Putting the Epistolary Novel in Place
Symbolic Geography in Richardson's Clarissa
Keywords:
symbolic geography, samuel richardson, epistolary novels, eighteenth-century literature, place and settingAbstract
In pre-industrial society, life primarily consisted of “face-to-face” interactions where space and place coincide through mutual human presence. However, the practice of letter writing as represented in the epistolary novel, which reached its height in popularity in the 18th century, upsets this harmony because it represents sustained human conversation, as we would say today, in virtual mode. In epistolary novels, the interlocutors must necessarily be separated from each other, typically through confinement, exile, or imprisonment. The supreme example in this genre is Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). This masterpiece of domestic realism—the story of Clarissa’s seduction and rape by the arch-nemesis, Lovelace, followed by her tragic death and apotheosis—has never been examined from the perspective of a symbolic geography. But spatial relations here are highly dynamic and worth exploring; characters become “closer” emotionally though they remain distant spatially, or vice versa, they write letters to each other though they live under the same roof. Also highly dynamic is Clarissa’s depiction of place, in which a significant pattern of place variety reveals a distinct trajectory for an archetypal movement. Taken in its entirety, Clarissa’s narrative enacts a mortifying journey with a number of credible interpretations: as a homecoming, as a pilgrim’s progress, a katabasis.References
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