IS GOOD WILL OUR GREATEST
POWER?
BY
EDWARD GREEN
Part
4
IV) Lovelace Looks for Weakness, or: The
Strategy of Ill Will
Clarissa is a critic, and a kind one. She very much hopes to like people.
And throughout the novel, even under the most distressing circumstances,
we see her great desire to like the world--through books, music, a garden;
and through lively correspondence with her best friend, Anna Howe. And
she has a sense of where unkindness begins--which Aesthetic Realism makes
clear: the hope for contempt. She tells the suitor her family has chosen,
"Nor can there be a greater sign of want of merit than where a man seeks
to pull down another's character, in order to build up his own." And Clarissa
is brave in criticizing the greed and ill will of her own family's real-estate
dealings. For example, she says:
And yet, in my opinion, the world is but one great family; originally
it was so; what then is this narrow selfishness that reigns in us but relationship
remembered against relationship forgot?
I respect her very much. Yet with all her keenness, Clarissa does not see
the extent of her family's ill will. She doesn't see that their selfish
way of seeing the world and other people is also--as Aesthetic Realism
says it inevitably has to be--their way of seeing her. Her brother James--one
of the worst brothers in or out of a novel--sees Lovelace's interest in
Clarissa as a threat to his economic prominence and forces Lovelace
to a duel in which Lovelace slightly wounds him. In response, the Harlowes
bar Lovelace from making further addresses and tell Clarissa that to compensate
for the lost income her marriage with Lovelace would have provided, she
must now do right by her family and marry an elderly and repulsive miser,
Solmes, who has agreed to hand over most of his holdings to the Harlowes
if Clarissa marries him.
Lovelace, outraged, tells Clarissa he will destroy her family unless
she allows him to continue his suit. And he tells his friend Belford with
malice:
Then my revenge upon the Harlowes! To have run away with a daughter
of theirs, to make her a Lovelace--to make her one of a family so superior
to her own--what a triumph, as I have heretofore observed, to them
! But to run away with her, and to bring her to my lure in the other
light, what a mortification of their pride! What a gratification of my
own!
He plants a spy in the Harlowe home. He knows Clarissa, kept under virtual
house-arrest, will in the end have nowhere to turn but to him. In the meantime,
he feigns honorable intent.
The Harlowe family and Robert Lovelace each stand for ill will; and
though their ways of being brutal differ, they make the same mistake about
their own lives. Eli Siegel explains it in these powerful sentences from
Self and World :
The self does not want to be strong by the weakness of others. It wants
to be strong by what it is, rather than by what others are not...Power
is not just the ability to affect or change others; it is likewise the
ability to be affected or changed by others. If a person's power is only
of the first kind, his unconscious will be in distress.
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