Karen Horney and Clarissa: The Tragedy of Neurotic Pride

For me, as a critic, the Horneyan approach to the study of literary characters is an experience of rediscovery with every novel that I choose to examine. Each time, in the midst of the process, I become freshly aware of why I need Karen Horney, of what it is that her system of psychology, and no one else's, can give me for my work. Let me share this experience by discussing some of the essential ways in which Horney is meeting my needs for my work-in-progress: a psychological study of the early English novel Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson.

The modern reader is quite likely to be unfamiliar with this novel. Written in the middle of the eighteenth century, Clarissa discourages us because of its length-over 2,000 pages-and because Richardson's special form, a novel written as a series of letters between intimate friends, makes a limited action excruciatingly slow. Although it is a tale of seduction, which suggests plenty of action, the entire plot can be adequately summarized in a few sentences. Clarissa Harlowe is the beautiful and virtuous daughter of an ambitious middle-class family, who try to use her as one means of acquiring greater power and wealth. When they force her into the disobedient act of refusing to marry the repulsive man of their choice, she, in her effort to escape, falls into the clutches of a handsome, aristocratic libertine named Robert Lovelace. Lovelace abducts Clarissa at the end of the first 500 pages; he holds her captive until he finally rapes her, on about page 1,200 (all that without much sexual excitement for modern readers); and as a result of her disgrace, the violated Clarissa dies-but gloriously, taking another thousand pages to do it! Samuel Johnson once remarked, “If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.”^{1, p. 62}

Johnson knew, however, that one does not read Richardson for his plots,