Honors Thesis Archive

Author	Sean McCullough
Title	Broken for Whom?: Reading Richardson’s Clarissa as the Eucharist
Department	English
Advisor	Dr. Cynthia Richards, Dr. Michael Mattison, Dr. Barbara Keiser
Year	2015
Honors	University Honors
Full Text	View Thesis (138 KB) At the author's request, an electronic copy of this thesis is only available to on-campus users.
Abstract	Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa is a pivotal feminist novel that deals with questions of the body, love, authority, and power. Throughout his work, Richardson ostensibly adheres to a Judeo-Christian allegory, his novel bearing not only resonances to, but also quoted passages from Milton’s widely disseminated Paradise Lost. However, concomitantly, Richardson also aligns Clarissa with Christ’s narrative in the New Testament. Not only is she Milton’s Eve, she is Christ. Through this double allegory, Richardson emancipates Clarissa and all women from the constraints of what scholars refer to as the “Eve Script.” In this interpretation, Clarissa’s textual body (her collection of letters) is the body of Christ broken for all to consume and experience salvation. Like Jesus, once Clarissa understands the limitations of her human body, the significance she places on it diminishes to allow her broken corpus of letters to become her new body; therefore, reading Clarissa becomes the Eucharist.