Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Abstract:

Early in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), Lovelace boasts of not raping a seventeen-year-old whom he identifies as “his Rosebud.” While critical references to Rosebud are now rare, her presence preoccupied early readers who were so impressed by Lovelace’s generosity that they could scarce believe his later actions toward Clarissa. Although Lovelace acknowledges that years of criminal behaviour have destroyed his reputation, he nevertheless fantasizes that such “generosity” might establish an economy of credits and debits whereby one non-rape can count against a future sexual assault. While Lovelace’s fantasy fails on multiple levels—he invokes the logic of double-entry bookkeeping only to misunderstand it, and his non-rape of Rosebud is, of course, not actually generous at all—it offers a paradigm for understanding Richardson’s broader approach to character. As even Lovelace recognizes, not raping Rosebud can never render him innocent in a larger sense. Returning to Rosebud allows us to read Clarissa as a novel in which character remains fixed, even if it takes hundreds of pages to fully unfold.