I just watched three hours of the BBC adaptation of Richardson's CLARISSA with Sean Bean and Saskia Wickham. If Candide is the 18th Century's dumbest male, Clarissa is his female equivalent. Her passivity is entirely frustrating, but i was moved to tears by her death. The novel's from around 1750, and it's influence on literature was enormous: de Laclos took a lot of it for his novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, even to his male protagonist's final suicidal duel.
I didn't know much about the novel, except that Henry Fielding made fun of Richardson's morally upright characters in JOSEPH ANDREWS and TOM JONES. Clarissa is a wealthy young woman who's widely known for her virtue and purity so, to escape a marriage to an idiot forced upon her by her family, she puts herself into the clutches of a rake, Robert Lovelace, determined to seduce her. He takes her to London, lodges her in a brothel, plots a false marriage to her, and when all else fails, has the whores hold her down while he viciously rapes her. Then he decides he loves her, and Clarissa tells him she wants nothing to do with him. His family, learning of his crimes, disowns him, and Clarissa, jailed on false charges by the madame of the whorehouse, determines to die in prison since heaven can only be an improvement on her current state of affairs. Her family takes her back, only after she's dead, and Lovelace allows himself to be killed in a duel by his friend Jack, who became a protector of Clarissa's while she was dying in prison. The Penguin edition takes 1534 pages to tell all this.
The BBC did it in three hours, and beautifully, to boot.
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Topic: LINT (Read 12858 times)