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—is to have her appear cheerful. When she has initially renounced the Protestant “heretic” Sir Charles all her family members embrace her and, as Clementina describes it, “complemented me, but only on my chearfulness, and said, I was once more their own Clementina” (2: 172). And when Clementina cannot keep up appearances and experiences her breakdown, they press Sir Charles to talk to her because the Patriarch is visiting and they “would have her be cheerful before the Patriarch … he will expect to see her” (2: 149). It is their property in their daughter and the public admiration she excites that prompts their love; they show precious little regard for her thoughts or feelings otherwise, and never for her personal boundaries.

Sir Charles Grandison, as a figure of masculine authority, seems to solve the problem of private conformity to public demands by rendering obedience pleasurable through his personal charm, generosity, and clear judgment. However, the pleasure of being obedient to a man of Sir Charles’s merit obscures but does not erase the pressure to conform. A good deal of freedom, and the merit of choosing wisely that only freedom can give, is lost by the characters in the world controlled by Sir Charles. Wendy Jones has pointed out that his and Harriet’s mutual attraction instantiates sentimental love—erotic attraction to the beloved’s virtue “in a dialectical resolution of reason and passion” (78). Yet the fact that Richardson makes Sir Charles’s merit irresistible underscores the foundational sadism of a man who uses people’s personal attachment to him to create the world he wants. Admirable and benevolent patriarch though he is, the environment he creates is one of coerced, not freely chosen, virtue. This is part of what Carol Houlihan Flynn calls “the costs of the domestic reconciliation that Richardson exacts from his female characters and readers” (134).

Indeed, the young bluestocking Hester Mulso argued with Richardson against this very domestic reconciliation in Clarissa while he was starting to write Sir Charles Grandison. Rejecting Clarissa’s continued reverence for her father’s divine authority after he had cursed her in her temporal as well as eternal life, Mulso tells Richardson, “I think a father who can be capable of solemnly imprecating divine vengeance on his child, has very little title to be looked upon in this awful light” (November 10, 1750). Interestingly, the absolute filial obedience Mulso indicts in Clarissa is central to the arguments Sir Charles, Mrs. Beaumont, and the Porettas use against Clementina when she wants to withdraw from public life. And since it is the money associated with a daughter’s marriage that prompts both the Harlowes and the Porettas to abuse their child psychologically, Mulso’s implicit query is quite relevant: should a parent’s authority always be obeyed, whatever motivates that parent and however he or she behaves? Mulso voiced what Clarissa and Clementina could not or would not fully articulate.

Sir Charles is completely aware of the Porettas’ machinations; indeed, he uses similar tactics when convincing Charlotte to marry Lord G, but he uses the language of sentiment, virtue, and feeling throughout. He chides Charlotte for making light of a subject “that concerned the happiness of your future life, and, if yours, mine” (2: 86). He confirms their affective bond as brother and sister even while exposing Charlotte before the family for what he perceives as her “unprincipled” (2: 86) remarks. Condemned by her domestic community for her responses to him, Charlotte observes of her brother, “Very happy … to have such a character, that every-body must be in fault who differs from him, or offends him” (2: 87). Obedience is nominally voluntary, yet Clementina could be speaking for Charlotte as well as herself in exclaiming that she is “Oppressed by persuasion! … Cruel persuasion!” (3: 60). There is an element of sadism in applying profound emotional pressure to individuals in moments of vulnerability and it is a sadism that Sir Charles is as guilty of as the Poretta family. Richardson’s characters derive pleasure from the power registered by another’s suffering.

Sir Charles—and Richardson—desired an ordered, harmonious world of virtue and sociability. The author was, as Juliet McMaster argues, concerned with “inward and spiritual grace,” but for his readers and characters that grace must be registered in “outward and visible signs” (267). Yet to force someone to reveal him- or herself, the inner private self, violates the very virtue it seeks to celebrate. The “pursuit of a classical harmony of form and essence” (McMaster 255), of inner reality and outward manifestation, leads at best to Harriet’s embarrassment at her own frank but premature admission that she loves Sir Charles and at worst to Clementina’s madness. The disturbing question at the heart of Richardson’s project of harmony is what, if anything, remains of the individual after the private identity has been rendered a sacrifice to public consumption? Ultimately, the problem of Sir Charles Grandison and Sir Charles Grandison is not the hero’s perfect virtue or almost constant didacticism, but that the reader, like Clementina in regard to the Porettas, cannot trust the good man.

Works Cited

Carter, Elizabeth and Catherine Talbot. A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot from the Year 1741 to 1770: To Which are Added Letters from Mrs. Carter to Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vesey between the Years 1767 and 1787, V. 1. London: F.C. & J. Rivington, 1808.

Chaber, Lois. “‘Sufficient to the Day’: Anxiety in Sir Charles Grandison.” In Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Ed. David Blewett. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Delany, Mary Granville Pendarves. The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany, Vol. 1. Ed. Sarah Chauncey Woolsey. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1879.

Doody, Margaret Anne. “Identity and Character in Sir Charles Grandison.” In Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays. Eds. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Flynn, Carol Houlihan. “The Pains of Compliance in Sir Charles Grandison.” In Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays. Eds. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Jones, Wendy. Consensual Fictions: Women, Liberalism, and the English Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

McMaster, Juliet. “Sir Charles Grandison: Richardson on Body and Character.” In Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Ed. David Blewett. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Mulso, Hester. “Letters on Filial Obedience.” In Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738-1785. Vol 3: Catherine Talbot & Hester Chapone. Ed. Rhoda Zuk. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999.

Richardson, Samuel. Sir Charles Grandison. 1753-4. Ed. Jocelyn Harris, 3 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.
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Where Does Grandison End?

by Emily C. Friedman, University of Missouri

Epistolary novels are notoriously "open" works. The potential unending nature of a correspondence lingers around the form, which tends to create endings that center around the reunion or final alienation of the correspondents, or that most ultimate of ends, death itself. Moreover, the subjectivity of the letter-writer's point of view has been time and again discussed: much ink has been spilled on what William B. Warner called "The Pamela Media Event" -- the explosion of multimedia responses, continuations, condemnations, and retellings of the story that contains the seeds of its own critique within the pages of its text. Less has been made of the effect of epistolarity on Richardson's final novel, Sir Charles Grandison, and what Jocelyn Harris calls the "prevailing self-consciousness" of the final novel -- a description by no means meant as a compliment (130).

This is, I suspect, because unlike Richardson's other novels, Grandison does not fall into the first and most glaring trap of the epistolary form: to whit, the title subject does not tell his own story. Because the titular hero is not also the speaker (as Pamela Andrews was entirely and Clarissa Harlowe was primarily), several of the interpretive problems that arise in the prior novels are not found in the same fashion. Because we do not hear Sir Charles speak of his own virtues, the charges of a self-serving narrative are largely mitigated.

That said, Grandison is not without its own challenges. Sir Charles himself is, unlike the vacillating Pamela or self-protective Clarissa, absolutely opaque and almost superhumanly consistent. If he struggles (as Richardson claims he does, with "tendencies to pride and passion" (6.300)), it is not presented to our gaze directly. How does one hang a story around a main character who does not grow and change, particularly in a period that is dominated, as J. Paul Hunter suggests, by a "character-centric" understanding of the shape of the novel? (283)
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