Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760, by Toni Bowers

Abstract

Seduction was a ubiquitous theme in the literature of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. The period’s drama, ballads, and poetry are full of men trying to entice women into illicit sex, and of detailed explorations of the consequences. In this fine book, Toni Bowers explores the prevalence of the subject in the fictional prose of four writers whom she sees as sharing a loosely defined ‘tory sensibility’: Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Richardson. Her focus is on the political parallels and resonances of stories of courtship, seduction, and rape. The book takes a broadly chronological approach. Each chapter considers a different text or group of texts, contextualising its central authors by reference to the period’s political and pamphlet literature. The first four chapters consider ‘old-tory’, or pre-1689, approaches to the subject. A bridging chapter is devoted to George Berkeley’s influential Passive Obedience, or The Christian Doctrine of Not Resisting the Supreme Power (1712), which Professor Bowers reads as a conscious attempt to update tory ideology in the wake of the Sacheverell affair. The second half of the book then examines in detail this ‘new-tory’ sensibility, from Manley’s New Atalantis (1709) to Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8). A concluding ‘Coda’ briefly considers the portrayal of seduction in two later eighteenth-century fictions: Richardson’s final novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4), and (somewhat randomly) Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799).