But then Sidney gets a cold, and hallucinates for a week or so, and when she's finally up and about, a letter has come from Faulkland's dismissed footman that says he's a bad, bad man—and inside that letter is a letter from Faulkland's ex-girlfriend, who writes to tell him she's pregnant. Now the Bidulphs are in an uproar—Lady B is incensed and says she will never let S marry such a dangerous rake; F says there's a more complicated side to the story than what was in the letter, and in fact there are some other letters Lady B refuses to read, "for fear of seeing something indecent"; G says that F is a really good guy, and that if Lady B is looking for a young man for S to satisfy all her (Lady B's) scruples, S will never get married. And Lady B has had a long and scathing conversation with F where she's told him to marry his baby's mama, that he should be ashamed to be courting S, that he's an evil man for having let the babymama's aunt let him have sex with the girl and then leave her. G and B are no longer speaking, either, although the B's all share a house. And this is all before page 40. FORTY. It's amazing.
Not that Clarissa doesn't have stuff that happens—but C spends a lot more time in her letters than S does on pity and guilt and wailing that she doesn't know what she'll do. I don't know that Sidney won't get to some of that—but a much larger portion of Sidney's elaboration on these events bears directly on the plot than Clarissa's does. So much so that I'm starting to think Clarissa doesn't have a plot so much as it has a mood—a sort of feeling of overhanging, sickly, horrible gloom. All the stuff that gets written about in Clarissa—the filial piety, the guilt, the recriminations, the shame, the wishing that her father would forgive her and her brother would stop torturing her and her mother would stand up for her—is important, but important mostly to making the reader feel as hopelessly depressed as Clarissa herself must feel. Whereas Sidney—so far, at least—seems to be fascinated by the soap-operatic drama of the family feud she's missed. She wasn't a part of it while it was going on (she was moaning and sweating and hallucinating on her bed for a week), so she can watch it after it's over. She's going to feel terrible when she gets to the end of this episode, of course—but I have a feeling I'm still going to like her when it's over. For one thing, she has these lovely sentences:
You know my mother is rigid in her notions of virtue; and I was determined to shew her that I would endeavour to imitate her. I therefore suppressed the swelling passion in my breast, and, with as much composure as I could assume, told her, I thought she acted as became her; and that, with regard to Mr. Faulkland, my opinion of his conduct was such, that I never desired to see him more. This answer, dictated perhaps by female pride (for I will not answer for the feelings of my heart at that instant) was so agreeable to my mother, that she threw her arms about my neck, and kissed me several times; blessing, and calling me by the most endearing names ]at every interval. Her tenderness overcame me; or, to deal with sincerity, I believe I was willing to make it an excuse for weeping. Oh! my dear mother, cry'd I, I have need of your indulgence; but indeed your goodness quite overpowers me.Sidney does what Clarissa never does: she reflects directly on her own conduct. "I was determined," Sidney writes, "to shew her that I would endeavour to imitate her. I therefore suppressed the swelling passion in my breast." That swelling passion is where Sidney acknowledges having feelings that she doesn't express, while Clarissa is so well behaved that she has no feelings except the ones the conduct-book expects she should. Clarissa, I think, ends up writing itself into a critique of this kind of behavior (because Clarissa does everything right but dies a horrible martyr's death), but it doesn't start off wanting to be this kind of critique—it wants to be the story of a wonderful girl whose family never appreciated her as they should have. Sidney Bidulph, though, starts off as a story about a girl who was always good but ended up unhappy, as though proving that doing everything right may actually be a bad idea.
Anyway, I'm toying with this idea of Sheridan writing a sort of vehicle for the kind of moral ambiguity that Richardson doesn't want to support. Does an epistolary novel have a viewpoint, though? Sidney Bidulph's been just letters from Sidney, so far (except for the brief introduction from the "Editor," and a briefer one from the grown-up Cecilia), so is the novel's opinion just Sidney's? Or is there a sort of über-narrator hidden inside this? (And the idea of the hidden narrator, of course, is making me think of Austen and the Secret of Style, too—could Sidney be internalizing a narrator like Miller claims Anne Elliot is doing in Persuasion?)
