Sexual Violence: A Favourite Subject

Few subjects were as frequently and as successfully inserted into the literary and artistic world of the Restoration and eighteenth century as was sexual violence. Depictions of sexual violence appeared regularly in novels, short fiction, tragic and comic plays, poems, the visual arts and more, with remarkable frequency during this era. In Restoration drama, this trope appears from 1662 onwards, beginning with the attempted rape of Bellmont in Thomas Porter's The Villain. Rape and attempted rape would become staples of tragic drama, with particular frequency during the 1670s and 1680s, and again at the turn of the eighteenth century. Older plays like William Shakespeare's King Lear (1606) were adapted and revived in the Restoration with newly-added scenes of sexual violence. New tragedies that revolved around rape like Nathaniel Lee's Mithridates (c. 1678) were great successes, and were imitated widely. However, Restoration dramatists by no means confined these sexually-violent scenes to tragic drama. Even many of the liveliest and most mirthful comedies of the Restoration, like Aphra Behn's The Rover I (1677) and II (1681) and Thomas D'Urfey's Trick for Trick (1678) contain frightening scenes of attempted rape. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century prose fiction was equally captivated by rape and seduction. In the short fiction of Eliza Haywood and Delarivière Manley, for instance, one is hard pressed to find a text that lacks female resistance to male sexual aggression.