ABSTRACT
Following the theoretical trajectory already established, the aim of this second chapter is to explore the nature of Clarissa Harlowe's legal subjectivity and its relation to her status as a spiritually transcendental heroine in Richardson's novel of 1748. It examines firstly the position of Clarissa generally in relation to the developing discourse of sensibility and its intellectual context in the mideighteenth century. In particular, I examine what I term 'the embodiment of virtue' - the philosophical association between human physicality and human virtue established by the 'moral sense' school of ethics. A conceptual link will be shown to exist between this philosophical shift of emphasis towards the ethical and epistemological value of sensory experience and the location of virtue within the body of the ideal bourgeois woman in the eighteenth century, a link essential to an understanding of Clarissa's feminine subjectivity. As Laura Hinton has observed, 'Richardson's moral paragon illustrates the inner workings of the "moral sense'" (Hinton 1999: 295). It will be argued also that the discourse of sensibility, in spite of its emphasis upon physicality, nevertheless remained focussed upon traditional religious conceptualisations of transcendental, immaterial selfhood, an emphasis which is likewise important to a reading of Clarissa's subject status. This continuing orientation towards transcendence will be explored by means of a brief discussion of Cambridge Platonism which follows R. S. Crane's analysis of the Latitudinarian roots of the cult of sensibility. The work of the Cambridge Platonist John Norris influenced Richardson and Norris' economy of transcendence and denial is essential to the symbolic ordering of Clarissa.
