The bourgeois novel and samuel richardson

THE BOURGEOIS NOVEL AND SAMUEL RICHARDSON

THE BOURGEOIS NOVEL

Richardson was the originator of the so - called bourgeois novels or novels of manners.

The novels are based on a single story,

The novels are set in a domestic environment, usually confined to interiors,

Richardson is the first writer to concentrate on the new middle classes, with their private lives, family problems and repressed desires,

There is plenty of realism,

All the novels reveals Richardson's unique psychological insight into human behaviour and strong empathy with the female sex. His own characters are capable of emotional development,

His novels are all love stories,

They are all written in epistolary form,

They all share moralizing purpose.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON (

Samuel Richardson was born in Derbyshire. After setting up a successful printing business of his own, he become in turn Printer of the Journal of the House of Commons. He spent all his working life in London, where he died.

Richardson took to novel - writing almost by accident. In 1739 two printers asked him to compile a little volume of model letters to be used by semi - educated country people and could teach them "how to think and act justly and prudently  in the common Concerns of Human Life". The collection was also to contain a number of letters intended for girls "who were obliged to go out to service".

Richardson had natural talent for letter - writing and he accepted the proposal but soon realized that the theme of certain of the letters was material for a complete novel. He temporarily set aside the work he had been commissioned to write. In two months he then produces the first two volumes of Pamela, the first of his three novels.

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded in four volumes, the novel narrates, in the epistolary form, how Pamela defends herself from the advances of her mistress's son, Mr. B, who, after many unsuccessful attempts to seduce her, finally falls in love with her and marries her. A second part was added, showing Pamela s a happy and virtuous wife.

Clarissa Harlowe in seven volumes. Unlike Pamela virtue here is persecuted and finally defeated. The heroine, Clarissa, is in fact abducted and raped, and dies after grief and shame.

Sir Charles Grandison in seven volumes. Is the story of a man intended as a model of manly virtues.

Richardson's novels had a precise purpose: they intended to edify and amuse.

They moral treatises in the form of love stories. Nothing like this had ever been written before, with such wealth of passions, subjectivism and self - revelation.

Middle - class people at once understood the importance of this new type of fiction, in which they found "a means of satisfying their suppressed desires. Richardson's works were intended for "them and showed them how to obtain spiritual and material success. He contrasted the honest bourgeoisie with the corrupt aristocracy, but made upward mobility the final goal of any attempt at social improvement. In Pamela Richardson seems to suggest that marriage to rake is desirable , provided is a man of gentle birth, and virtue is good above all for its utilitarian value. What Richardson did not realize was that, by coming into contact with the upper class, the bourgeois citizen often came to lose his or her innocence, as we may read metaphorically in Clarissa.

PAMELA ANDREWS

Pamela Andrews works as a servant l lady B's house. When Lady b dies her son, Mr B, asks Pamela to remain and continue to work for him. However Mr B soon reveals his second aim: he wants to seduce Pamela. His wicked intentions reach their climax when he confines her in his country house and keeps her as a prisoner. He even tries to rape her by sneaking into her bed. Pamela always resists his attacks in order to defend her virtue and recounts the various events in detailed letters to her parents: she especially speaks about her feelings and the psychological strain she is under. Pamela's strong determination to keep herself honest and chaste captures Mr B's heart who falls in love with her and asks her to marry him notwithstanding the difference in their social status. Pamela, who too has fallen in love with him, accepts the proposal. Pamela adjusts to her status and becomes a perfect wife.

CLARISSA HARLOWE

Divided into three parts:

Clarissa, a beautiful and virtuous middle - class girl, refuses to marry an old, ugly but wealthy man as she is in love with Lovelace, under whose protection she imprudently places herself after running away from home,

Lovelace is an unscrupulous rake who, after vainly attempting Clarissa's virtue, finally manages first to drug and then rape her. Having got what he wants, he now proposes to marry her, but Clarissa refuses and eventually escapes from him,

Abandoned by her family and banished from society by the harsh moral code of the time, Clarissa finally dies saint - like while Lovelace will eventually be killed in a duel by Colonel Morden, Clarissa's cousin.

Clarissa is narrated through letters, but here the structure is much more complex. In Clarissa there are two separate groups of letters, which sometimes overlap, but which convey more information and more varied viewpoints. The first group is made up of the letters between Clarissa and her friend Anna Howe, the second of those between Lovelace of Clarissa's death in a way which is a "studied presentation of "ars moriendi", a high example of the art of dying like a Christian.

Clarissa's death

The passage offers a prime example of Richardson's melodramatic style and moralizing tendency. Humiliated and defeated in life, she finds in death her only escape from a hostile word, which considers chastity a purely physical condition and in which there is no more place for her, as she has failed to combine virtue with prudence. Clarissa dies like a martyr.

Clarissa and Pamela Clarissa can also be read as a document of the conditions of 18^th century woman, who was making her first tentative struggles for emancipation beginning whitin the sphere of feelings. Pamela is an ethical model to follow, because she make her own choices and marry the man she loved always obeying her parent's. but Pamela did provide any solutions to the complex problem of the relationship between parents and children, above all daughters. Richardson realized the new demand of female reading public and, in Clarissa, he tried to face this problem, as is evident from the very long subtitle he added to the novel.

Ambiguity Richardson actually defended a "status quo" which still punished all those who dared to break precise codes of behaviour. Clarissa's misfortunes and her very death sound like genuine warnings and remind us, in a way, of the Puritan idea of punishments. Clarissa's return to her father's house might be seen as a supernatural equivalent of the necessary return of all daughters to the parental authority. Clarissa first embody a new type of heroine in her rebellion to her parents, ends by being reconciled to the moral code of the time.

Hypocrisy moral ambiguity is often combined with a certain indulgence in morbid details and situations. This suggests a latent repressed current of sensuality and even elements of sadism, barely disguised under a moral message.

RICHARDSON'S TECHNIQUE AND INFLUENCE

Richardson's epistolary technique:

Provided immediacy, as each letter was in keeping with the personality of the writer,

Created a sense of intimacy between characters and readers,

Provided an acceptable device for simultaneously publicizing  virtue and describing bourgeois life,

Writing letter was the custom of the age,

Influence other writers such as Rousseau (La Nouvelle Heloise), Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther) and Foscolo (Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis).

Richardson became the first true novelist in English literature, starting a fashion which was to continue up to our own times in modern sentimental novels, films and television soap operas.