The dissertation explores the role of rape in the 'rise' of the novel, attempting to account for the surprising frequency with which rapes occur in early- and mid-eighteenth-century fiction. Narratives of rape to some degree 'enable' the increasingly restrictive domestic role constructed for women during the course of the century, though at the same time the gradual disappearance of such Stories from fiction is clearly owing to the eventual production of a feminized, Sentimental, masculine ideal. More importantly, eighteenth-century fiction uses rape, in all its ambiguity of intention and experience, to destabilize ways of knowing, and to explore the tenuous boundaries of identity The earliest novelistic narratives, 'amatory' works by Manley and Haywood, demonstrate that rape (as it takes form in fiction) gives rise to shattered fictions of identity and difficulty in representing the self. These authors demonstrate that a victim's physical, social, and psychological lives are violently disjoined by the act--and the consequences--of rape. This conjunction of themes--sexual violence and division of self--carries through the century. The dissertation examines the various uses of sexual violence in examples of popular fiction, moving from the work of Manley and Davys to Samuel Richardson's supposedly 'psychological' novel Clarissa. Sentimental novels by Burney and Inchbald are examined for their depiction of violence in the Sentimental family, while the terrors of Radcliffe's Gothic are highlighted by a comparison to Austen's illusory tranquility / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_27370 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Contributors | Richardson, Leslie Ann (Author), Lowenthal, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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