The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage by Jennifer L. Airey (review)

Literary rape is a difficult subject. The scenes and descriptions about which the author must write are often repulsive, appalling, offensive, or sensational, and they are obviously difficult to stage. The playwright's motive for including them may, at times, be suspect as baldly commercial or sexually titillating. Jennifer Airey attempts to deal with one of the greatest problems in writing about this topic at the end of her introduction: "There is, of course, a danger in reading acts of physical violation as acts of metaphoric or allegorical violence. To do so is potentially to engage in what Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver term the 'obsessive erasure . . . of sexual violence against women'" (pp. 25-26). Lucy Valerie Graham describes what must be achieved in State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature (2012): "My study aims to offer a dialectical approach that acknowledges the suffering of those who are subjected to sexual violence, without losing sight of the ways in which certain rape narratives have been exploited for political ends in South African history" (p. 4). Rape is never just a trope.

The strength of Jennifer Airey's book is the way she demonstrates the pervasiveness of references to rape in a variety of genres between 1660 and 1700 and the various, often contradictory, ways they are employed in major political controversies. Cumulatively, these incidents make vivid the violence, trauma, sense of aggrievement and violation, and competition for the moral high ground. It was surely one of the most tumultuous times in British history, as it covers the Restoration of the monarchy, the regicides, the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, and the Rye House Plot, which included an assassination attempt on Charles II and the Duke of York and more executions.

Chapter 2, which examines the period 1666-1677, opens with a masterful reading of Andrew Marvell's satiric The Last Instructions to a Painter (1667) and then moves to John Dryden's play Amboyna (1673), a cluster of political tracts, and three more plays. In many ways, this chapter illustrates the strengths and considerable weaknesses of the book. It advertises, for instance, that this chapter opens with "an analysis" of Amboyna and "concludes with a reading of Aphra Behn's The Rover, Part I (1677)" (p. 69). Behn's play is a major political document, and rapes and near-rapes are major thematic vehicles. Airey devotes two and a half pages to it and does not cite any of the pertinent, recent critical studies of it. The critical literature cited on Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1682) is even more dated, and the treatment of this play in which a reported rape incident is the dramatic crisis point is oversimplified to an astonishing degree. (There may have been no rape or even a serious attempt, for instance, and this is not mentioned nor is the fact that the victim's husband has used her like a hostage.) To explicate the full significance of the texts with which Airey works, they must be deeply and often specifically contextualized, and the ways they are socially symbolic identified. Venice Preserv'd was not only a major, much-debated, and controversial moment in 1682, the height of the Exclusion Crisis, but continued to carry traces of its political life for the rest of the century. In a single sentence and a note, she acknowledges that some critics dispute the "Tory Whig-bashing" interpretation, but this is completely inadequate (p. 162).

For me, a major problem with the book is that it is about plays as texts, not performance pieces. What might be done with staging appears in Airey's fine discussion of the harrowing rape scene in John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester's Valentinian (performed 1684). Valentinian times a rehearsal of his masque that includes the rape of Lucrece to cover the sounds of the actual rape...