Essay Questions

What is ultimately the single simple moral lesson which the novel espouses?

A single quote appears at both the beginning and the end of the novel: “That a Reformed Rake makes the best Husband.” This idea is situated as the controlling theory of romance for young women like Clarissa. It is the foundation upon which romance is pursued and accepted. And, to a point, it is a thought which remains as valid among many today. After all, is the “bad boy” to whom virtuous young women are drawn like a magnet not still found in literature and cinema and film? Richardson assumes the job of presenting evidence which feeds into the denial of the myth. Lovelace is the iconic symbolic incarnation of the reformed rake whose experiences are supposed to have been transformative. The novel tells a quite different story. Lovelace is not transformed; once a rake, always a rake. And for clinging to the belief of the myth, Clarissa pays the price.

What’s wrong with Mr. Hickman?

The answer to this question is: seemingly nothing. The man who sets his cap for Anna receives for his efforts pretty much nothing much a persistently mocking attitude. He is not a rake like Lovelace. Hickman is, in fact, quite decent. True, he does fulfill the opinion expressed of being “a man of that antiquated cut...a great deal too much upon the formal.” His formal manners and old-fashioned ways are the things stick most deeply into Anna’s craw, but those merely concrete expressions of what is actually the biggest problem at stake for the man in his pursuit of romance. Mr. Hickman is a necessity for the purpose of the novel’s lesson about disregarding the myth of the reformed rake. What is wrong with Mr. Hickman? He’s a nice guy and everybody knows what they say about nice guys.

Would “Clarissa: Virtue Reworded” have been an appropriate title for the author’s follow-up his groundbreaking first novel?

Richardson is credited with changing the course of the novel through the publication of his novel Pamela: Virtue Rewarded. It was an enormous best-seller as well as influential, but at the time also instantly the subject of ridicule and parody for what was deemed an overly serious contemplation of the concept of virtue. Henry Fielding’s Shamela remains the iconic example of the satirical novel written in response to a literary work by another. In response more to this critical negativity than to the phenomenally successful commercial success, Richardson wrote Clarissa which in many ways is a rewording of the concept of virtue as applied to Pamela.

Published serially, the success of the follow-up even reached the point where the public en masse appealed to the author to change the ending so that the rake is reformed and his heroine could wind up marrying Lovelace while retaining her virtue. But the virtue had already been lost and could not be regained through non-existence magical properties of marriage to a redeemed jerk. The message of Pamela that virtuous action is always rewarded is undermined throughout Clarissa through its message that the virtue of another is based entirely on interpretations made from inferences of what is seen rather than judgment on what is actually known.