ABSTRACT

A representative sampling of the ambiguity can be found in Clarissa Harlowe's pathetic response to Lovelace's invocation of divinity in his "sincere" post-rape offer of marriage. The strength of Nicolas Malebranche's system lay, its admirers believed, in positing a nature that was already supernatural, a divinity whose real presence served as precondition of all human experience, even the experience of doubting the real presence of divinity. Margaret Anne Doody correctly suggested that "Lovelace is 'out-Norris'd' by Clarissa's joyful acceptance of death," but in her limited account of John Norris, she does not note that being "out-Norrised" carries far more specific, and devastating, implications. As Malebranche's best known disciple, Norris provides a pregnant context for Lovelace's–or any human being's–desire to "plot." Norris too had carried on an important debate with Dodwell, arguing that the soul was "naturally" immortal, but only through God's direct role in rendering it so; nature is always supernatural, from the Malebranchean perspective.