Thalestris' speech comically reminds us that there are equally lively wars
going on between members of the same sex. The exclusively female
contest of principal concern here is that between Belinda and Clarissa,
the one a coquette who thrives on conquest and carefully controlled flir-
tations, the other, for all her sanity, at heart a prude who thrives on
piety and moral imperialism. In actuality, the two are not so very differ-
ent. Being women, both are "wondrous fond of Place" (III.36). If
Ariel has successfully urged Belinda to "Hear and believe! thy own Im-
portance know" (1.35), Umbriel has doubtless at some time whispered
similar advice in Clarissa's ear. Belinda's strong suit is her physical at-
tractiveness, whereas Clarissa's is her unimpeachable respectability. The
one seeks ascendancy through beauty and the indiscriminate bestowal of
her charm; the other seeks it through her reputation for rectitude and
the formidable gravity of her manner. Both perform the Rites of Pride,
but each in her own way. One can see how, viewed generically as social
types, they are natural enemies. While the coquette is tantalizing each
passing spark, the imperious prude is at her elbow solemnly insinuating
to her and the world that she is nothing but an empty-headed flirt a few
years away from spinsterhood. Likewise, while the prude is grandly
lecturing on the indispensability of Sense and Merit, across the room the
coquette sits blithely amid a cloud of beaux, for awhile yet, at least, "The
wise Man's Passion, and the vain Man's Toast" (V.10).
Is it this jealousy, this natural rivalry between prude and coquette,
that prompts Clarissa to take "arms" against Belinda midway through
the third Canto? Pope, with his studied ambiguity, teasingly withholds
an outright explanation, but he doesn't really need to give one. If we
read closely, Clarissa's act speaks for itself, proclaiming female jealousy
disguised as practical joking:
But when to Mischief Mortals bend their Will,
How soon they find fit Instruments of 111 Î
Just then, Clarissa drew with tempting Grace
A two-edged Weapon from her shining Case;
So Ladies in Romance assist their Knight,
Present the Spear, and arm him for the Fight.
(III.125-13O)

Now those critics who view Clarissa as a paragon have a rather obvious
problem with this passage. That problem is how to reconcile her covert
complicity with the Baron with her later seemingly high-minded sermon

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 Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock 68 i

to Belinda. On the face of it she appears to be two different people.

Aside from ignoring this passage (which they invariably do), their only
resort is to read Clarissa solely as a mock-heroic device, thereby with-
holding any psychology from her and, in effect, solving the problem
even before it arises. But it is a palpably expedient solution. It cheapens
the poem, it insults Pope, it overlooks Clarissa's characterization as a
grave prude, and it quite ignores the nuances of the phrase "with tempt-
ing Grace."
If, on the other hand, we don't insist that Clarissa come out looking
like a saint, the passage presents no problems whatsoever. Indeed, it is
perfectly consistent with her implied character as a prude. Earlier Ariel
had explained that, after death, the prude "sinks downward to a Gnome,
/ In search of Mischief still on Earth to roam." Here is an example
of the kind of mischief that Clarissa, once a gnome, will continue to
revel in. Significantly, the cue- word "Mischief* is used again in the
couplet introducing this vignette. As her later speech makes evident,
Clarissa knows that Belinda's face is her career. She knows, too, that she
cannot compete with her as a belle. The rape, then, will be her means
of making Belinda lose face (humiliation being the greatest of all catas-
trophes to such a one) as well as her means of forcing a confrontation
with Belinda on a plane where she has certain hope of victory.
The passage is, among other things, a parody of Eve's temptation of
Adam "with Female charm" {Paradise Lost, IV.999) . By implication, the
lock is the Baron's forbidden fruit. Pope humorously casts Clarissa as a
provocateur who "with tempting Grace" has mastered the arts of subtle
manipulation and intrigue, and who knows perfectly well what will
ensue. "Arm him for the Fight" makes her intent reasonably explicit.
Her subtlety of manner, together with her excellent choice of "Knights,"
allows us to assume that Pope understands her as cleverly intuiting what
events in fact later confirm: the Baron is a trophy-hunter who can be
counted on to seize the opportunity she will create, and a conspirator
who will gloatingly shoulder full responsibility, thereby leaving her look-
ing like a blameless spectator. Pope insinuates, further, that Clarissa is
interested in the amorous attentions of the Baron no less than in the
humiliation of Belinda: "So Ladies in Romance assist their Knight." This
line opens the possibility of a sexual rivalry between the two women
over and above their social rivalry. We are already beginning to see,
then, that Clarissa is not so detached from the beau monde, least of all
Belinda, as she would later have us believe.
At this point we take leave of her. Unobtrusively and quickly as she
had entered, she now fades into the background, presumably just as she
would wish it, biding her time, collecting her sentiments. A Canto and

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682 JOHN TRIMBLE

a half later, with victory there for the taking, she suddenly reappears.
Belinda has just lost her lock, and, being a well-bred young lady, is
properly engrossed in playing the role of indignant virgin that society
expects of her, mourning loudly her betrayed Honor, cursing her unlucky
fate, uttering fears that the rude rape may now invite yet another -
clearly a virtuoso performance by a seasoned actress. The "pitying Audi-
ence" (V.I) about her, meanwhile, is dissolved in sympathetic tears.
With the world temporarily standing still and a vacuum waiting to be
filled, enter grave Clarissa, the very picture of calm self-possession:

Then grave Clarissa graceful wav'd her Fan;

Silence ensu'd, and thus the Nymph began.
(V.7-8)

While this may lack the splendor of Belinda's nautical arrival in Canto
II, connoisseurs of grand moments will appreciate the perfection of tim-
ing and gesture that Clarissa demonstrates here. Belinda is her only
significant rival. Belinda can smile and make the whole world gay, or
show chagrin and give half the world the spleen. But Pope implies that
Clarissa, though operating on a less sublime scale, is equally effective
within her sphere. With her grave mien and a mere imperative flick of
her fan - the spoken word being as unnecessary to this imposing woman
as to Belinda - she can dry up tears and command immediate silence.
And, as we learn before she has made her final exit, when given an oc-
casion appropriate to the full use of her declamatory accomplishments,
she can even eclipse the nymph whose eyes eclipse the day.
Here, then, is Clarissa's famous speech, the thematic center of the
poem:

Say, why are Beauties prais'd and honour'd most,

The wise Man's Passion, and the vain Man's Toast?
Why deck'd with all that Land and Sea afford,
Why Angels call'd, and Angel-like ador'd?
Why round our Coaches crowd the white-glov'd Beaus,
Why bows the Side-box from its inmost Rows ?
How vain are all these Glories, all our Pains,
Unless good Sense preserve what Beauty gains:
That Men may say, when we the Front-box grace,
Behold the first in Virtue, as in Face !
Oh ! if to dance all Night, and dress all Day,
Charm'd the Small-pox, or chas'd old Age away;
Who would not scorn what Huswife's Cares produce,
Or who would learn one earthly Thing of Use?
To patch, nay ogle, might become a Saint,
Nor could it sure be such a Sin to paint.

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 Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock 683

But since, alas ! frail Beauty must decay,

Curl'd or uncurl'd, since Locks will turn to grey,
Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade,
And she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid;
What then remains, but well our Pow'r to use,
And keep good Humour still whate'er we lose?
And trust me, Dear! good Humour can prevail,
When Airs, and Flights, and Screams, and Scolding fail.
Beauties in vain their pretty Eyes may roll;
Charms strike the Sight, but Merit wins the Soul.
(V.9-34)

Clarissa's speech reveals her to be not so much a moralist as an in-

stinctive opportunist - or, if we wish to put a gentler light on it, a social
pragmatist. That is, she espouses virtue ("good Sense/' "good Humour,"
"Merit") less for its own sake than for its practical advantages. What
she says here is that beauty is a fine advantage since it is a form of power
that commands blandishments ("Glories") from doting men; and it
would suffice - suffice quite well, in fact - were it not subject to the in-
exorable law of nature ("all shall fade"). But since it is so subject, and
because to ignore this reality is to die a powerless maid, women must
learn to use their power well. They do that by cultivating good humor,
another form of power that goes on winning much longer. Virtue, in
short, pays.
In keeping with the paradoxical mode of the poem, her sentiments
are susceptible to opposing readings. From one point of view, they make
excellent sense. Frail beauty will decay, thus setting a temporal limit on
the success of coquetry and charms, whereas good humor does not.
Realism dictates, then, that women cultivate the virtue that blooms for-
ever. Indeed, experience corroborates Clarissa's point that good humor
can prevail even when beauty is in its prime. In view of this logic, it is
appropriate that she uses good sense and good humor almost interchange-
ably: good sense dictates good humor and good humor helps make possi-
ble good sense. Here Pope and Clarissa undeniably walk on common
ground, for Pope himself celebrated both virtues - earlier in his Epistle
to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture (11. 57-68), later in his
Epistle to a Lady (11. 289-292), and indeed also at the time of The
Rapes publication. In his dedicatory letter to Arabella Fermor, he an-
nounces that the poem "was intended only to divert a few young Ladies,
who have good Sense and good Humour enough, to laugh not only at
their Sex's little unguarded Follies, but at their own." The poem came
into being precisely because the Fermors and Petres, temporarily forget-
ting their good sense and good humor, chose to treat a prank with im-

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684 JOHN TRIMBLE

moderate seriousness; and the poem itself appeals to both qualities in the
reader if its ironies and fun are to be properly enjoyed.
All this granted, Pope yet makes it possible for one simultaneously to
view Clarissa's sentiments as tinged with expediency. Power and the ef-
fective "use" of virtue are her principal concerns, not virtue for its own
sake. "Gains," "Pow'r," "lose," and "wins" (V.16, 29, 30, 34) reflect
the orientation of her value system. (Her very speech, it might be noted,
illustrates an effective "use" of virtue: by it she wins, Belinda loses.)
The attributes she espouses - "good Sense," "good Humour," "Virtue,"
"Merit" - seem, as a consequence, deflated to means, and virtue seems
to pass into social prudence. Furthermore, she appears as much a captive
of her society's values as a critic of them. Her use of the word "Glories"
(V.I 5) to describe rituals of adoration betrays the woman concealed be-
hind the philosopher. As Cunningham rightly perceives, "She evidently
prizes the 'Glories' (a telling overstatement) of the theatre box and the
coach besieged by flattering dandies."11 It would seem that her own good
sense has been subtly corrupted by the prideful cravings "that early taint
the Female Soul" (1.87).
If the sentiments themselves are teasingly ambiguous, so too are
Clarissa's motives in this speech. The first twenty-two of her twenty-six
lines serve to create an impression of high-minded objectivity. Belinda
might as well be on the moon for all the direct notice Clarissa takes of
her. It is a subject that she is apparently addressing herself to, not a
person; this is a moral for all Beauties, not one in particular. In the last
four lines, however, she suddenly turns to Belinda and drives the moral
home: "And trust me, Dear! good humour can prevail, etc." This is a
masterstroke on Pope's part, for with these two closing couplets he in
effect backwashes the entire speech with ambiguity of motive consonant
with Qarissa's first appearance in the poem. Is she really the disinter-
ested, trustworthy counselor she sets up to be, or is she actually an arch
rival slyly seeking, through false piety and feigned helpfulness, to en-
hance her own reputation while ruining Belinda's?
Most critics, impressed by the sensibleness of Clarissa's preceding lines,
have closed their ears to the lethal nuances of these final lines. An alter-
native interpretation would begin with the fact that Clarissa is repre-
sented as a clever woman. She understands psychology, rhetoric, and
imposture. She values winning and means to win here at Belinda's ex-
pense. All of this - artfully foreshadowed by Pope in the earlier con-
spiracy scene with the Baron - is shown in the first twenty-two magis-
terial lines of her speech (V.9-30). Her object is to put Belinda off

11 Cunningham, p. 44.

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 Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock 685

guard, convincing her, as well as the other listeners, that personalities

are not the issue, merely matters of common sense applicable to all. By
the time she gets to the last of these lines, she has done just that:

What then remains, but well our Pow'r to use,

And keep good Humour still whate'er we lose?

She might well end here, of course. It is a fitting, tactful conclusion; her
moral has been made. But total victory, not friendly counseling, is her
true object. Indeed, ego insists on overkill. Clarissa cannot pass up this
last, choice moment to patronize Belinda directly, showing the belle to
be ludicrous as well as girlishly unthinking. Thus, she pointedly turns
toward her, saying, with unctuous familiarity: "And trust me, Dear! good
Humour can prevail, / When Airs, and Flights, and Screams, and Scold-
ing fail/' The exclamation point following the word "Dear" (i.e.,
"dearie") would be quite unnecessary were her sweetness sincere, as also
with "alas!" in line 25 above.12 But Clarissa has never been more de-
liciously superior - or, for that matter, more rhetorically effective.
However, she is not finished. Having shown Belinda to be ludicrously
impotent in anger, she concludes by showing her coquetry to be equally
futile, and for that reason a pretty absurdity: "Beauties in vain their
pretty Eyes may roll; / Charms strike the Sight, but Merit wins the Soul."
As before, this is unimpeachable truth, but it is also hugely triumphant
and tactless. One can imagine the weak adjective "pretty" being spoken
with fine derisiveness, just as one can imagine "Merit" being spoken
with special point and puffed bosom. Clarissa's case is a good one, but her
own merit, good humor, and good sense are dubious. Ironically, she
voices the very standards by which she herself may be convicted.
The ambiguities of sentiment and motive in Clarissa's speech are de-
lightfully compounded by its parodie relationship to Sarpedon's speech
in the Iliad (Book XII), translated by Pope some years earlier. Before
discussing these further ambiguities, however, I should like to briefly
explain, as best I can reconstruct it, how Pope came to parody Sarpedon's
speech in the first place and what ends he meant to achieve in doing so.
As many readers know, Clarissa's speech was the last of several major
additions to The Rape. It followed the others, in fact, by a full three
years. What explains the very tardy afterthought? The case of Boileau
is probably illuminating here inasmuch as Pope, in this final addition,
was still paralleling the course charted decades earlier by the Frenchman

12 Clarissa's sensitivity to the specter of aging in line 25 suggests that she may
have already experienced some of its effects herself. The exclamation point implies
a mock sigh of feigned commiseration, although on another level Pope may be
voicing his genuine sigh of regret at the thought of beauty's poignant transience.

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686 JOHN TRIMBLE

in his mock-epic, Le Lutrin. Boileau, under the pressure of Le Bossu's

Traité du Poëme Epique (1675), decided after an interval of several
years to append to his poem an explicit moral so as to ensure it epic cor-
rectness. If the notorious strictures of John Dennis are any indication,
Pope found himself under similar pressure to add a moral once the epic
features of the poem had become pronounced in the second (1714)
version. Actually, the pressure upon him was quite a bit greater than
that faced by Boileau, for now Boileau himself was another authority in
Bossu's camp, and so too was Dryden. A possible symptom of that pres-
sure is the striking explicitness of his (or Warburton's) note to V.7
announcing Clarissa's purpose.13
Pope's initial reason for adding Clarissa's speech, then, was presum-
ably defensive: the poem wanted some kind of reasonably explicit moral
in order to be able to call itself a correct mock-epic. I think Pope had no
intention, however, of allowing that need to jeopardize the delicate ironic
balance of his satire. That would be like killing the patient with the
cure. His problem was a tough one: how to devise a speech that was
moralistic enough to look and function like a moral - a sop to the crit-
ics - yet ironic enough to harmonize with its context? The idea of parody-
ing Sarpedon's stirring, high-minded oration was one-half of his brilliant
solution to the problem; the other half was putting that parody in the
mouth of a complex prude who unwittingly convicts herself with her
own sermonizing.
The parody itself serves three equally important functions. First, it
ensures Pope's ' "moral" the necessary elevation and purple coloring. Sec-
ond, it amuses by its witty aptness - like one of Donne's startling con-
ceits - as well as by its patent incongruities. And third, it gives Pope a
silent voice with which to complicate still further the reader's valuation
of the beau monde, not to mention the Hellenic world itself. The first
of these functions speaks for itself. The second and third, however, war-
rant some illustration.
The witty aptness of the parody amuses in two ways: initially by sur-
prising us with the mere fact of its aptness, and moments later by en-
couraging us to discern still other similarities lurking behind the obvious
ones. To put it another way, the obvious, noncomic similarities between
Clarissa and Sarpedon compel us to view the two of them shoulder-to-
shoulder; the close juxtaposition in turn reveals to us the comically ironic
similarities between them. Here, for example, are some of the obvious

13 The explicitness of the note may be ironic too, of course, inasmuch as Claris-
sa confuses almost as much as she clarifies. The same may apply to her name also.

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 Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock 687

similarities: both speakers are in critical battle situations; both seek to

exhort their audience to accept certain values or attitudes and to stake
their lives - literally in the one case, figuratively in the other - on those
values; both are eloquent orators; both enjoy exalted perspectives on the
human condition; both talk about proving their superiority and thereby
achieving honor (or reputation) , which is to say, winning the respect (or
hearts) of men; both see gifts (social and material prerogatives in the
one case, beauty in the other) not as ends in themselves but as spurs to
achievement.
The chief ironic similarity, perceived only on a second inspection, is
this: While Clarissa is ostensibly seeking to pacify Belinda, might she
not actually be bent on inciting her to battle no less than Sarpedon his
troops? This perception paves the way for the rest. For instance, as the
son of Jupiter, Sarpedon is "inspir'd with martial Flame" and "Fir'd
with the Thirst of Glory" (Pope's Iliad, XII.349, 370). The careful
reader discerns that Clarissa, though possibly no daughter of Jupiter,
may in fact be inspired with a similar flame and thirst. Moreover, one
begins to realize that she is herself every inch the field general, in a
manner of speaking. It was she, after all, who resourcefully supplied her
"Knight" with his "arms," and it is she who now presumes to lecture
Belinda on how to win the battle of the sexes with good humor. It seems
ironically appropriate, then, that both speakers should inspire their lis-
teners "With equal Warmth, and rouze the Warrior's Fire" (Pope's
Iliad, XII.398).
If Pope's use of parody here complicates even further our valuation
of Clarissa, it also further complicates our valuation of the beau monde.
On the one hand, the superimposed Homeric world throws into sharp
relief the social emphasis of modern manners and preoccupations, and
we begin appreciating anew the human shrinkage that has occurred since
antiquity:14 the drawing room has supplanted the great councils of state,
fame has dwindled to reputation, dignity to the glories of courtly at-
tentions, epic conflicts to sexual skirmishes, martial bands to white-gloved
beaux, fear of death to fear of gray locks and spinsterhood, great acts
to civility and good-humored composure, and so on.
Even Clarissa's ethic, which may seem admirably exalted by contempo-
rary standards, begins appearing unexalted in relation to the more rigor-
ous heroic standard. Sarpedon shows us what that standard involves.

14 Maynard Mack touches sensitively on this point in " 'Wit and Poetry and
Pope': Some Observations on His Imagery," in Pope and His Contemporaries:
Essays Presented to George Sherburn, ed. James L. Clifford and Louis Landa
(New York, 1949), p. 37.

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688 JOHN TRIMBLE

Rather than quote his entire speech to Glaucus {Iliad, XII.371-396),

I will paraphrase it:

How can we take honest pride in our many advantages - wealth, adulation,
authority - unless we have proved by our actions that we truly merit them?
We have an obligation to match the dignity which our troops accord us with
dignity which we ourselves have earned through valorous deeds. We must be
as superior in valor, Glaucus, as we are in rank. Were death avoidable, I con-
fess I would not now pursue Fame on the battlefield. But death is inevitable.
And since death itself confers no honor, I shall dedicate my life to the pursuit
of Fame, winning glory for myself if I am victorious in battle, and giving
glory to others if I bravely fall.

Whereas Clarissa is talking in her speech about power, winning, getting

ahead - in effect, virtue used prudentially for social conquest - Sarpedon
is talking here about basic self-respect, honest pride in who and what he
is. Like Clarissa, he enjoys some golden advantages. Unlike her, though,
he is not content merely to preserve what is already gained. Rather, he is
compelled by his high moral consciousness to be genuinely worthy of
these advantages - not just in others' eyes, but perhaps principally in his
own. He desires to be an authentic leader; he desires to give his personal
best that it may be an inspiration to his fellows and later an epitaph to
his value as a man.
But does the shrinkage go only one way? An Augustan reader - and
Pope himself - would doubtless feel that it does not. We know from his
"Preface" to the Iliad that Pope was no blind admirer of the heroic age.
He speaks there of the * Vicious and imperfect Manners" of Homer's
heroes, and asks pointedly: "Who can be so prejudiced in their Favour
as to magnify the Felicity of those Ages, when a Spirit of Revenge and
Cruelty, join'd with the practice of Rapine and Robbery, reign'd thro' the
World, when no Mercy was shown but for the sake of Lucre, when the
greatest Princes were put to the Sword, and their Wives and Daughters
made Slaves and Concubines?" (Twickenham Edition, VII, 13-14).
Clearly, Pope recognized that each age, Ancient and Modern, has its
peculiar strengths and weaknesses. That recognition makes itself oblique-
ly felt in Clarissa's parody. We may hear in her speech no talk of per-
sonal honor and high moral courage, no alarums announcing heroic con-
flicts off in the distance; but what we do get is a sense of a world that
has discovered and delights in its social foundations, a world that values
civility and manners and marriage. For all its effeteness and amusing
pomp, the beau monde is a triumph of the long civilizing process. It has
seen the creation of a bona fide society. Its new kind of killing (with
glances, etc.) is not permanent; its new kind of "dying" is bloodless and

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 Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock 689

agreeable. Men would seem to have at last discovered women, and

women, men; and their wars are now intersexual games affirming life
rather than death.
With the adoption of a purely Augustan perspective, Clarissa's ethic,
too, regains much of its first luster. It strikes one as supremely appropri-
ate to such a social world, a perfect instance of decorum. Indeed, her
values of good sense and good humor may even be allowed to be, in a
sense, truly heroic, so rare and ennobling are they. Possibly they are less
rare than Sarpedon's self -integrity and magnanimity, but one would be
hard put to show how they are less estimable.

In conclusion, then, it may be said that instead of patly clarifying the

poem's putative moral, as most readers believe, Clarissa actually compli-
cates and enriches it. She does this in three principal ways: by adopting
unwittingly some of the conventional values of her modish world, by
demonstrating that good sense does not necessarily exclude self-interest
and vanity, and by parodying a speech that threatens to trivialize her
basic concerns. Each of these complications indicates that her objectivity
and range of vision, while considerable, are nonetheless limited. Superior
as her general awareness may be to the other characters in The Rape, it
still does not enable her to transcend the poem's continuously double
perspective, principally because she is as blind to her own vanity as she
is aware of it in others. She may criticize the beau monde for its foolish
priorities, but she clearly enjoys being numbered as a part of it and cut-
ting a figure herself. Significantly, in her speech she includes herself
among those Beauties who own a coach and take pains with their ap-
pearance. Moreover, like one of The Spectators typical ladies of fashion,
she carries her scissors in a "shining case" every bit as impressive as Sir
Plume's amber snuffbox, and can match that fop's "nice Conduct of a
clouded Cane' (IV.124) with an equally modish flutter of her fan.15
Thus Clarissa, no less than Belinda, remains paradoxical to the end.
She espouses good humor but ironically shows little sign of it in either
manner or mien. She urges Belinda to be a good sport while unsportingly
being a conspirator in the belle's undoing. She recommends good sense
at a time when elementary tact argues against pious lectures. Given these
inconsistencies in her behavior, it is understandable that our response to
her be one of mingled admiration and antipathy.

10 It is perhaps fitting that this pairing is eventually made explicit in the poem.
During the fracas following Clarissa's speech, we learn that "bold Sir Plume had
drawn Clarissa down," a line that smilingly undercuts her projected image of
moral elevation.

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690 JOHN TRIMBLE

What makes this paradoxical manner of hers finally hang together

psychologically is the prudish nature that Pope has assigned her. With-
out that first Element, her actions and preachments, taken together, would
simply make no sense. But in her character as a prude it is dramatically
plausible for her to be a bundle of inconsistencies, both seeming and real.
Further, what makes Clarissa so aesthetically satisfying as a character
is that her motives and inconsistencies are kept delicately muted. Else-
where, one often finds Pope describing characters in Theophrastian style.
Here, however, playful ambiguity is his watchword. Clarissa's character
thus emerges through hints and indirections - as, for example, in his
wonderfully spare treatment of the conspiracy scene, where the phrase
"with tempting Grace" and the act itself are, for the moment, our only
hard clues to her motives. Two effects result from this oblique method.
First, the reader is given the pleasure of making sense of Clarissa him-
self, experiencing anew the truth of the old axiom, "the smaller the sign,
the greater the aesthetic pleasure." Second, in view of so much indefinite-
ness, the reader is maneuvered into conceding to Clarissa real complexity
of character, including a measure of contradictoriness.
Finally, and this I believe is of cardinal import, Pope's deliberate mut-
ing of her motives has the additional effect of greatly enhancing her
effectiveness as a rhetorical device. Judging from his own scattered com-
ments on the value of good sense and good humor, he quite clearly
wished us to attend seriously to Clarissa's moralizing. At the same time,
however, he wished to prevent us from fully relaxing our critical sense
lest we confuse her with a dramatically implausible Athena. Muting
Clarissa's motives accomplished both ends at a stroke: the careful reader
is always aware of her prudery, but not so much that it interferes with
his receptivity to the merit of what she is saying. This allows her to func-
tion simultaneously as a surrogate for Pope and as yet another object
of ironic diminution.
In all likelihood, Pope had one further reason for muting her motives,
namely, to prevent our taking her "fault" all too seriously. Were Claris-
sa's prudery overtly insisted upon, the good feeling and urbanity of the
satire would be jeopardized, if not severely diminished. We would find
her coming across as a solemn dramatization, not as a character of inter-
estingly mixed motives and values; and, as just suggested, we would
slight the worth of her moral out of repugnance toward her character.
We would also begin losing our sense of the paradoxicality of the entire
beau monde, and it was this sense, perhaps above all, that Pope wished
to leave us with. That he recognized the exceedingly fine line he had to
walk with her characterization is but another testimony to the acuteness
of his critical judgment.

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 Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock 691

Clarissa is a prude, then, but a most complex one. like the poem it-
self - "Tis a sort of writing very like tickling,"16 he once remarked -
her characterization is calculated to evoke in the reader a decidedly mixed
response. If we deplore her hypocrisy and hauteur, we yet feel genuine
(though qualified) admiration for her sentiments. If we deplore her
tactlessness in voicing those sentiments when she does, we yet feel that
someone, somehow, had to interject a little good sense into the broil at
that juncture. If we deplore her underhanded part in the rape of Be-
linda's lock, we also recognize that Belinda's vanity invited - perhaps de-
manded - the deflating it got. In Clarissa, sublimity and meanness, right-
eousness and self -righteousness, clash head on. It is cases such as hers
that result in hung juries.

The University of Texas at Austin

16 Letter to Mrs. or Miss Marriot, 28 February 1713/14. See George Sherburn,

ed., The Correspondence of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1956), I, 211.

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