Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 by Toni Bowers (review)

In Force or Fraud, Toni Bowers argues that, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, seduction stories offered a powerful site for working through the problem of virtuous resistance to authority, a dilemma that particularly bedeviled Tory writers. Unlike the Whigs, who could understand resistance as virtuous by following models such as the overthrow of the Tarquins in response to Lucretia’s rape, Tory writers needed to imagine the much more fraught possibility of “collusive resistance,” or “resistance through submission,” as they navigated the changes of authority from Charles II through James II to the Glorious Revolution and beyond (4). The purportedly apolitical narratives of seduction stories gave them a shared, popular language for these issues.

The “force” and “fraud” of Bowers’s title name rape and seduction, respectively. One of the book’s chief insights is to illuminate the ways in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers (and politicians, magistrates, and families) had a great deal vested in understanding these as opposed alternatives: “The distinction between ‘force’ and ‘fraud’ crucially came to require a determination of whether the respondent, paradigmatically female, colluded in or resisted her own fall, and it posited collusion and resistance as necessarily exclusive acts” (8). Importantly, Bowers’s carefully historicized readings refuse to countenance this opposition, which resonates to our present day. Instead, she illuminates both the negative aspects of this relation (distinguishing rape and seduction covers over the coercive aspects within seduction) and surprisingly positive possibilities (revealing a female figure who both desires and submits, “compromised and complicit yet still virtuous” [23]).

Force or Fraud has two major parts, on Tories old and new, joined by a bridge and followed by a coda. The rich introduction, full of paths for subsequent scholars to follow, sets out definitions of rape and seduction in their historical and theoretical contexts. As throughout the book, Bowers demonstrates equal facility in reading literary, legal, and political texts, from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, to the notorious Earl of Castlehaven trial, to Robert Filmer’s lesser-known writings. The first chapter in the “old Tory” section on strategies of passive obedience delineates the tropes of late seventeenth-century seduction fiction. It traces the problematic transition from “old Tories,” those loyal to James II before his fall in 1689, and “new Tories,” who position themselves against the triumphant Whig response to William and Mary and the reactionary plots of the Jacobites. The language of “innocence in a world of pervasive corruption” allows Tories to define their stance (48). Subsequent chapters move forward chronologically, focusing on texts from the well-known to the little-read: Sir Roger L’Estrange’s translation Five Love Letters in chapter 2; representations of the rebellion of James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, in chapter 3; and Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister in chapter 4. Each chapter pairs a precise and evocative analysis of historical and political events with its literary readings; the historical framing is clear and comprehensive enough to serve as a useful primer for those less familiar with the period.

The bridge between the two primary sections tracks the transition from old to new Tory via analyses of George Berkeley’s Passive Obedience and Dr. Henry Sacheverell’s The Perils of False Brethren. As passive obedience becomes unprofitably associated with earlier characterizations of monarchic legitimacy, new Tories such as Berkeley elaborate a conception of loyalty wherein “they also obey who only feel loyal” (154; emphasis in original). The latter half of the book traces this stance’s implications in the idea of “collusive resistance,” with readings of Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis in chapter 6; Manley’s The Adventures of Rivella and The Perjur’d Beauty in relation to Behn’s The Nun, Or The Perjur’d Beauty in chapter 7; Eliza Haywood’s scandalous fiction in chapter 8; and Samuel Richardson...