'Clarissa lives': Female response to 'Clarissa' from Richardson's contemporaries to Jane Austen (Samuel Richardson)

“‘Clarissa Lives’: Female Response to Clarissa from Richardson's Contemporaries to Jane Austen” is a study of early oppositional readings of Richardson's blockbuster novel. The fraught reception history and the curious reader-dynamics of Clarissa (1747–8) lie at the heart of my investigation. A sustained reading of the debate Richardson engaged in with readers in his personal correspondence yields a deeper understanding of the methodological underpinnings of his didactic program and of the gender politics of the day. I contend that Richardson constructs Clarissa according to a “therapeutic” or cathartic model that seeks moral education through emotional expenditure. In Richardson's view the correct reader response to Clarissa's death should be both sentimental and somatic—the reader should shed tears. While many female readers did stied tears at the heroine's demise, they also left behind a powerful rhetorical legacy of resistance that is often overlooked by critics today. This dissertation hopes to make legible female readers' opposition to Clarissa's death not merely as sentimental textual engagement, but as an indirect (and in some cases an overt) form of ideological resistance to the exclusion of women from full legal and civil subjecthood that they believe Richardson's narrative choices underwrite.; The second half of the thesis explores the shift away from Richardsonian thematics and epistolary narrative form in the mature works of Jane Austen, namely Northanger Abbey (1818), Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Mansfield Park (1814). In liberating her heroines from the Richardsonian seduction plot Austen emphasizes the fact that the problems they face are socio-economic rather than psycho-sexual, political rather than emotional. The “injured body” at the center of Austen's novels takes the shape not of the private body of an individual woman, but of the public body of women as a collective group. Where Richardson creates an ethics of sympathetic engagement, Austen privileges the subversive forces of iron), and wit and shows the reader that these too can have an ethical function.