Perfect Spelling: A little more on Clarissa
Clarissa is a long novel: 537 letters, nearly as many words as all the assembled volumes of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. We would want a good reading to replicate Clarissa’s durational quality: not its tedium – the wrong word, surely – but the dread of expecting something to happen, the dull terror of confinement, the static of worry for Clarissa as her family and then Lovelace and then arguably she herself cuts her off from escape. We don’t want a good reading to bore us; but we would want, somehow, to be burdened by it.
Faced with that, I decided, in my second blog post for the group, to focus perversely on just one word. It comes from Letter 529, from Clarissa’s friend Anne Howe to John Bedford, Lovelace’s friend and erstwhile fellow rake. It’s October 12th; Clarissa died September 7th, nearly 50 letters previously, but she won’t rest. Her letters carry her on, written in advance, posted afterwards, and then still further, in Anne’s letter of some 8700 words, I believe the book’s longest, where her friend memorializes Clarissa’s appearance (tall, elegant), her capacities (an excellent reader of French and Italian, a beginner in Latin), her steadiness in economy, in charity, in the almost monastic regularity of her day and week.
No detail is too insignificant to merit its own perfection. Here’s my favorite:
She was an admirable mistress of all the graces of elocution. The hand she wrote, for the neat and free cut of her letters, (like her mind, solid, and above all flourish), for its fairness, evenness, and swiftness, distinguished her as much as the correctness of her orthography, and even punctuation, from the generality of her own sex; and left her none, among the most accurate of the other, who excelled her.
Orthography!
I’m a medievalist in an English department. In my period, no languages but the taught ones could be correct. Middle English was spelled like it sounded, either to the first writer, or to a later copiest, or some melding of the two, according to how they said the word or even the letters themselves. The accent of Middle English — for all Middle English had one — is what lets us at least pretend to figure where our texts come from: Chaucer was a London writer, the Gawain poet from Cheshire, their scribe, from Staffordshire. Swift, one of Anne’s words, might be spelled z-u-i-f-t or s-q-u-i-f-t or at least six other ways. Though none are wrong, unless wrongly transcribed by modern editors, I would hesitate to say that any are correct. That’s simply not a consideration for my era.
The later seventeenth century changed that. To praise Clarissa for her orthography is to praise her for a feature that’s consistently managed by nearly all the novel’s correspondents. I don’t know how often mid-eighteenth-century novels are so poorly copy-edited that misspellings abound. I don’t know what more hastily produced print looks like. But in Richardson’s novel, this novel produced by a printer, only the servants spell things otherwise; well, only the servants and the odious Solmes, an oaf who loves nothing but money. Accents are for outsiders. Perfect orthography is general.
So much of what Clarissa does cannot be matched. Does her particular catastrophe require her particular virtue? Or is it a general possibility for young women of rank and virtue? Is she to be admired, or imitated?
Anne’s long letter offers some opportunity for imitation. On the lowliest level, if we are women, we can learn to correct a fault too general to our sex, as Anne says, by disappearing into the invisibility of perfected spelling.
Among Clarissa’s problems is her notability. Her unsurpassed beauty and virtue is what draws Lovelace to test her and to destroy them both in the process. She is worth memorializing because she is a paragon; she may well be peerless, and therefore a magnet for peerless rakes. Inimitability attracts.
It would be less of a novel if there were no one in it worth the noting. But surely disappearing into a more distributed perfection, the perfection of a tool that just works, that of correct spelling, might have kept her from notice. Here’s the one perfection, then, that’s camouflage. Would this have been enough to save her? I’m absolutely not saying that; but this is a perfection, at least, that is more hidden the better it is practiced. It may be the only perfection that could be called modest.
Thank you.
(a supplemental post to this one at the Clarissa blog)
