IS GOOD WILL OUR GREATEST
POWER?
BY
EDWARD GREEN
Part
2
II) We Can Learn from a Novel about the
Fight in a Man about Good Will and Ill Will
Tonight, as I speak about the thrilling, life-giving ethical education
of Aesthetic Realism, and what I am so privileged to be learning now about
good will in classes taught by Ellen Reiss, I will also be talking about
aspects of Samuel Richardson's important novel Clarissa,
published in l748. It is a novel I have seen every man can learn from.
Clarissa Harlowe is a young woman of England--thoughtful and kind--and
it is a sign of his power as a novelist that for nearly 2,000 pages Richardson
keeps us intensely interested: we want to know--what is Clarissa thinking;
what will she do next? It is not easy to show that goodness is powerful
and dramatic because most often evil seems more interesting--but Richardson
does exactly that, and in a way that has swept people. Eli Siegel said
it was the most popular novel in Europe in its time, and he spoke of how
people in l760 had tears when they "read the history of Clarissa Harlowe."
The novel also has perhaps the greatest villain ever in the field of
a man's ill will towards a woman. He is Robert Lovelace, described by Richardson
in his list of principal characters as:
a man of birth and fortune, haughty, vindictive, humorously vain, equally
intrepid and indefatigable in the pursuit of his pleasures--making his
addresses to Miss Clarissa Harlowe.
Lovelace is powerfully attracted by Clarissa, but she does not want to
be courted by him. He is very angry at this and as the novel goes on his
plans for revenge become terrible. He threatens her family with physical
injury if she doesn't reconsider his suit. He tricks her into fleeing her
home--seeming to offer protection when her family tries to force a marriage
on her with another man, whom she loathes. He keeps her prisoner in a London
house of prostitution making it at first appear a respectable home, a temporary
lodging until she is safely beyond the reach of her family. There he persistently
tries, in her words, "to break my spirit"--to have her cheapen herself
by giving him a bodily approval he does not deserve.
Clarissa does not want to betray herself and she resists his attempts
to seduce her. Lovelace takes the strength of a woman as an insult, as
a gnawing wound. He takes her critical mind not as something to love and
want to strengthen--something he is grateful to benefit from--but as a
cause of humiliation he has a right to get revenge on. He is determined
to bring her down in her own eyes and those of her family. In a letter
to his friend, John Belford, Lovelace says this:
Is it not a confounded thing that I cannot fasten an obligation upon
this proud beauty?...To have my monitress so very good! I protest I know
not how to look up at her! Now, as I am thinking, if I could pull her down
a little nearer to my own level; that is to say, could prevail upon her
to do something that would argue imperfection , something to
repent of; we should jog on much more equally.
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