La Not-so-Petit Mort: Marriage as Death of Self in Clarissa

A Critical Essay

While we tend to view marriage as a promising event and death as a sinister loss, both mark a dramatic change in a person’s life. In the case of marriage, especially in Samuel Richardson’s time, a woman abandons the life she knows when she enters into the unfamiliar state of wifehood. As a financial transaction, she stops being her father’s property and instead becomes her husband’s as she sheds her surname and gives up her virginity at last. In Clarissa, marriage not only represents a social status change but also a physical status change: from virgin daughter to sexually active wife. Likewise, death is a financial event of burial expenses and wills, and it quite obviously marks the most extreme social and physical status change—from being alive to being dead. In the Christian world of the novel, one’s life ends completely as he or she dies to this world and enters the eternal afterlife, heaven or hell. In both scenarios, an expensive event marks the passage from one state to the next. Whether funeral or wedding, preparations involve special clothing, ornate decorations, and writing promises to loved ones—either vows or a will. In letters 2-XVII, 2-XXXII, 6-IX, and 7-LXXXII, Clarissa, Belford, and Lovelace inadvertently emphasize the parallels between death and marriage as the paramount status changes. Throughout the novel, Richardson positions Clarissa at the end of her time in the Harlowe household, pushed out by her siblings’ control for failure to comply in a marriage to Mr. Solmes. By removing Clarissa from her home and family, Richardson is able to wedge her between marriage and death as the only alternatives. Through this marriage-death binary, his characterization of Clarissa as excited for death and opposed to marriage, and the novel’s attention to the exchanges involved after weddings and funerals, Richardson suggests that marriage is a sort of death: the death of self.

Richardson consistently constrains Clarissa’s fate to two options: death or marriage. The Harlowe family will shun her if she does not comply with their wishes and marry Mr. Solmes, yet she has no way to survive on her own, as her cousin Morden, the only person who can move her into her grandfather’s estate, remains unavailable as he travels abroad. Unwelcome at home as a single woman, she sees herself as having to choose between two escapes: marrying or dying. She professes, “I would sooner chuse death, than Mr. Solmes” (2-XVIII, 120). Later, after leaving home and being raped by Lovelace, she must choose again. Knowing that she will earn a reputation as a fallen woman if she does not marry Lovelace, she can either hope to marry him or die. Lovelace corners Clarissa to remind us of the binary choice:

Let me ask you, Madam, what meant you, when you said, “that, were it not a sin, you would die before you gave me that assurance?” …

To be constrained as I have been constrained! To be stopt by your vile agents! To be brought up by force, and to be bruised in my own defence against such illegal violence!—I dare to die, Lovelace— (6.IX.43-44)

In Richardson’s plot, Clarissa’s life as a single woman is an impossibility; the world of the novel allows no room for alternative lifestyles. Clarissa is “constrained” to either giving a man “that assurance” of marriage or daring “to die.” She must grow up, graduate from adolescence, and enter an endless state of maturity. In this life, that means a lifelong commitment to either Solmes or Lovelace. The only alternative is death, which provides an eternal life with God. Perhaps what makes Clarissa’s single life impossible is her physical status change. She is no longer a virgin, so what was a necessary choice before now becomes urgent. Caught between single and married statuses, Clarissa cannot reverse the physical loss of virginity. She has already lost some part of herself and, by Richardson’s plot devices, she must now lose the rest of herself by either becoming Lovelace’s wife or through death. By pushing the protagonist to these limits and “constraining” her so dramatically, Richardson exposes how closely related marriage is to a complete death. He aligns them so that dying is the next logical—for Clarissa, the only—choice besides marrying.

Richardson reminds readers of this equation of marriage and death through characters’ diction of loss. Lovelace, like Clarissa, seems to view marriage as a complete change of state and loss of self. He writes to Belford about the loose women in Mrs. Sinclair’s house, “They concluded that I should certainly marry, and be a lost man” (6.IX.46). These ruined women at Mrs. Sinclair’s tease Lovelace for his efforts to marry Clarissa. Readers would probably consider these women as “lost,” as they live and work in what is essentially a brothel, yet the women think of people who deviate from their single life of sex, drugs, and lies as “lost.” Subtly, Richardson uses these women to depict Clarissa’s potential fate if she refuses to succumb to either marriage or death. To not enter into a new state of commitment with either a spouse in his estate or God in heaven translates to becoming a loose, earthly woman—an impossibility for Clarissa’s character, making death the only way out. The term “lost man” is also poignant because it implies that Richardson’s equation of marriage to loss of self applies for both partners, not just for women. Both Lovelace and the women link the two ideas together casually, without reflection, indicating that the association is common knowledge: marriage necessitates losing oneself.

Through Clarissa’s bizarre excitement for her own death, as well as through the marriage arrangements that other characters press on Clarissa, Richardson points to the similarities between the rituals surrounding marriage and death. Clarissa argues against a union to Solmes by accusing him of only offering a positive financial exchange:

His reverence!—his unworthiness!—’Tis so apparent, that even he himself sees it, as well as everybody else. Hence his offers to purchase me!—Hence it is, that Settlements are to make up for acknowleged want of merit! (2-XXXII.184)

Clarissa prepares for a life of wealth in death, while her family pushes her to prepare for a life of wealth through marriage. She acknowledges marriage as a financial transaction for those around her and tries to abstain from it. Again, Richardson recalls these early scenes of marriage and money as Clarissa dies in order to suggest some similarities between death and marriage. The novel reminds us that death is also largely a financial transaction. The entire drama is set in motion by Clarissa’s grandfather’s willing his estate to her. But instead of aiming for the settlements to be gained through marriage, Clarissa focuses on the immaterial, heavenly settlements to be gained through death. Richardson highlights the financial aspects of both the wedding and the funeral—the marriage settlements and the will—to draw attention to the ways in which marriage and death are both portals to a new state: from poor to rich, from living with one’s family to being in charge of an entire estate.

As Clarissa dies, she returns to the idea of wealth. She purchases an expensive coffin and burial clothes as a bride might choose a gown:

She discharged the Undertaker’s Bill…with as much chearfulness as she could ever have paid for the cloaths she sold to purchase this her palace: For such she called it; reflecting upon herself for the expensiveness of it…. It is covered with fine black cloth, and lined with white satten;…The burial-dress was brought home with it. The women had curiosity enough, I suppose, to see her open That…. And, perhaps, thou wouldst have been glad to have been present, to have admired it too!— (7.LXXXII.312-13)

Clarissa would rather die than marry for wealth and estates, yet she calls her own coffin her “palace.” She prepares for her transition to an eternal life in heaven through expensive purchases of clothing and other funeral arrangements, like the delivery of an ornate, inscribed coffin to her bedroom. Richardson showcases the similarities between weddings and funerals to again assert that marriage and death have much in common. He confuses the usual idea of a bride-soon-to-be preparing for her wedding day by replacing it with images of Clarissa cheerfully preparing for her funeral. Trying on her burial-dress, admiring the detail of her coffin, and even eyeing her coffin with excitement as her eternal dwelling space, her “palace,” she does not come across as simply morbid. Instead of just fascinated by death, Clarissa looks forward with “more fancy than would perhaps be thought suitable on so solemn an occasion” to the status change, to the transition from her impossible position in life—a single woman who is no longer a virgin—to an eternity of being a new self. Even the date on her coffin supports Richardson’s claim that marriage is a type of death: “The date, April 10. she accounted for, as not being able to tell what her closing-day would be; and as That was the fatal day of her leaving her Father’s house” ((7.LXXXII.312). By choosing the day she left the Harlowe home, she considers herself dead, in a sense, from the time she moved beyond the realm of virginal daughter. She does not choose the day she lost her virginity or even the day she moved in with Lovelace. Richardson wants us to see that Clarissa begins the process of losing herself as soon as she steps out of the position she has always occupied under her father’s rule.

Through the characterization of Clarissa as unwilling to marry but eager to die, the novel’s attention to the rituals surrounding weddings and funerals, and the plot-driven marriage-death binary, Richardson equates marriage with death. Marrying signifies a death of the self, just like legitimate death. In both cases, the change is both social and physical. Both are marked by events to acknowledge a person’s loss of self and passage into a new life.