여성과 속박 : 사무엘 리처드슨의 『클래리사』 Samuel Richardson;s Clarissa = Woman and Captivity

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

One of the perpetual themes in literature is the escape from captivity. Captivity, or the lack of freedom, refers to a person's inner and outer situation. We always want freedom, yet a paradoxical truth is that we sometimes submit to captivity for the sake of safety. We sometimes believe that we are completely free simply because we fail to figure out what really captures us. Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, in this sense, appeals quite powerfully to us, showing what captivity is and how a particular human being struggles to get out of it.
This paper is to discuss how a young woman is agonizing and struggling to get out of captivity, imposed on her by the society in a certain time and place (the 18th century, middle-class, puritan society, to be exact) and how her attempts construct a profound human tragedy. First of all, I examine the form and structure of the novel as a whole, which significantly manifest the theme of captivity. And then I analyze Clarissa as an individual virtuous self, captivated by a false ideology of her society. When there is a harmony between Clarissa's own individual morality and that of society, she enjoys her freedom as well as being a paragon of virtue. Yet when she claims to be free and independent in marriage against her family's-her father's and brother's-wish, her happiness suddenly falls down, and she is practically imprisoned in her house. She desperately tries to prove that the mercantile view and parental authority of the Harlowe family are wrong. But the power lies with the family.
Clarissa's escape from her family puts her in another kind of captivity devised by Lovelace, an aristocrat rake who is captured in between his libertine principle and his love for her. Different as their individual situations may be, the two protagonists are the same in struggling to get out of captivity. The rape of Clarissa by Lovelace reflects his desperation while forcing her to realize that she cannot be free from the society and its ideology. Clarissa refuses to accept her realistic situation in which a young woman naturally marry the man that violates her chastity or bring him to the court. Her final resolution is to escape permanently from her body, dramatizing it as a melodramatic death of a virtuous woman.
The novel shows that an individual can never be free from the captivity imposed by the society as long as one remains in it, and this constitutes an ultimate human dilemma. Time has changed since Richardson observed a young girl's struggle to escape from the male chauvinistic middle class puritan ideology, but the situation, the conflict between the society as a blind power and an individual desire to be free, remains the same. The captivity Clarissa has met becomes our problem in our society and our time.