"Who Shall Restore My Lost Credit?": Rape, Reputation, and the Marriage Market

Who Shall Restore My Lost Credit?": Rape, Reputation, and the Marriage Market LESLIE RICHARDSON The heroine of Mary Davys's 1727 novel1 The Accomplished Rake is drugged and assaulted at an inn; unconscious during the event, she has no experience, no memory, of the rape. Her ordeal, and her resulting disorientation, evoke the debates—still virulent in the 1720s—over John Locke's supposed equation of memory and identity.2 Locke argued in 1694 that "it being the same consciousness that makes a Man be himself to himself, personal Identity depends on that only.... Personal Identity consists, not in the Identity of substance, but... in the Identity of consciousness."3 By this model, he continues, if the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same person. And to punish Socrates waking for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never aware of, would be no more of right, than to punish one twin for what his brother twin did whereof he knew nothing {EU 11.27.17). Miss Friendly (as Davys's heroine is rather unfortunately named)4 at first seems an ideal example to illustrate Locke's theory. Though she has lost 19 20 / RICHARDSON her physical virginity, she has no sexual experience: she is innocent, in her ignorance, of intercourse. Having forced this rift between her character's substance and her consciousness, Davys almost immediately problematizes the division: the bewildered victim conceives, inextricably binding her identity to her substance. Rather than exploring the psychological impact of the disjunction between Miss Friendly's virgin consciousness and the fact of her pregnancy, Davys assesses her heroine as a social being, tracing the consequences of her injury in the reactions of her acquaintance. Uncorrupted mind belied by fertile body, Miss Friendly, unlike Locke's Socrates, will be judged upon the results of an event "whereof [she] knew nothing." This issue of accountability was of great concern to Locke's contemporary detractors, who feared that the location of identity in consciousness, and the delimitation of consciousness by memory, would absolve a criminal of crimes he—or she—had forgotten: Locke, they argued, would persuade us that the adult who cannot recollect his youthful peccadilloes is not the same person who once transgressed.5 "If personal identity consisted in consciousness," charged Thomas Reid, "it would certainly follow, that no man is the same person in any two moments of his life; and as the right and justice of reward and punishment is founded on personal identity, no man could be responsible for his action."6 The implications of Locke's theory of identity, critics insisted, would rend the social fabric. If the Socrates who has forgotten his dreams is not the dreamer, the elderly gentleman could no longer be blamed for his juvenile exploits, and the man who has conveniently forgotten a debt might deny his obligation to pay. Poor Miss Friendly, who falls sacrifice to a sexual double standard as well as to a rapist, is not permitted to plead ignorance: she is held accountable for what is done to her, and will pay the cost of the crime of which she is the victim. The integrity of her will, the innocence of her intentions, are irrelevant to the disgrace attending her pregnancy. The rake who violated her, attempting to downplay his own guilt by casting her injuries as imaginary, insists that "you wrong yourself. . . when you own a crime you are not guilty of; if "you know nothing of the fault laid to your charge," he asks, "How then, are you culpable?"7 Miss Friendly replies astutely: "The . . . world knows my fault, and it will be sure to keep it in continual remembrance," for "my child [is] a living demonstration against me," she says. "Who do you think will believe me, when I urge innocence and ignorance?" (371). Davys's novel suggests that, for women at least, social reality trumps personal experience of the natural world, creating a social identity that in turn shapes personal identity.8 Bearing a child out of wedlock, Miss Friendly Who Shall Restore My Lost Credit? / 21 will endure humiliation and sorrow, wholly...