A whale of a book; ‘Force or Fraud’ is ‘about’ far more than its immediate subject – in this case early genre fictions of seduction and abandonment. Before we ever reach those books, we take a lengthy tour through the meanings of our terms, starting with the medieval idea of rape as theft; a crime against the father, not the woman herself, whose consent (or otherwise) was of little interest. Through the C18th period, our modern definitions of ‘seduction’ and ‘rape’ began to be constructed, both legally and linguistically, according to the response (collusion or resistance) of the woman in question, who emerges – slowly – from the shadows as a subject. The political dimension – or, more pertinently, the blurring of distinction between the personal and the political – is Bowers’ fascination, as she looks at how seduction stories allowed contemporary readers to consider the problem of virtuous resistance to authority. She would like us to go beyond the rape-or-seduction dichotomy (‘Force or Fraud’), arguing that if it limits the woman’s agency to mere consent, her voice is just ‘yes’ or ‘no’. “What if we choose to doubt that sexual interactions… are adequately described as either consensual or non-consensual?” she asks. As female desire is complicity in seduction, Bowers’ project is thus to find a space between force and fraud; both politically and privately, in what she calls ‘collusive resistance.’
And so we start, not really in the 1660s, but in the multiple political crises of the 1680s. Tory ideology had long argued for political non-resistance, for passive obedience to the King as God’s representative on Earth. But what if the King’s actions were manifestly wrong, as with the hated King James II? Whigs – the mainstream political Left – had executed Charles I in 1649; had grumbled through but colluded in the reign of the weak and flawed Charles II. But upon Charles II’s death in 1685, the crown passed to his catholic brother James II, against whom even Tories might wish to rebel. Enter: the Duke of Monmouth. Bowers argues that Monmouth – Charles II’s illegitimate son, who led a failed rebellion against James II that summer – was a seducer who was himself fatally seduced. She notes how contemporary metaphors have him flipping between male and female roles; a charismatic hermaphrodite, an universal object of desire. His person, as a dashing and gallant commander, and his position as a (crucially) protestant Prince made him a seducer, one who carries all hearts with him, but, his faults (as his father once quipped) were never his own, they were his advisors’: the rebellion was always something into which he had been seduced by false counsellors.
After this, finally, we reach the novels; beginning with one of the first true novels in English, Aphra Behn’s “Love letters between a nobleman and his sister” (1684-7). Based upon the true story of Lord Grey, Monmouth’s right-hand man, who eloped with his wife’s younger sister. But where are the woman’s wishes/desires in all this? Court records of the prosecution denied them entirely (it was the man who was on trial) until, dramatically, she appeared to speak in his defence, arguing her own willingness. For Behn, coming from a Tory standpoint, this showed the perversity and degeneracy of the Whigs in all their deeds; the seduction a kind of petty sedition. The woman’s mock-resistance in the book does not in the least mask her real desire to be seduced, something Behn sees as both unwomanly and uncitizenly conduct. Neither Grey nor Monmouth turned out to be particularly heroic in the real world in the end, and again, Behn sees it as almost inevitable that one who would break his allegiance and duty to his King and father, would do the same to his wife and followers also. Behn died in 1689; to see how Tory writers would go on to generate a concept of virtuous subordinate resistance we have to look at the seduction stories of her successors; Manley, Haywood and Richardson. In this section I got some way out of my depth, since I am familiar with a lot less of the source material, but I’ll try to do it justice.
Before we discuss them, however, we briefly look at the Tory Bishop Berkeley’s contribution to the ‘passive obedience’ debate in the post-1689 era. Berkeley subtly redefined the terms of such obedience, as being due to the Sovereign, and not to the person thereof, thus eliding hereditary right. So, when James II, faced with William of Orange’s invasion, abdicated the throne and fled the country, he ceased to be sovereign and his subjects were released from their allegiance. This must have salved the consciences of many; against him came the thunderings of the old-Tory Sacheverell against dissenters, who he thought were, just as much as catholics, seducers from the truth. Sacheverell was briefly a hero to High Church mobs who in 1710 pulled down meeting-houses and stoned the dissenters; there was apparently no irony in the fact that this was all done in the name of ‘passive obedience’! Berkeley’s narrowing of definition of what was rebellion to “Force and open violence,” did however allow new space for all sorts of quietly resistant behaviours and attitudes – which leads us back, once more, to Bowers’ big idea: collusive resistance to authority; in which the subject may remain virtuous despite complicity.
In the seduction novels, Bowers sees the Crisis of the Abdication (or ‘the Glorious Revolution,’ as it was known by Whigs – one person sees the cloud, his neighbour the silver lining) looming over all. The disappearing King leads to a collapse of patriarchal authority, and an obsession with defrauded inheritances, and faithfulness to vows. Female desire is not criminal, but agency – its expression – is. The occasional heroine, in Haywood, for example, who is allowed to retain both effective sexual agency and virtue is a rare one, and seems to walk to the altar over the bodies of scores of her ruined, unhappy sisters. The genre reaches a climax (as it were) in Samuel Richardson’s epic ‘Clarissa,’ the bane of every literature student I have ever met. Bowers sees Clarissa’s refusal to marry the man who raped her – a decision that is beyond the comprehension of every other character in the book – as a radical refusal of the reductive binary ‘Force or Fraud;’ a simple statement that these choices are not enough. I fear I’ve gone on too long already in this review, but that is perhaps as good a place to end as any. A wonderful book.
Recent Comments