Rape and the Rise of the Author

Gendering Intention in Early Modern England

Amy Greenstadt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754662747
• eBook ISBN: 9781317071525
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contending that early modern fictional portrayals of sexual violence identify the position of the author with that of the chaste woman threatened with rape, Amy Greenstadt challenges the prevalent scholarly view that this period's concept of 'The Author' was inherently masculine. Instead, she argues, the analogy between rape and writing centrally informed ideas of literary intention that emerged during the English Renaissance. Analyzing works by Milton, Sidney, Shakespeare and Cavendish, Greenstadt shows how the figure of 'The Author' - and by extension ideas of the modern individual--derived from a paradigm of female virtue and vulnerability. This volume supplements the growing body of studies that address the relationship between early modern textual representation and notions of gender and sexuality; it also adds a new dimension in considering the wider origins of modern concepts of selfhood and individual rights.

Chapter 1Sidney's Ravishment

DOI: 10.4324/9781315603605-2

In a scene in the original version of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (written ca. 1580), the romance's hero, Pyrocles, comes to the bedchamber of his lover, Philoclea, intending to convince her to elope with him. Approaching her door, he is “rapt from himself with the excessive forefeeling of his near coming contentment” (200). The narrator explains that such rapture works by “so forcible a holding all the senses to one object, that it confounds their mutual working, not without a charming kind of ravishing them from the free use of their own function” (201). The word “rapt,” like “ravishing,” derives from the Latin raptus, meaning “violently seized or carried away,” and by the later Middle Ages, both terms were used to describe a psychological state in which the individual was transported by an emotional experience. Renaissance culture identified female beauty as a primary agent of such rapture, an enthralling power that seduced men's senses and overturned their higher mental faculties of reason and will. The “rapt” Pyrocles seems to be under the sway of such ravishing effects of the feminine, as his “excessive forefeeling” of sexual consummation with Philoclea robs him of the “free use” of his own “function[s].”

When antiliterary polemicists accused fictional works of inducing such a loss of moral control, they described textual “ravishment” as a form of both seduction and violation. One antitheatrical pamphlet claimed that “To the beholding of [stage-plays] … very many … are by the pravitie of their nature (addicted wholy to Pleasures) carryed as it were with force and violence” (“I.G.”, 4) and another elaborated, “[W]hile wee plaie at Theaters and stages, we are ravished with the love thereof. … Their wanton speeches do pearse our secret thoughts, and move us thereby unto mischiefe, and provoke our members to uncleannes” (Eutheo 32, 107–8). The idea that a playwright's words “pearse” the “secret” interiors of audience members suggests a connection between the aesthetic experience of ravishment and its legal use as a synonym for rape—a word likewise derived from the Latin raptus. A 1553 handbook celebrating the rhetorical arts made this connection clearer when it described how “a whole multitude with the onely talke of a man [may be] ravished … drawen whiche waye him liketh best to have them” so that they are “forced even to yelde in that, whiche most standeth againste their will” (T. Wilson, A1v, A3v)—a phrasing strikingly similar to the wording of the period's emerging legal definition of rape as carnal knowledge of a woman's body against her will.

The above episode from Sidney's original Arcadia (now known as the Old Arcadia) emphasizes the link between aesthetic influence and sexual violence. Although the “rapt” Pyrocles goes on to engage Philoclea in a sexual act that the narrator assures us is consensual, in the morning he is hauled off by the authorities and charged with “ravishment,” or attempting to “prevail against [Philoclea's] chastity” by “violence” and “force” (328). The love scene foreshadows this outcome when the narrator compares Philoclea to “a solitary nightingale” (201), linking her to the similarly named Ovidian rape victim Philomela, who was transformed into the songbird after her violation. Later, Pyrocles's trial for rape ironically reprises the romantic language of the earlier episode when the judge describes Philoclea as “ravished … from herself” (351) in an echo of Pyrocles's being “rapt from himself.” By inviting comparison between an aesthetic experience and an immoral sexual act, Sidney's romance may seem to cast doubt upon the entire enterprise of literary creation. But in An Apology for Poetry (ca. 1581), which he wrote around the same time as the Old Arcadia, Sidney portrayed literary ravishment as a potential force for moral reform. The Apology described the superior art of the “Heroicall” poet, “who, if the saying of Plato and Tullie bee true, that who could see Vertue would be wonderfully ravished with the love of her beauty[,]… sets her out to make her more lovely in her holyday apparell” (106–7). According to Sidney, poetry may ravish, or reach its audience through the sensual appeal of a lovely garment of words, but it does so in order to use its beautiful exterior to “set out” virtue. In the romance, Pyrocles himself exudes such sensual appeal, since he spends most of the narrative dressed as an Amazon. Through the figure of this cross-dressed hero, the Old Arcadia attempts to dramatize the positive moral effects of literary ravishment and, in turn, of femininity itself.¹ In the process, the romance paints a vision of gender equality centering on the paradoxical figures of the cross-dressed man and the desiring yet virtuous woman. Yet even in this pastoral utopia of malleable identities and desires, the threat of coercion is never entirely dispelled; in the end, the Old Arcadia puts not only its hero but also the art of poetry on trial for ravishment, and in this case, the verdict is far from certain.

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¹ I offer another version of this argument in the essay “‘Rapt from Himself.’” Lehnhof's later article makes some of the same points that I do. For interpretations that view Sidney's depiction of the feminine as simultaneously enabling and threatening to poetic creation, see Dickson; Dolan; and Lamb, “Apologizing.”

“Some Excellent Artificer”

Sidney's Old Arcadia depicts how two princely cousins, Pyrocles and Musidorus, successfully seduce Philoclea and Pamela, daughters to Basilius, the Duke of Arcadia. While traveling in search of adventures, the princes arrive in Arcadia, where they find that Basilius has retired with his family to the forest, fearing a prophesy from the Delphic oracle that seems to predict disastrous marriages for his daughters (the sole heirs to the dukedom), as well as his own political overthrow. To gain access to the princesses, the cousins disguise themselves—Musidorus as a shepherd and Pyrocles as an Amazon. Eventually, Pamela agrees to elope with Musidorus, while Philoclea and Pyrocles, after exchanging private marriage vows, consummate their love. Both couples are caught by the Arcadian authorities, and the romance ends with the princes standing trial for ravishment: while Pyrocles is accused of attempting the sexual violation of Philoclea, Musidorus is charged with abducting Pamela.

It seems that in the fictional land of Arcadia the crime of ravishment holds the same dual meaning that it did in England's medieval statutes, which did not distinguish abduction from forced copulation.² The trial judge, Euarchus, makes clear that these two forms of ravishment are essentially equivalent under the law. After describing Pyrocles's attempted “violence” against Philoclea, he turns to consider Musidorus's “abduction” of Pamela, calling it “without all question a ravishment no less than the other; for, although he ravished her not from herself, yet he ravished her from him that ow[n]ed her, which was her father” (351). While Euarchus's phrasing suggests that Philoclea may claim some ownership over her body, his conflation of the two crimes undermines this idea: what matters, evidently, is that these women were illicitly appropriated from their rightful “owner,” their father.³ The judge even admits that the princesses may have agreed to the relationships with the princes; yet he asserts that this is no ground for dismissing the charges. Meanwhile, the princesses’ perspectives are literally banished from the trial. They are barred from the court and remain in prison, where they write letters that point out the contradiction in using the term “ravishment” to refer to consensual acts and demand that the court acknowledge and honor their right to choose their own husbands. The court, however, never allows these letters as testimony, and when the trial produces a clearly unfair outcome—the princes are sentenced to death and only saved through a miraculous intervention—it appears that a law based on principles similar to those in England's medieval statutes has little ability to dispense true justice. It may seem that Sidney's narrative therefore upholds a version of rape law that would privilege women's individual rights of consent—a change that was happening during his lifetime when this crime was increasingly defined as the violation of a woman's “will.”

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² The depiction of the law in Sidney's romance likely reflects the aristocratic context in which the medieval ravishment statutes were first instituted. As Post has shown, statutes forbidding this crime, probably responding to particular marriage scandals within noble households, were designed to prohibit consensual elopements as well as nonconsensual acts of kidnapping and coitus (158).

³ The original spelling of “owes” also points to Pamela's complex status as both the heir “owed” the crown and a daughter “owned” as a piece of property by her father. On this issue, see M. Sullivan, “Amazons”; for more on Pamela as potential ruler, also see her “Getting Pamela out of the House.”

Yet by the time we get to the concluding trial scene, the romance's reader knows that Musidorus did attempt to rape Pamela during their elopement when, alone with him in the “desert” outside her father's lodge, she fell asleep in his arms. Fortunately, he was interrupted when a peasant mob surprised the couple. Although this means that Pamela's letter to the trial court is technically correct that all relations between her and Musidorus were consensual, in light of the danger she unknowingly faced, her faith in the efficacy of her consent appears naïve. It seems Euarchus may have had reason to exclude the letter as irrelevant to determining the prince's guilt. The rape scene invites similar misgivings, for although Pamela made the preservation of her chastity a condition of her elopement with Musidorus, stipulating, “Let me be your own (as I am), but by no unjust conquest” (173), once she is asleep, the narrator tells us that Musidorus realized the truth of the dictum “no vow is so strong as the avoiding of occasions” (177).⁴ This moralizing comment echoes the bias not only of the Arcadian court but also of English legal authorities. The author of the law manual The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights asked

to what purpose is it for women to make vowes, when men have so many millions of wayes to make them break them? And when sweet words, faire promises, tempting, flattering, swearing, lying will not serve to beguile the poore soule: then with rough handling, violence, and plaine strength of armes, they are, or have beene heretofore, rather made prisoners to lusts theeves, than wives and companions to faithfull honest lovers: So drunken are men with their owne lusts, and the poyson of Ovids false precept,

Vim licet appellant, vis est ea grata puellis.

That if the rampier of Lawes were not betwixt women and their harmes, I verily thinke none of them, being above twelve yeares of age, and under an hundred, being either faire or rich, should be able to escape ravishing. (377)

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⁴ G. Sullivan interprets sleep in Sidney's romance as evoking the suspension of reason and unleashing of passion that characterize the romance genre, but he does not discuss Pamela's slumber and the refusal of consent it entails.

The Latin quotation is from Ovid's Artis amatoriae or “The Art of Love,” which counseled men eager to seduce women, “You may use force; women like you to use it.” Ovid continued: “they often wish to give unwillingly what they like to give. She whom a sudden assault has taken by storm is pleased, and counts the audacity as a compliment” (1.673–6). In citing these lines, the author of the Lawes Resolutions identifies not only men's “lusts” but also works of literature as causes of sexual violence.⁵

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⁵ For a discussion of the treatment of sexual violence in the Lawes Resolutions in terms of literacy, see Sale.

The Old Arcadia's rape scene similarly connects the persuasive effects of poetry to the problem of sexual violence. Before Pamela falls asleep, Musidorus sings “in a kind of still but ravishing tune a few verses” (175) that lull her into unconsciousness. In this state, “which gave Musidorus opportunity at leisure to behold her excellent beauties” (176), Pamela's body itself becomes “still but ravishing”:⁶

He thought her fair forehead was a field where all his fancies fought, and every hair of her head seemed a strong chain that tied him. Her fair lids (then hiding her fairer eyes) seemed unto him sweet boxes of mother of pearl, rich in themselves, but containing in them far richer jewels. … [T]he roses of her lips (whose separating was wont to be accompanied with most wise speeches) now by force drew his sight to mark how prettily they lay one over the other, … and through them the eye of his fancy delivered to his memory the lying (as in ambush) [of her teeth] under her lips …. And lest this beauty might seem the picture of some excellent artificer, forth there stale a soft breath, carrying good testimony of her inward sweetness … [from] that well closed paradise, that did so tyrannize over Musidorus's affects that he was compelled to put his face as low to hers as he could …. But each of these having a mighty working in his heart, all joined together did so draw his will into the nature of their confederacy … that rising softly from her, overmastered with the fury of delight, having all his senses partial against himself and inclined to his well beloved adversary, he was bent to take the advantage of the weakness of the watch, and see whether at that season he could win the bulwark before timely help might come. (176–7)

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⁶ Sussman similarly points out that in this scene, “poetic ravishment is … both an antecedent and an incitement to physical ravishment” (65). Yet I disagree with her conclusion that the Old Arcadia creates a model of sexual violence, linked to the beauty of verse, that is “supposed to be fun” (65).

Pamela's beauty exerts a seductive power: her hair “[en]chains,” her lips offer “force,” her teeth lie in “ambush,” her breath “tyrannizes,” and all together “compell” Musidorus, inducing a process of ravishment in which “all his senses” become “partial against himself.” While it is Pamela's beauty that seems to have this ravishing effect, in fact, this visible spectacle becomes indistinguishable from the elaborate poetic conceits with which it is described: Pamela's forehead is compared to a field, her hair to chains, her eyes to jewels, her eyelids to “sweet boxes of mother of pearl.” The specific literary technique on display here is that of the blazon, which in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) George Puttenham described as “the figure of resemblaunce … wherein we resemble every part of [a Lady's] body to some naturall thing of excellent perfection in his kind, as of her forehead, browes and haire” (204). Popularized in sixteenth-century England through the influence of Petrarch's sonnets, the blazon was by Sidney's time a fixture of Renaissance poetic discourse.⁷ The narrator himself calls attention to the literary conventions on display when he surmises that the spectacle of Pamela's body might be taken for “the picture of some excellent artificer.” He does so ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transcription and Translation
• Introduction: Questionable Intentions
• 1 Sidney’s Ravishment
• 2 Shakespeare’s Chaste Will
• 3 Milton’s Inapprehensible Song
• 4 Cavendish’s Willing Subjects
• Works Cited
• Index