Knowing Love: The Epistemology of Clarissa

My essay focuses on the eighteenth-century gender revolution, in particular, how the obsessive retelling of seduction narratives provided contesting narratives for knowing love. Love's plot changes with the emergence of bourgeois ideology, a change which many feminist scholars interpret as negative for women. In doing so, scholars read late eighteenth-century seduction narratives as always already reflecting the nineteenth-century ideal of passive desexed femininity. My essay focuses on Samuel Richardson's paradigmatic novel Clarissa in order to demonstrate that Clarissa's multiple narratives provide contesting epistemologies. Clarissa shows that the ideal of passive femininity was not the only and inevitable outcome of the gender revolution and that the multiple plots in the novel reflect the heterogeneous terrain for knowing love in the mid-eighteenth century.