Beauty
For women, beauty is associated with goodness, but this
does not hold true for men. Clarissa is remarkably beautiful, and
it is clear that her beauty reveals her ceaseless inner goodness.
Even when she is emaciated and near death, Belford calls her a “beautiful
skeleton.” On the contrary, the whores at Mrs. Sinclair’s house
look nice enough when they are dressed up to look like dignified
members of the aristocracy, but when Belford sees them in dishabille
he is disgusted by their ugliness. The whores, unlike Clarissa,
are vicious and therefore ugly underneath their finery. Lovelace
is an exceptionally attractive man, and his good looks go a long
way in helping him seduce women and collect minions to help him
carry out his contrivances. Belford, on the other hand, is ugly,
as Lovelace points out time and again. But in the end, Belford rises
above his rakish ways and proves to be a good man, and arguably
one of the only characters in the novel who comes to Clarissa’s
aid.
Angels/devils
Throughout the novel, Clarissa is referred to and described
as an angel. Lovelace calls her “my angel” and other people frequently refer
to her as a divine woman. She wears white and has an otherworldly
goodness that is frequently equated with heaven and the afterlife.
Lovelace is determined to defile Clarissa’s purity and prove that
she is indeed a woman and not an unearthly being: “And should not
my beloved, for her own sake, descend by degrees from goddess-hood
into humanity?” On the other hand, Lovelace and Mrs. Sinclair’s
whores are associated with devils and demons. Lovelace frequently
calls his servant Will, who assists him in his wicked works, “my
devil.” After Lovelace rapes Clarissa, she asserts in a letter that
he is “Satan himself.” And Lovelace describes Mrs. Sinclair’s whores
as diabolical and calls their establishment a “hellhouse,” which
again associates him with Satan or some hellish figure: from his
first flight with Clarissa, he is mysteriously drawn to Sinclair’s
brothel, the setting of numerous deceits and Clarissa’s ultimate
desecration.
Animals
References to animals occur throughout the novel and,
in contrast to the symbol of the angel, they are always associated
with the bestial and with sex. Mrs. Sinclair is most often described
as an animal and frequently embodies several at once. Lovelace compares women
to chickens, easily tricked into sex, or flies to be trapped in his
web. Belford tells Lovelace that to have sex with Clarissa would be
a shame, even if he married her first, because it would bring her down
to the level of an animal. In the “mad papers” Clarissa writes after
her rape, she describes a parable about a lady who attempts to raise
and tame a young tiger into a lapdog, only to be savagely shredded
to bits once the beast returns to its true nature. This symbolizes
her experience with Lovelace, the personification of this vicious,
untamable creature.
