By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Chaste Clarissa’ (1952) is a story of seduction. Baxter, a promiscuous twice-divorced man, finds himself drawn to a young married redhead named Clarissa while holidaying at Martha’s Vineyard, as is his wont every summer. The story ends with Baxter finally unlocking the key that might – might – just make Clarissa break her marriage vows.
Clarissa Ryan is the daughter-in-law of Mrs Ryan, whom Baxter has met before. Baxter learns that Clarissa’s husband, Bob Ryan, is away on government business, and Mrs Ryan is about to travel abroad. Clarissa will be all alone at the house where she’s staying. He makes some enquiries and learns that Clarissa, according to those who have met her, is a bit stupid. This will be important later on.
At Mrs Ryan’s farewell party, he persuades Clarissa to go swimming with him at the beach the following day. Baxter is struck by how beautiful she is when he persuades a reluctant Clarissa to disrobe and join him in the water. She then makes a very stupid observation about how the stones have ‘grown’ since she was last there, insisting that her mother has a stone in her rose-garden that had grown a foot in size in a matter of years. Baxter humours her, but must be thinking the locals are right: she’s a little bit thick. She’s also fairly cold and unresponsive towards him, much of the time.
She insists he drive her home as she’s expecting guests (female friends of hers). Despite his best efforts to engineer a meeting with Clarissa over the next week, he doesn’t see her at any of the parties he attends, and when he calls at the house the servant, Mrs Talbot, tells him Clarissa is busy and can’t see him.
Then, at a barn dance that weekend, there she is, and he engages her in conversation again. He drives her home, and she tells him he saved her life as she was having an awful time before she met him. He tells her she’s lovely, but she shrugs off the compliment, insisting that nobody really understands who she really is. When Baxter suggests he’s the exception to this, she pooh-poohs the idea that he knows the real Clarissa.
And then he kisses her – and she pushes him away, telling him he’s ruined everything.
Baxter goes home and chastises himself for making the move on her too quickly. He buys her some sweets and takes them to her house. Clarissa opens the door and tells him her friends who were coming to stay never came in the end. She accepts the gift of sweets but tells him he shouldn’t have bought them for her.
Bob tries to get himself invited into her house, but she tells him she wrote a letter to her husband telling him that Baxter had kissed her. Then she closes the door on him. He goes to a cocktail party but while a married woman is chattering away to him, he finds himself thinking of Clarissa. So he drives to her place and Clarissa calls down to him from an upstairs window.
He tells her he’s going away and he’s come to say goodbye. This information earns him an invitation over the threshold this time, and they talk. Baxter tries complimenting her on her looks again, this time telling her how beautiful her hair looks, but when this doesn’t have the desired effect, he changes tack and flatters her, telling her how intelligent she is.
She initially shrugs off this compliment too, telling him that her own mother-in-law and even her husband say she’s stupid. She starts crying, and Baxter, realising his chance, pushes home this notion that she’s not stupid at all, but deeply intelligent. Clarissa confides to him that she hides her opinions because those around her – her husband and his mother – never let her speak.
She tells him that she thinks humans are all just cogs in a wheel, repeating this rather bland insight several times. He flatters her further, telling her he’s interested in her opinion, and she comes out with more insipid and irrelevant observations. He continues to indulge her, and the last line of the story, ‘It was as simple as that’, suggests that Baxter’s attempts to flatter her into thinking she’s something she isn’t – an intelligent person – succeed, and her marriage vows are forgotten that night. ‘The Chaste Clarissa’ is no more.
This is a story in which a smart but immoral man meets a morally principled but all-too-human young woman. In this relatively short tale, Cheever drops in all manner of details about Baxter’s character. He wants to woo Clarissa with gifts, but he’ll only go so far as a box of sweets, rather than jewellery or something more expensive. He views women as just potential notches on his bedpost, as is evinced by his mind wandering when he’s talking to the married mother at the cocktail party, and Clarissa’s image forms in his head.
As for Clarissa, she may really be quite vapid and vacuous, but even so, her own husband and mother-in-law calling her stupid seems rather cruel. The implication is that Bob married her for her looks (or her money, or perhaps both?) because he wanted a pretty and faithful wife who would play the good housewife at home while he was away on business. She may be taken in by Baxter’s transparent attempts to flatter her into bed, but we can’t help feeling that he’s the more deceived, to borrow from (and adapt) Philip Larkin.
She has been told something she’s always longed to hear: that she’s not as dumb as those around her think she is. She may give up her virtue in order to hear this, but we may find it hard to muster much sympathy for her husband if he thinks her so unintelligent (and is happy to say it to her face, demeaning and humiliating her). Baxter, meanwhile, will be trapped in his perpetual cycle of Lacanian desire, moving on to the next beautiful young woman to have a holiday fling with. Those two failed marriages in his past suggest he, unlike Clarissa, will never find someone he can settle down with.
She is trapped in her imperfect marriage, but he is trapped in the hamster-wheel, endlessly chasing something he desires, only to desire something else once he gains it. Only perhaps he’s not a hamster, but a cog in that wheel. Maybe the ‘stupid’ Clarissa was right all along.