Models of Reading

Two predominant critical assumptions about Samuel Richardson--that he is a feminist and that his novels aim to exert a straightforward didactic influence on readers--are challenged by this comparative study of female exemplarity in Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, Evelina, and Les Liaisons dangereuses in a theoretically and historically informed context, in order to investigate the ideologically charged terrain of models and modeling in eighteenth-century epistolary fiction. The female subjectivity transacted by Clarissa's text-reader relation is imagined as a site not of ethical transformation but of crippling shame and self-reproach. Koehler's readings produce a trajectory in which Burney and Laclos, writing within thirty-five years of Clarissa's publication, reject Richardson's use of female exemplarity as a weapon.