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

Like an earworm, Foucault’s catchy dictum “we must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power” ran through my head the entire time I was reading Bowers’s new, forceful critical work. On the one hand, the formulation is entirely applicable to the central argument of Force or Fraud : seduction stories in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are not so much about sex as they are about negotiating compromised forms of power for writers of tory sensibility in the wake of 1688. On the other hand, the dictum is completely misplaced since the power of Bowers’s explanatory thesis points directly away from Foucault’s modern concept of sex as speaking the deepest truths of our interiorized selves to an entirely different model of political subjectivity. In Force or Fraud, the sexual dynamics of seduction’s dominance and subordination are assumed, but the stability of the tale’s “topoi” precisely allows tory writers to use it to negotiate a political model of what Bowers names “collusive resistance—a paradoxical exercise of resistance through submission” (4). Seduction tales allegorize the “complex moral position” of remaining obedient to both a heredity monarchy and Anglicanism, of articulating a politics that was neither jacobite nor whig. Stories of false promises, innocence duped, complicit desires, and sexual betrayals are perfect veils under which to explore a subjectivity that combines virtue and complicity, obedience and resistance.

Bowers’s archive is both fictional and historical, and before she turns her critical eye to seduction literature by Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Richardson, she relates gripping tales of historical seduction dramas, from the Exclusion Crisis to Lord Grey’s trial for seducing his sister-in-law, Henrietta Berkeley, to the Monmouth Rebellion. In the first hundred pages, Bowers unravels the complicated history of post-Restoration Britain and, along with Steven Pincus’s 1688 (2009), this section constitutes a serious new engagement with the political stakes of the period. Bowers convincingly demonstrates that non-literary discourses such as the philosophical debate on the doctrine of passive obedience, pamphlets around the Glorious Revolution, scandal satires, and the political theory of Filmer, Shaftesbury, and Locke primed readers to recognize the tory political resonances of Augustan seduction tales, and thus writers, under the guise of fiction, were able to air “some of the most troubling moral and ideological dilemmas of their day” (xv). By and around 1688, “the plot of seduction and betrayal was, so to speak, a language that everyone understood” (xiv).

The test of Bowers’s thesis—that telling seduction stories stands in for negotiating forms of collusive resistance for tory prose fiction writers—will be the power of the explanatory frame to provide new and convincing readings of the literature. Does reading Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, Rivella, Love in Excess, or Pamela through the frame of old-tory and new-tory versions of passive obedience make those fictions come alive in ways they did not before? Are previous critical quagmires resolved under the clear light of fresh insight? The answer is a persuasive “yes.” Bowers breathes new life into Rivella, which previously suffered under suffocating autobiographical interpretation, by putting aside tortured attempts to fit the life to the writing and instead reading the tensions in the text as emerging from “the paradox of compromised virtue” (194). Under this rubric, Rivella’s father’s controlling behaviour is understood in terms of Manley’s new toryism where a “wisely omnipotent patriarch who recognizes the irresistible force of love and uses his authority for his daughter’s preservation” is a positive thing. Modern (whiggish) feminists who twist this work into a critique of tyranny misread the text’s representation of necessarily living in a period where the clear line between consent and resistance, between virtue and obedience, is always already blurred.

I had many insightful “ah ha...