Interpreting Sexual Violence, 1660–1800 ed. by Anne Greenfield (review)

Of the fourteen essays in this collection four focus on texts outside the Scriblerian’s boundary dates, but because the book deals to some extent with changes in the period, it makes sense to include the outlying pieces in a review of the collection as a whole. In a helpful introduction, Ms. Greenfield describes her book as taking a “multi-disciplinary, cross-genre, diachronic approach” to “sexual violence” of several types. In a strong essay of her own on representations of rape or attempted rape in British drama from 1660 to 1720, she uses the term “cultural studies,” which can be aptly applied to all but two of the eight pieces concerned with literature (four on the drama, three on novels, and one on Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion). In other words, most of the essays examine literary works in relation to historical developments, popular attitudes or prejudices, and nonliterary discourses such as those in legal treatises and the emerging field of medical jurisprudence.

Part I of the collection includes Greenfield’s introduction and a useful survey of the historiography of sexual violence by Julie Gammon, who concentrates primarily on rape and draws attention to issues that come up later in the collection, including the “relationship between conceptions of masculinity and the perception of sexual violence,” or an ethos that predisposed judges and juries to believe in the innocence of men accused of rape and to be highly skeptical of the accounts given by their victims. Ms. Gammon surveys Anna Clark and Antony E. Simpson; an interested reader should also look at Karen Harvey’s Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century (2004), Jennine Hurl-Eamon’s Gender and Petty Violence in London, 1680–1720 (2005), Gregory Durston’s Victims and Viragos (2007), Toni Bowers’s Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (2011), and a book by one of the contributors to the collection, Jennifer L. Airey’s The Politics of Rape (2012).

In one of the essays in Part II, “Legal and Social History,” Mary R. Block points out that the single English statute concerning rape between 1576 and the nineteenth century failed to define it clearly, and that judges and others had to rely on “legal treatises” which, while reflecting “cultural sensibilities about sex, violence, women and women’s nature,” purported to explain the law. Contradicting both Ms. Greenfield and Jennifer L. Airey (whose later, otherwise solid essay deals with dramatic representations of Sir Robert Walpole as a figurative rapist), Ms. Block argues that the legal writings describe “rape as a crime against the body of an individual woman and not as a property crime”; this appears to be a serious inconsistency in a collection markedly concerned with legal understandings of sexual violence, and the editor’s introduction should have clarified it. She enumerates important criteria for rape in court trials, including those related to consent or nonconsent (for example, over the course of the eighteenth century courts and judges came to reject the idea that conception or pregnancy indicated a woman’s consent to sexual intercourse, but in the second half of the eighteenth century medico-legal authorities attempted with some success to reverse this trend and were thus no friends of rape victims). Katie Barclay examines another particular difficulty rape victims faced in court: “how expectations of female resistance shaped women’s and men’s experiences within courtship.” Rapes were infrequently prosecuted because there was a general cultural acceptance of “the normality of violence within courtship.”

One of the essays in the last section of the book (Part V, “Other Genres”), Lena Olsson’s on “the myth of the unrapeable woman” (the influential belief that “it was physically impossible for a single man to rape a conscious, ‘genuinely’ resisting woman”), belongs in Part III. It is a very good piece, and together with Misty Krueger’s fine reading of Visions of the Daughter of Albion (also in Part V), is one of only two...