Rape

Abstract

The Victorian period was notorious for its oblique representations of sexual violence. This article argues that rape is a necessary word and concept for Victorian studies and, we contend, a keyword for a growing subfield of literary and cultural scholarship, humanistic rape studies. Without rape as a stable signifier of specific acts, we find ourselves transported back to the nineteenth century, fumbling like Tess Durbeyfield for language that adequately describes what happened. Rape remains an indispensable domain of nineteenth-century literary studies precisely because it is a thoroughly historically contingent phenomenon. It is part of the power of rape, of its current structural pervasiveness, that it is capable of shaping people's expectations to such an extent that it suggests itself as a timeless, eternally recurring fact of life, when it actually amounts to an intensely situated set of behaviors, many of which crystallized into their current forms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, propelled by changing labor conditions, European imperialism, and shifting family and romantic configurations. Literary scholarship, especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, has traditionally attempted to tether representations of gender-based violence to “objective,” transhistorical frameworks such as “the law” and psychology, a move we wish to counter here.