“Silence wants not either merit or amiableness”: les silences de Clarissa

Abstract

A sheer impossibility of the epistolary novel, silence is nevertheless thematized in Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). Clarissa’s silences are multifarious, affecting both internal and external communication, both the represented conversations and the correspondence itself. This paper presents a typology of the various silences at work in Samuel Richardson’s second novel. It underlines the importance of what proves to be a genuine speech act in the making of the characters and strives to highlight the specificity of the silences of fiction. The thematics of silence calls for a reflection on the role and place of woman both in the society represented in Clarissa and in Familiar Letters (1741).