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Format:
Print
Author:
Arrison, Patti L.
Dept./Program:
English
Year:
2011
Degree:
MA
Abstract:
Samuel Richardson's Clarissa is a novel of rooms--of enclosures. Clarissa's parents restrict her to her room in the family home. Mr. Lovelace holds her captive in Mrs. Sinclair's London house. Dying and rejected by her family after she has escaped from her abductor, Clarissa can scarcely leave the refuge of her room in Mr. Smith's house. She plans her final place of confinement-her coffin-with obsessive detail. An epistolary novel, even the book is made up of discrete segments, the letters written by Clarissa, her friend Anna Howe, her relatives, and Mr. Lovelace and his associates.
Richardson's profession as a printer suggests a way to read the story of Clarissa's struggle. He uses typography, especially in the printing of Paper X, to depict the restrictions imposed on Clarissa and her attempts to break through those restrictions. Although Clarissa, as the tragic heroine of a tragic story, must succumb to the sequence of events that overtake her, she is able to imprint her own record-her own reading--of those events, by the means of her letters, her inscription on her coffin, and the account of her life she asks Belford to publish after her death.
This paper is based on an examination of the first edition, Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Latfy, published in seven volumes between 1748 and 1752 (London: Printed by S. Richardson ... Sold by A. Millar et al.).