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

At the end of Samuel Richardson’s novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), the eponymous hero, following the collapse (on religious grounds) of his engagement to the Italian Catholic Clementina della Poretta, marries the English Protestant, Harriet Byron. In a letter quoted by Toni Bowers in the coda of Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, Richardson concludes that Charles will forever be torn between his two sympathetic loves: “A divided Heart he must ever have” (301). This sentiment suggests the broader concerns of Bowers’s readings of seduction fiction against the background of James II ’s deposition in 1688, the Jacobite threat toward the succeeding Protestant monarchy, and the evolution of Tory political identities and ideologies in an era dominated by Whig preferment. In this reading the genre is highly political, and amatory narratives are used to delineate the ways Tories explored their compromised principles after the Glorious Revolution. Although the idea of “seduction fiction” seems attuned to commonplace assumptions about Charles II ’s court and its culture of sex and merriment, it was almost a century later, in Richardson’s Pamela (1740–41) and Clarissa (1748–49), that the genre found its most enduring exemplars. Bowers traces that evolution from the writings of the Restoration court propagandist Roger l’Estrange (whose Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier [1678] is an epistolary account of a Portuguese nun’s doomed romance) through detailed readings of writings by Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood as well as Richardson’s more famous works. Her book explores the connections between a genre preoccupied with the sexual, romantic, and matrimonial dynamics of men and women, and broader political and social questions of authority, obedience, and subjecthood.

Bowers’s book is extremely useful as an introduction to tomes with melodramatic plots that engaged enthusiastic contemporary audiences. The argument that they form a coherent genre of seduction or amatory writing is well made. They are usually epistolary novels that repeat narrative plot points, images, and ideas, and Bowers charts how their broader thematic concerns paralleled the evolution of partisan—primarily Tory—thought in the decades after the Glorious Revolution. As Bowers’s title suggests, Restoration and Augustan seduction stories were shaped by the tropes of “force” and “fraud,” terms frequently paired together to suggest that all men satiated their lust through violence or found wives through deception. Rape, or its contemplation, is a recurring motif in these texts, which are often freighted with images of men observing sleeping women whose provocatively arranged clothing heightens both potential threat and intense desire. These contemplative acts—men thinking about, but not necessarily acting upon, the possibility of violence, or women desiring men who will ultimately abuse them—are central to Bowers’s argument about evolving Tory ideas, and the shifting nature of victimhood they suggest. Early seventeenth-century texts could reflect the legal argument that seduction or rape was an assault, not on the daughter, but on the patriarchal father, and many instances of amatory fiction present the female victim of force or fraudulent seduction as complicit in her own downfall. The kernel of her own desire for the seducer denies her true and honest virtue, and this idea intertwines with authors’ representations of male sexuality. In Manley’s The New Atalantis (1709), Bowers argues that “the plot of besieged virtue turns out to be complicated by elements of complicity already resident in the victim” (108). As Bowers points out, these texts assumed it a truism that male sexual interest was intensified by womanly resistance. The conquest and defeat of this resistance is central to the heterosexual relationships of amatory fiction, whether the plot ends with marriage or more explicitly tragic consequences. Seduced heroines are a “paradoxical combination . . . of resistance and complicity, victimized innocence and transgressive desire” (71), and Bowers’s book raises many interesting points about the representation of gendered power...