C h a r a c t e r5 3herself. As long as there are bigamously minded Rochesters around,
as well as religious fanatics like St John Rivers eager to drag you off
to an early death in Africa, an orphaned, penniless young woman
like Jane would be ill advised to relax her moral vigilance.
Pleasantness is for those who can afford it.
This is also true of one of the greatest female figures in
English literature, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Few characters
have received such a mauling at the hands of the critics. Clarissa,
who refuses to go to bed with a dissolute aristocrat and is raped by
him instead, has been variously described as prudish, priggish,
morbid, narcissistic, self- dramatising, masochistic, hypocritical,
self- deluded and (this from a female critic) ‘a ripe temptation to
violence’. Few examples of resplendent virtue have been so cordially
detested. Richardson’s heroine is certainly pious, high- minded and
mildly self- deluded. Yet all she is really doing is protecting her chas-
tity in a brutally patriarchal world. If she is not the kind of woman
one would gladly accompany on a pub crawl, unlike Shakespeare’s
Viola or Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, the novel makes it clear enough
why she cannot afford to be.
Innocence in a dissolute society is always likely to be mildly
amusing. The eighteenth- century novelist Henry Fielding loves his
good- hearted characters, like Joseph Andrews and Parson Adams
in Pamela, but he also delights in sending them up. The innocent
are likely to be credulous and naive, and are thus always a rich
source of satiric comedy. The good are bound to be gullible, since
how can virtue look sharp for itself and still be virtue? To be guile-
less is as absurd as it is admirable. Fielding thus uses his good-
hearted characters to expose the rogues and scoundrels around
them, while at the same time poking some gentle fun at their
unworldly innocence. If the novel itself were not looking out for