Lovelace’s crime, in a certain sense, is only incidental. There can be no worldly happiness for Clarissa. In defense of this virtue, Clarissa has an almost morbid streak that prefigures her conclusion. Her purity and her virtue are the building blocks of her selfhood, but these elements have been formed in her childhood, and thus are not directly transferable to the exigencies, and duties, of adult life. Her devotion to “the single life” is not only a resistance to an unwanted match, but a refusal to have her purity blemished. Like all young people, she wants happiness but her idea of it is impossible to live, an almost childish fantasy. Though she is an extremely rational heroine, she is not necessarily reasonable. Her death-drive is a fundamental aspect of her character, one present since the very beginning of the book. This heroine can have no other conclusion. Richardson respects the conclusion made inevitable by the very “divinity” of Clarissa’s personality. Her death serves not only a narrative end in the novel, but the demands of psychological realism. Clarissa’s death is the inevitable result of her unrealistic, unimpeachable virtue a virtue that is defined less by what she does than by what she will permit. The life suggested by her example is untenable. Only in the afterlife does Clarissa presumably receive what she deserves. In Clarissa, Samuel Richardson finds “an exemplar to her sex.” But her story does not provide a model to live by, as such a qualification may lead one to expect.
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