FRANCES FERGUSON

Rape and the Rise of the Novel

Representations 20 (Fall 1987)

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This view of the law of rape argues that its mechanisms for defining rape in terms of formally stipulated states continually operate to reduce mental states to potentially or actually self-contradictory constructs. That is, the constructs that make it possible to secure justice for an injured party themselves become an affront, an implicit trivialization of the very subjectivity that they are, at least heuristically, designed to protect. That is, the importance of the notion of a mental state, the importance of the notion of subjectivity itself, may be guaranteed precisely by eradicating its relevance in an actual situation, precisely by denying the capacity of a particular individual to have a meaningful mental state.

This particular interpretation of the law of rape may, moreover, lead us toward a revised understanding of the psychological novel and the importance that Samuel Richardson attaches to rape in producing, in Pamela and Clarissa, the first full examples of the psychological novel. We know from Margaret Doody’s useful discussion that Richardson was drawing on imagery and techniques developed in earlier eighteenth-century rape narratives and novels of “love and seduction,” but a question about the particular resonance of rape for depicting individual psychology remains. In the terms of Michael McKeon’s excellent recent study of the origins of the English novel, a crime like rape would represent one element of the intersection between eighteenth-century skepticism and prose fiction. Rape, that is, dramatizes a problematic about the relationship between the body and the mind; although a rake like Lovelace may imagine that carnal “knowing” includes knowing someone else’s mind, a character like Clarissa—virtuous even in her violation—suggests that one knows about mental experience as much in despite of the body as through it.

Two models of intersubjective understanding are in competition here. The one, emphasizing a split within the individual, provides the model of internal confusion that has always left Pamela open to charges of self-deception at best and duplicity at worst. Pamela’s marriage both bespeaks her ability to reread Mr. B’s attempted rape as seduction and also works to make her virtue look like an instrument in a marriage campaign rather than an end in itself. The individual changes situations—and stations—by discovering the unreliability of the self in determining what one really wants. The other model, emphasizing a split between private experience and its public apprehension, suggests that the psychological novel arises to demonstrate the superiority of individual perception to the world of social forms. The strength and pride of the individual, in this account, rest in being misunderstood. Thus, the psychological novel seems to be psychological by virtue of being either resolutely confused or resolutely unconfused. While the conduct books and model letter-writers that Richardson had earlier written might have suggested that there was a straightforward technology for producing upright and efficient individuals, Pamela and Clarissa appear to be psychological novels precisely because they continually pose the confusions or resolutions of the self as an alternative to social engineering. Clarissa, indeed, seems to provide a more satisfying model of the psychological novel because it rests more squarely on psychology as interiority, the individual’s inalienable rights in herself, than does Pamela, with its reconciliation with Mr. B. and society.

Thus, in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, Clarissa epitomizes the novel of private experience. And the occurrence of rape within a novel like Clarissa represents the novel’s ability to convey, as the stage could not, private aspects of experience such as sexuality. Moreover, the rape becomes the vehicle for the constrast between what could be said in public and proved and what is said in private and believed. As Watt comments on Clarissa’s decision not to take Lovelace to public trial, the issue of rape comes to dramatize the primacy of psychological states for the novel:

A bare summary of the events might suggest that Clarissa courted her fate; only a full knowledge of her sentiments and aspirations, and the certainty that Lovelace understood them well enough to realise the enormity of his offence, enable us to understand the real nature of the story. (198)

As an act that cannot really be understood in public, the rape in Clarissa bespeaks the primacy of the psychological states that Richardson was continually trying to transcribe with greater and greater accuracy (194).

Richardson’s presentation of the rape in Clarissa would seem, then, to criticize the limitations inherent in the formal criteria by which the publicly recognizable laws of rape function. For it is not so much the particular laws as their inevitable reduction of psychological states to formal states that makes them both public and problematic. Likewise, recent criticism of the novel has continued to prefer the psychological in discussing the rape. For Terry Castle and Terry Eagleton the rape becomes the occasion for protest against the forced alienation of the individual’s meaning. The psychological novel, as fully initiated by Clarissa, thus appears to be a confrontation between other people’s accounts of one and one’s own account. For Castle the psychological novel affirms Clarissa’s right not to mean anything she does not want to mean, her right not to be “interrupted” in her course of seeking to mean. For Eagleton it revolves around the woman’s resistance to hegemonic forms, her “rebuffing of all patriarchal claims over her person.”

One crucial difficulty with seeing the rape as illustrating the primacy of the psychological, however, is that it occurs while Clarissa is unconscious. If the question in any rape case is, “What was the victim’s mental state? Did she consent?” then the answer Clarissa seems to give is, “She had no mental state.” The very fact that the rape counts as rape necessarily depends not on Clarissa’s mental state but on a formal account of that state. It therefore looks as if Clarissa, like rape law and unlike the “psychological novel” that it is supposed to represent, argues for the primacy of form by framing the rape so that it cannot depend upon the victim’s mental state. One the one hand, Clarissa’s unconsciousness during the rape eliminates her capacity not to consent to her rape. Therefore, her resistance to the rape has been made impossible. On the other hand, her resistance has been made inescapable. For the law of rape specifically stipulates that unconsciousness (along with states like idiocy, insanity, and sleep) “negatives” consent. Thus, although Clarissa’s unconsciousness deprives her of the capacity to resist and even of the capacity to know exactly what happened to her, it also ensures that her nonconsent will be inescapable. The stipulation that unconsciousness is nonconsent—even though it necessarily cannot manifest itself as physical resistance—thus provides that Clarissa’s nonconsent continues even in her absence, even in her unconsciousness.

But if it then appears that Clarissa bespeaks the primacy of forms—a primacy designed to ensure the legibility of mental states by deriving them from forms—that very legibility itself carries within it the constant possibility of internal contradiction. For it stages the possibility that one’s actual mental state will conflict with one’s stipulated mental state—that which one is held to have by virtue of age, mental capacity, or lack of consciousness. It recapitulates the contradiction that we earlier discovered in the very form of the law of rape and the feminist critique of it—that one might never consent even if one wanted to consent, that the form might itself oppose the very mental state it was designed to represent. What Clarissa’s unconsciousness establishes for the psychological novel, then, is a pattern of psychological complexity that does not at all directly express mental states but rather relies on the contradiction built into the formal stipulation of them. Psychological complexity, that is, pits the stipulated mental state against one’s actual mental state, so that one is able to resist without resisting, can have a mental state even in unconsciousness, and is unable to consent even if one wants to.

The contradiction that establishes psychological complexity, then, enables us to reread Lovelace’s aesthetic detachment. For Lovelace has appeared in the role of the artist who is committed to a proliferation of meanings, and, in the terms of William Warner’s deconstructive account of him, he has continually dispersed and recreated himself to acknowledge the absurdity of the connection between any particular form and any particular significance. In this he seems to doubt both the ability of forms to determine mental states and the ability of mental states to determine forms. But his very boldness in trying out different roles represents not so much an escape from connections between intentions and forms as a reversal of what might seem their usual sequence. He can thus distance himself from forms, but only by insisting that the form be completed by a mental state. Always proceeding as if there could be no such thing as an unclaimed form, a form detached from someone’s mental state, he cannot himself exercise the freedom he prides himself on until someone else has fulfilled the form. As becomes clear from his bafflement at Clarissa’s continuing resistance to the rape, form for Lovelace implies a mental state. Lovelace’s account of himself is that he will discover what it was that he intended when he sees how things turn out, so that his account of his intentions is that they are infinitely variable precisely because they are defined as arbitrary, operating as a fictional code in which he assumes different parts at the will of the imaginary text that he is elaborating. This apparent suspension of representational will, however, is equivalent to the greatest possible confidence that the very perception of a form or an act involves the perceiver’s assent. Whatever is, is made right by the perceiver rather than the initiator of the form. After the rape, however, it becomes clear that he has imagined, like Brownmiller and Dworkin, that the forms of actions—however fictitious—carry mental states like intention and consent within them. Form, in this account, can never really be contradicted, only replaced or outdistanced.

From Lovelace’s standpoint, then, the chillingly brief letter that announces the rape to Belford is not so much a confessional or even a triumphant one as a bizarre kind of birth announcement: “And now, Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.” Lovelace, having followed the logic of his plottings and his plot, sees them as having resulted in the annihilation of the affair and the creation of Clarissa. That is, the rape for him is at least as much the transfer of intention as it is an attempt to “know” Clarissa. He must “know” her not only to know what she knows, but also so that he will be able to have a sense of how his plottings have come out—so that he will know what it was that he meant.

When Lovelace’s intention does not get translated into consent, his rape of her is rendered perpetually incomplete. Thus he writes with gloomy self-pity to Belford:

Caesar never knew what it was to be hypped [depressed], I will call it, till he came to be what Pompey was; that is to say, till he arrived at the height of his ambition: nor did thy Lovelace know what it was to be gloomy, till he had completed his wishes upon the charmingest creature in the world, as the other did his upon the most potent republic that ever existed.

And yet why say I, completed? when the will, the consent, is wanting—and I have still views before me of obtaining that? (888)

In Lovelace’s terms, the rape remains incomplete, because the only evidence that would count as the apprehension of the rape is Clarissa’s consent. He can, thus, never discover the shape of his own intention, as long as the rape remains self-canceling—which it inherently becomes in two senses. Without Clarissa’s consent, the rape remains incomplete, and it therefore seems, in Lovelace’s account, not a rape. Were the rape to be validated by Clarissa’s consent, however, it would cease to be rape and would instead count as seduction (or marriage, according to Brownmiller’s account of Hebrew law)—intercourse as the act of discovering what one really wanted all along.

Just before the rape, Lovelace, having noticed Clarissa’s suspicion of the legion of fictitious agents he has planted in the world he has substituted for her bourgeois home, writes to Belford that “her mistrust is a little of the latest to do her service” (882). Having mistrusted too late, she is, he thinks, no longer in a position to imagine that she can set the conditions of her liking or her trust. And it seems that Clarissa fully emerges as an individual in her insistence that she can continue to refuse to accept Lovelace’s valuation of her, that she thinks she can always continue to deny her consent. The question of consent comes to be framed, alternatively, by the Lovelacean view that “the action” is already over and that consent has always implicitly been given, and by Clarissa’s view that consent can only be given freely and thus that the act of deciding the value of an action—the interpretation of it—is itself a kind of prospectiveness, a claim that “the action” is never over.

Lovelace, trying to gain his point that Clarissa’s consent is already contained within the events that have already transpired, thus offers a series of ways of domesticating the rape. First, he suggests, in an echo of rape law as it was established prior to the Statutes of Westminster of 1285, that Clarissa should redeem him through marriage. If his marrying her will redeem her reputation, her marrying him will redeem him from the crime that she charges him with (if only outside the legal system). The appeal of marriage for Lovelace, then, is that it establishes the wife’s consent as a stipulated state, and one that of necessity exonerates him. He imagines that Clarissa’s consent to marriage, once given, amounts to a wife’s irrevocable consent—so irrevocable even as to apply before it was given. To the man who has said, “A wife at any time,” the fixity of the implications of marriage allows considerable latitude in the timing of a woman’s consent (915); the form of consent will count as having always existed. Thus his first stratagem after the rape is to convince Clarissa that they are already married: “I would at first have persuaded her, and offered to call witnesses to the truth of it, that we were actually married” (889; cf. 896).

What Lovelace wants, then, is not so much consent as the effect of consent. He therefore repeatedly misses the point of Clarissa’s having been unconscious at the time of the rape. Thinking that her unconsciousness merely preserves her honor, he archly writes to Belford, “I know thou hast such an high opinion of this lady’s virtue, that thou wouldst be disappointed if thou hadst reason to think that she was subdued by her own consent, or any the least yielding in her will” (888). Clarissa’s unconsciousness is, for him, merely the absence of her consent, a deficiency that will be retrospectively repaired. This is why he imagines it would serve his purposes just as well to convince Clarissa that she had married him while she was unconscious, and why he imagines that he can point to the fact that other people take them to be married as an argument that Clarissa should think them married. In the same spirit, he fantasizes that Clarissa will discover herself to be pregnant from the rape:

Were I to be sure that this foundation [Clarissa’s pregnancy] is laid (and why may I not hope it is?), I should not doubt to have her still (should she withstand her day of grace) on my own conditions: nor should I, if it were so, question that revived affection in her which a woman seldom fails to have for the father of her first child, whether born in wedlock or out of it. (917)

Pregnancy would provide a reason for Clarissa to consent, to set things right; a child would represent in little the society whose version of things Lovelace is continually asking Clarissa to consider and to accept as her measure. Moreover, he can speak significantly in this fantasy of Clarissa’s revived affection, because he is clearly taking the imagined pregnancy as a sign of consent. For while commentators like Sir Matthew Hale specifically denied “that it can be no rape if the woman conceive with child,” Hale was directly responding to legal commentators in the formalist tradition I have outlined who had claimed that conception was presumptive evidence of consent.

Lovelace, while not worrying particularly about whether he would or would not be acquitted in a trial for rape, thus continually presents the evidence that would make it look as though Clarissa had consented to their relationship. She had created the conditions that resembled consent not just in running off with him but in appearing to agree to live in the same house with him, in appearing to be his wife, and her pregnancy might have appeared as just the final formal version of consent, her body speaking truly in open opposition to her voice. Although Clarissa rails against the misrepresentations involved in seeing any of these appearances as expressions of consent, Lovelace goes further than merely answering her when he argues that some version of consent is implicit in participating in any appearance at all. Clarissa would invent independence “at the latest,” he argues to Belford: “And as to the state of obligation, there is no such thing as living without being beholden to somebody. Mutual obligation is the very essence and soul of the social and commercial life—Why should she be exempt from it?” (760).

On this account, persons are persons not because they preexist society but because they are continually produced by their sociability, their coming into view and contact with other persons. From Lovelace’s perspective, then, there can be no such thing as the falseness, the false personation, that Clarissa accuses Lovelace of. For the falseness involved in his impersonating a husband is, on his account, necessarily redeemed by the fact that it can produce true persons. To send the false impression out into the world is to set up a part of that structure of obligation which is “the soul of social and commercial life.” Falseness is then truth, because it is instrumental in producing truth. Lovelace’s falsehood is a falsehood he continually justifies as fundamentally truthful, because its aim was to produce forms that would tell both Clarissa and him what it was they really wanted, who it was they really were.

The Lovelacean apology for his act of rape continually equates his role in relation to Clarissa with the role of society in relation to any newborn infant. For him, individual existence thus involves an acknowledgement of events and forms that preexist the individual. Identity is forged in the process of the individual’s adjusting to make the text of the past event whole, to make it come out right. Thus the notion of agency is transferred from the rapist to the victim, from the active party to the passive one, as Lovelace’s continuing complaints and self-pity over Clarissa’s bad reaction to the rape suggest. Caveat lector. Like the letters that circulate in authentic or forged form throughout the novel, the truth or falsity of any transfer of meaning becomes the responsibility of the recipient.

For Lovelace, however, the greatest impediment to the project of transferring responsibility to Clarissa lies in his having resorted to “art,” his having drugged her to effect the rape. Lack of consciousness, both in the law and in the logic of the novel, always counts as nonconsent. While there may be two bodies—Lovelace’s and Clarissa’s—involved in the rape, only one person is present. The central argument that Lovelace has been making is that responsibility is always to be dispersed, diffused among a number of persons other than himself, and his entire defense must rest on the desperate effort to multiply himself retroactively to make it look as though there was anyone at the rape except him. This is why he needs the formulae of consent—the marriage, the pregnancy—that would belie Clarissa’s resistance and establish that she was there—and why he continually frames the rape that she did not consent to with the events that she did participate in—the elopement, residence in the same house.

From Lovelace’s standpoint, then, Clarissa’s unconsciousness at the time of the rape ought to be a matter of complete indifference, because he imagines that the form of the act should make consent implicit. Clarissa’s derangement after the rape is, therefore, particularly troubling to him because it indicates that his effort to make states of consciousness derive from the forms of action has not taken. The mad papers that Clarissa writes after resuming consciousness seem designed to cast doubt on the capacity of any written form to connect with a mental state. As Terry Castle has observed, “Clarissa’s mutilation of her own discourse suggests not only an impulse toward self-destruction, but also a massive, indeed traumatic loss of faith in articulation, and the power of the letter to render meaning.” But while Castle sees “the mutilation of sense and syntax” in the mad letters as being “linked to a loss of selfhood” (120), one might want to modify that implicit claim about the link between the self and the representation of it. For the disruption physically wreaked on the letters itself establishes a representational homology with the stipulated state that may or may not correspond with one’s mental state.

In the representational conventions of the epistolary novel, the convention of reading acts as a kind of stipulation. The characters repeatedly claim that they are writing, in the famous Richardsonian phrase, “to the moment,” that they are setting down for each other accounts of events that have just transpired. Readers, likewise, do not pause to wonder that what they accept as an up-to-the-minute account of what just happened could already have been written about and could have been returned from the printer’s in orderly lines that do not look at all like anyone’s handwriting. Convention prescribes that the characters’ script always looks like a printed page. To call attention to this stipulation, however, is to indicate the discrepancy between the handwriting that the printed page has been defined to be and the print that it so palpably is. Richardson produces this effect particularly strikingly in the tenth paper that Clarissa writes after the rape, in which the lines of writing run at off angles on the page. Various critics have noted that this paper shows, in Ronald Paulson’s phrase, “the printed page itself” becoming “a form of mimesis.” The very impulse of using the printed page to ape Clarissa’s mental derangement with skewed and unjustified lines of print is, however, both mimetic and antimimetic at the same time, for it calls attention to the fact that one has dutifully been reading for hundreds of pages as if the printed page counted as handwriting. Thus, the tenth mad paper operates as a kind of failed ostensive definition; the typographical arrangement of the words converts the letter into a kind of display of itself, a sign announcing “this is handwriting,” but the very announcement of what the letter is—or would be—acts to point to the obviousness of the fact that the type is not handwriting. It is a mimesis of distinction rather than of similarity, a pitting of stipulation against its internal self-contradiction.

More than a fiction of nature or truth, more than the representation of epistolarity as a matter of “writing to the moment,” Richardson’s formal insistence here upon a mimesis of distinction represents something like his invention of a new aesthetic. For it represents in formal terms the negative that Clarissa continually deploys against what comes to look like Lovelace’s complacent acceptance of forms. Perhaps nothing else epitomizes Lovelace so much as his sense of the capaciousness of forms, his susceptibility to the notion of reformation in the purely pagan terms of metamorphosis, in which matter is never lost but merely converted into a new shape. If he thus imagined that Clarissa would recognize herself in a new form as a result of the rape and would become what she had been made, he did not count on her capacity continually to produce a negative that leaves the business of forms appear to be unfinished. He did not, that is, count on her reforming herself into a version of the disorderly letter. For the force of her negative is not merely to oppose Lovelace but to see his effort at converting her nonconsent into consent not as making her a woman but as returning her to girlhood, to the legal infancy that means she could not consent even if she wanted to. Clarissa makes her body, the body that Lovelace had hoped to convert into a form of consent, into a slowly wasting sign of the inability of a form to carry mental states in anything but excessively capacious (that is, ambiguous) or potentially self-contradictory stipulated forms. Thus her notoriously slow-paced death is itself a way of calling attention to the states like consent that seem illusory to a character like Lovelace. For from the moment after the rape, when Clarissa begins dying and Lovelace begins longing for her consent, the novel is literally haunted by the specter of psychology, in which mental states do not so much appear as register the improbability of their appearing. The psychological novel arises by registering the enormity of Lovelace’s sophisticated but absolutely unquestioning belief in representation, in thinking that a body with its blushes can represent an interior state like consent or that a printed page can announce itself as handwriting.

For what Lovelace had merely taken as the absence of consent—Clarissa’s unconsciousness during the rape—turns out to be for Clarissa the condition for the impossibility of consent. In the law unconsciousness “negatives” consent, in much the same way as being ten years old—or twelve or sixteen—“negatives” it. Thus, although Lovelace expects Clarissa’s unconsciousness to be over when it is over, Clarissa recognizes it as something like a stipulated state—an ongoing condition of the impossibility of consenting whether one consents or not. She had said, on Lovelace’s account, that she was “cast from a state of independency into one of obligation” (760), and her progressive reduction of her body mimics a return to the body of a ten-year-old, in which one’s actual consent (or nonconsent) and one’s ability to consent potentially contradict one another. In such a stipulated state as legal infancy, there is no inevitability that the difference between one’s mental state—what one wants—and one’s stipulated state—what one must want—will appear. But the contradiction makes the difference between mental states and their formal stand-ins, stipulated states, visible. To Lovelace’s effort to read the form of the act of rape as stipulating consent, Clarissa thus responds with her own persistent impersonation of stipulated nonconsent. For him, lack of consent will (eventually) carry consent, become its opposite; for her, not having consented establishes a condition of dependency that makes nonconsent inevitable (no matter what she might want). In her white dress and increasingly childlike body, she represents the difference between the Bildungsroman, with its project of maturation, and the psychological novel, which can never get ahead, because its way of manifesting itself in the world is to make apparent its own subjection to a stipulated state—a legal infancy—that its conditional likings and wishes can strain against and contradict but never escape.