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Article: "I shall enter her heart": fetishizing feeling in Clarissa.
- Article from:
- Studies in the Novel
- Article date:
- December 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 University of North Texas. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In its barest narrative terms, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747-1748) is a novel in letters about bow a notorious libertine kidnaps and rapes a young woman to seek revenge on her family and test her virtue. The young woman, exceptional in almost every regard from the transcendental to the mundane--in beauty, writing, wit, needlework, French, housekeeping, chastity and worship of God--unknowingly walks into the charming libertine's schemes by writing to him in an attempt to reform him, and rebelling against her parents, who want her to marry someone else. Despite her subsequent "fall," the loss of her virginity, she recovers her virtuous ...