These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. 2 She is characterized most frequently as a creature out of balance with her physical body, place and time, whose textual life consists in marking and reproaching that imbalance: an exemplar. Consequently, the character of Clarissa came to personify for many readers the vulnerable, the passive, the penetrable, the physically and socially powerless female figure. 1 This ‘best self’ is her Virgin self, the enclosed and empty space of moral virtue, penetrated in the course of the novel by sexuality defined as male. ‘Once more have I escaped - but, alas! I, my best self, have not escaped!’ she cries. After fleeing the scene of her rape, however, Clarissa speaks poignantly of a new self-perception, one she recognizes by naming it only after its loss. Clarissa, as she tells her own story, was once woven of whole cloth: her public and private selves were one before the cloth was rent.
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