The Loss of Maidenhead: Rape and the Revolutionary Novel

Autor: Clayton Carlyle Tarr
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 31:549-574
ISSN: 1911-0243
0840-6286
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.31.3.549
Popis: Inspired by William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), revolutionary novels of the 1790s candidly depict the violence of rape and express the physical loss that victims endure. Rather than alluding to sexual assault through coded innuendos, as in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), these late eighteenth-century novelists represent rape with unsettling clarity. Authors Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Charles Brockden Brown emphasize the body in their respective texts to challenge conceptions of women as the property of fathers and husbands. The presence or absence of the hymen was used as evidence in rape trials during the final decades of the century, and many women without intact hymens were ostracized from society. Revolutionary novels, including The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798), The Victim of Prejudice (1799), and Ormond, or The Secret Witness (1799), helped trans form this narrative about women’s bodies, leading to nineteenth-century reforms that partially restored women’s physical subjectivity. Brown’s Ormond, especially, indicates that women’s writing ought to be used as a weapon for revolution.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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