The Trope of the Fallen Woman in Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice

ESC 25, 1999 characters reveal themselves through their letter writing, and from these letters the reader learns not only of the intimate re­ lationships between them but also of the evil that lurks in the ‘real’ world beyond the protective castle walls. Fenwick’s novel is so full o f tension and suspense that it was difficult to put down, and its formal, ornate, and extremely poetic language adds greatly to the melodrama of her heartbreaking tale. Grundy’s helpful explanatory notes, inserted at the bot­ tom of almost every page, further enhance Secrecy’s readability. W ithin each volume of this three-volume text, Grundy has in­ serted definitions for uncommon words or phrases; highlighted literary, theoretical, mythological, historical, and biblical allu­ sions; and explained any ‘fashionable’ traditions, customs, or beliefs of which a reader might not be otherwise aware. It is pleasing to see a novel such as Secrecy surface in the late twentieth century, a time when the imagination of many human beings has been buried beneath an overabundance of electronic images and ideas. As a creative work of intrigue and passionate love, Fenwick’s novel might be just what the readers of today need to help them rediscover their imaginative capabilities. JANICE A. ISAAC / Carleton University Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice. Ed. Eleanor Ty (Peter­ borough: Broadview Press, 1998). 240. $15.95 paper. Historians and feminists alike will applaud the second Broad­ view edition of Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice, edited by Eleanor Ty. Hays, one of England’s early feminist writers, wrote the novel in 1799. The harsh realities and prejudices of the pre-Romantic era are explored in the tragic story of a young woman who is raped and refuses to marry her attacker. Pro­ tagonist Mary Raymond is ostracized by a conservative English society after the details of her birth to a promiscuous mother, as well as her own deflowering, are disclosed by her unrelenting persecutor Sir Peter Osborne. In an intriguing and factually comprehensive introduction to the text, Ty outlines several themes within the novel that in­ 116 R E VIE W S volve male-dominated institutions. Ty says that Hays uses the story of Mary Raymond to demonstrate “how ‘having no hand in forming [the laws],’ women become the ‘sufferers’ ” (xxi). Ac­ cording to the editor, Hays blames society for Mary Raymond’s destruction. Clear class distinctions and the literal connection between the disastrous destinies of both Mary and her mother are also pointed out as thematic devices. Finally, Ty aligns the novel’s messages with the personal obstacles that Hays faced as a writer and feminist thinker. After displaying emotion to a male friend, says Ty, Hays was marginalized by her sex when 1990s standards are applied. An erroneous story surfaced within English literary circles that Hays was amorously involved with her male friend, which Ty recognizes as an interesting link between fact and fiction. “Despite her spirit and intelligence, the false rumour brought Hays down to the level of the sensual and sexual, much like her own heroine” (xxx). Ty takes the two-volume edition of Victim that was first published by Joseph Johnson in 1799 as her copy-text and re­ tains Hays’s notes at the bottom o f the appropriate pages. Ex­ planatory notes, for which there are fifty-three entries, appear after the main text and provide in-depth explanations of every­ thing from allusions to Hays’s first novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), to the metaphor o f a magic circle “suggesting] the confinement of women by custom or patriarchal society” (190). The most notable change in this follow-up to T y’s first edition of Victim, published in 1994, is an updated bibliogra­ phy and appendices. While the first edition contains a sparse, two-page selected bibliography, the second edition has four ap­ pendices and a larger select bibliography that includes books by Hays, other works, periodical publications, letters, and bi­ ographical and critical studies. The appendices in the second edition contain the entire text of “The Female Seducers” from Edward M oore’s Fables for the Female Sex because Ty says that it is “an important intertext...

Feminist criticism regarding Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799) often focuses on Mary, the protagonist, who refuses to marry her rapist. This paper expands on this focus by considering the protagonist’s mother, also named Mary, who had a consensually ambiguous, extramarital sexual relationship with a criminal. Through the parallels between mother and daughter, the novel underscores a double bind for the late eighteenth-century woman: an extramarital encounter must either be legal rape or a woman’s punishable transgression, with no room for grey areas. This essay argues that the novel underscores the limits of male-authored rape laws, which actively harm sexually transgressive women. The younger Mary’s resistance to her rapist offers a glimpse at what a woman-centric version of justice could be, in which there is recourse for rape survivors and room for women to enact their agency.

This paper explores the correspondences between the cult of motherhood and the conventions of maternal education in three series of fictional letters and Mary Hays’s early feminist novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799). In late eighteenth-century novels mothers are notably absent; their stories are mediated through letters and memoirs. Letters with advice and guidance from absent mothers or maternal surrogates to daughters were also a staple element of conduct literature. These texts uniformly advocated chastity, obedience and piety as virtues that guarantee a daughter’s happiness. The Victim of Prejudice turned the conventions of maternal letters upside down and also radically reconsidered prostitution narratives. By giving voice to nonnormative women, but leaving out the trope of penitence, letters in Hays’s novel constitute an altogether different lesson than was customary: to “rouse her to independence, inspire her with fortitude, with energy, with self-respect, and teach her to contemn the tyranny that would impose fetters of sex upon mind.”

of an ideology. As a result, he wound up playing with his own ideas and then attempting to justify his writing career by playing with that too. There was probably something of the con-man in the Callaghan who wanted to be a big league player, but Boire gently sidesteps that side of the man and concentrates on the facts of his life. He does use words like “contrarian” and “gadflyish” to describe Callaghan (102), but in the context he provides, words such as those are tinged more with affection than judgment. What else can one do in such a short study? In the final analysis, both books do what they set out to do — provide some basic information for students while offering a glimpse of the personality behind the writings. More elaborate treatments will have to wait until the dust settles. Given more time, real myth-making will begin. j o h n o r a n g e / King’s College, University of Western Ontario Isobel Grundy, ed., Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock, by Eliza Fenwick (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994). 359. $15.95 paper. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, eds., Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994). 371. $11.95 paper. David Oakleaf, ed., Love in Excess; or, the Fatal Enquiry, by Eliza Haywood (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994). 297. $14.95 paper. Eleanor Ty, ed., The Victim of Prejudice, by Mary Hays (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994). 197. $29.95 paper. Considered together, these four well-conceived and well-executed editions comprise a useful cross-section of the radical stuff of women’s social, intel­ lectual, and psychological preoccupations over a century. Three are reprints that the editors introduce with scrupulous attention to biographical, histor­ ical, and theoretical issues; the fourth is a superlative presentation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 edition. All the editors situate the novels within a distinctively feminist tradition. Each fiction provokes abundant analysis of rhetorical and schematic representations that communicate a desire for agency. Haywood’s Love in Excess; or, the Fatal Enquiry (1719-1720) posits the blamelessness of female eroticism, whereas Fenwick’s Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock (1795) and Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799) politicize women’s sexuality while implying its range and creative potential. Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus relegates women to the status 488 of domestic icons and displaces feminine struggle onto the monster. His creation, life, and death quarrel with the nineteenth-century suppression of female desire. This transference leads to speculation about the roads not taken — what might have been were it not for the closing down of emanci­ patory consciousness and the dwindling of feminist writers like Fenwick into drudgery and obscurity or Hays into ignominy. It would seem, however, that the tiresome necessity remains of defending the project of uncovering, contextualizing, and theorizing eighteenth-century women’s texts. Terry Castle, in her review of Secresy (“Sublimely Bad,” London Review of Books, 23 February 1995, 18-19), sees Grundy’s and, by implication, Broadview Press’s series, as a misguided exaltation of medi­ ocrity. Although Castle gestures toward the literary historical value of reading a literature of women’s own, she would relegate this pursuit to ultra-sophisticated hecklers and thorough specialists. Castle pathologizes eighteenth-century women writers as thwarted creatures, undone and de­ formed by their enslavement to the rule of the father. The drearily familiar diagnosis of the period’s literary woman as female impotent, writer manquée, what you will, leaves no room to examine women resisting and exploring, in whatever language available to them, material as well as psychological restraints on liberty. Castle’s cavilling typifies postmaterialist, postfeminist discourse, according to which the best books are those that seem freest of political struggles. Broadview Press’s four editions deserve more serious consideration of the complexity, plangency, and self-awareness of women’s radical consciousness. Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess; or, the Fatal Enquiry, which David Oakleaf elucidates as a composite of genres, dramatizes on one level the education of the sexually irresistible hero. Count D’elmont contends with, and learns to feel compassion for, the...

THE 1790'S RADICAL WRITER MARY HAYS, BEST KNOWN FOR HER BY TURNS painfully earnest and, to some, utterly scandalous 1796 fictional autobiography The Memoirs of Emma Courtney, found it impossible to avoid weighing in on the infamous Caroline of 1820. Precipitated by the Queen's return to Britain after many years in exile, having been unceremoniously dismissed by the Prince Regent in favor of his preferred mistress, the divorce trial galvanized public opinion in Britain and became a particular cause celebre of political radicals. (1) Discussing Queen Caroline in her 1821 Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated, Hays invokes Edmund Burke's famous lament for the passing of the age of chivalry in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Describing the collective response to the Queen's ostensibly shabby treatment, Hays writes: Burke, had he now lived, would have retracted his assertion, that the age of chivalry had passed away; it revived, in all its impassioned fervour, amidst the soberest and gravest people in the civilized world. Every manly mind shrank from the idea of driving, by protracted and endless persecutions, a desolate unprotected female from her family, her rank, from society and from the world. Woman considered it as a common cause against the despotism and tyranny of man.... With the fell the childish privileges and paid to the sex; and to equity not gallantry do they now prefer their claim. Oppression and proscription, it is true, still linger, but appear to be passing away; and, in another century probably, should the progress of knowledge bear any proportion to its accelerated march during the latter half of the past, all will become new. (2) This is a stunning series of claims coming, as they do, from the same writer who twenty years earlier published her novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799), often referred to as a female version of William Godwin's 1796 Caleb Williams. Whereas the Hays of 1799 would have argued in stark contrast to that chivalry was alive and well in the form of barbarous prejudice and the victimizations wrought by distinctions of rank, here she argues from the other side, insisting that a reformed chivalry is happily robust. (3) By 1820, the feudal institutions appear to have fallen away, as has the degrading homage paid to women. Particularly striking is the Whiggish stance captured by her claim that old appear to be passing away and in another century all will become new, especially given that she writes this in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, after which point it must have felt to many radicals and reformers as though old would never pass away. Compared to her texts from the 1790's such as The Victim of Prejudice, moreover, which is so decidedly deterministic about the possibility of change because of the sheer tenacity of things as they are, as Godwin puts it, Hays's lauding of a reconstituted chivalry in her treatment of the Caroline Affair is without question a long way from what she implies about chivalry in her earlier novel. (4) In the polarized political climate of 1790's Britain, chivalry either rendered one and vulnerable, or, in contrast, clothed and protected, depending on one's point of view. Burke's memorable defense of chivalry in Reflections is inseparable from his attack on the rights of man; the latter, for Burke, reduces humankind to its naked shivering nature, whereas chivalry covers and protects. (5) In his figuration of the rights of as a kind of stripping naked, anticipates Hannah Arendt's twentieth-century critique of what she calls the perplexities of the rights of man. In an oft-cited passage from The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt observes that her own arguments about the incommensurable relationship between man and citizen offer ironical, bitter, and belated confirmation of the ones with which Burke opposed the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man. …

Hyena high jinks

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).

This chapter discusses an online curricular tool for pre-service teacher intercultural education programs. The tool is centered on the story of an Indigenous migrant child who was the victim of prejudice in his preschool in Mexico City. The story was inspired by an ethnographic study of a preschool in Mexico City, where an educator faced the challenge of teaching in an environment of prejudice, racism, and discrimination towards Indigenous children. The curricular tool brings to light the ways that the attitudes and values of pre-service teachers towards the inclusion of Indigenous children in the classroom have an impact on learning. Based on role-play, the tool serves as an effective pedagogical strategy to help pre-service teachers identify expressions of prejudice or exclusion in intercultural education.

The pioneering feminist Mary Hays was the friend of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Joseph Priestley. Hays’s writing was unconventional and progressive. Her radical novels, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and The Victim of Prejudice (1799), revise the conventions of eighteenth-century fiction while condemning the ways in which a patriarchal culture exploits and victimizes women. Hays was also the author of Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793) and An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Wcimen (1798). Her six-volume Female Biography (1803) is an important feminist chronicle of the achievements of women throughout history.

Our Lady of Guadalupe: Victim of Prejudice or Ignorance?

Self-reported health among migrants. Does contextual discrimination matter?

By the end of the eighteenth century, motherhood had come to be seen as the ultimate source of female identity. The maternal body was invested with different meanings; it was simultaneously glorified and demonised, depending on whether it was submitted to patriarchal control or not. The cult of motherhood constructed women as naturally submissive and nurturing; any unconventional expressions of maternity were branded as monstrous. The re-assessment of the sanctity of motherhood is one of the key features of Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice. The novel challenges prevailing ideas of domesticity as represented in the idealised mother figure. The lack of the cult(ivation) of motherhood, the reassessment of the trope of the monstrous mother, and the creation of a heroine who defiantly refuses to become a wife and ends up mothering a disruptive text, make Hays one of the formidable rebellious Marys.

Chapter 5 Sexual Violence, Sexual Transgression and the Law in Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice

IntroductionDiscrimination is seen as a behavioral response, caused by negative attitudes towards specific values of certain people, and can be considered an effective form of stigma.The trans population has been the target of various forms of discrimination, not only through disrespect for their name and gender-appropriate pronouns, but also resorting to aggression, isolation, marginalization and consequent economic hardship. These experiences can negatively influence mental health (MH), namely a higher prevalence of substance use, depressive episodes, anxiety disorders and suicide attempts.ObjectivesTo identify the impact of discrimination and to determine the barriers associated with healthcare for trans person.MethodsThe P[I][C]OD methodology was used to prepare the research question: How does discrimination create barriers to health care for transgender people?. Research carried out through the EBSCOhost search engine, in the CINAHL Complete, MEDLINE Complete and Academic Search Complete databases, using the MeSH descriptors: “transgender”, “health”, “barriers” and “discrimination”, conjugated to the Boolean AND and OR, the search expression was obtained: (TI transgender OR AB transgerder) AND (TI discrimination OR AB discrimination) AND (TI health OR AB health) AND (TI barriers OR AB barriers). Inclusion criteria: studies published from 2018-2022; available in full text; English, Portuguese or Spanish languages. Sample of 6 articlesResults: Studies show that the trans person is often stigmatized, a victim of prejudice and discrimination in accessing health care, with an impact on MH. Barriers to accessing health care highlighted are: denial of care, lack of specialized services, lack of knowledge and support, failures in training and knowledge of guidelines by health professionals.Prejudiced/insulting language and exclusion are episodes reported with high frequency. Denial and discouragement of exploration of gender identity are reported as episodes of indirect discrimination.With regard to MH, the stress of gender minorities caused by stigma, prejudice and discrimination in health services creates a hostile and stressful social environment in the trans population, which causes MH problems.ConclusionsPrescription and barriers lead trans person to avoid accessing care, with short and long-term adverse health warnings. The absence and/or lack of knowledge of health professionals contribute to this problem, making it crucial to invest in their academic training and continuous training, as well as in clinical practice guidelines and guidance, with the aim of training professionals.It is necessary to acquire knowledge about the health of the trans person, particularly about the specific health needs and the creation of an inclusive environment between professionals and the person being cared for. Increased support, knowledge about issues related to the trans population and access to care improve MH.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Reviewed by: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia Tara Ghoshal Wallace (bio) Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. Jessica Richard. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008. 216 pp. $16.95. ISBN 978-1-55111-601-3. Broadview Press has earned the gratitude of academics by issuing editions of eighteenth-century novels long out of print but important to scholars; one thinks of Eliza Haywood’s Eovaai, Mary Hays’s Victim of Prejudice, Robert Bage’s Hermsprong. At the same time, the press has produced familiar texts—Frances Burney’s Evelina, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk—in well-edited teaching editions that include useful generic and historical contexts. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, edited by Jessica Richard, surely belongs in the latter category, since the tale has remained in print and is available in multiple forms, from Gwin Kolb’s scholarly edition for the Yale University Press Johnson series to paperback anthologies published by Rinehart and Oxford University Press [and a recent standalone scholarly edition for Oxford University Press, edited by Thomas Keymer]. Arriving just in time for the tercentenary celebration of Samuel Johnson’s birth and the 250th anniversary of its first publication, Richard’s edition is a welcome addition to the Broadview list of good teaching texts, and one that should find a home in many eighteenth-century syllabi. While clearly aimed at students, this edition also seeks to contribute to the continuing scholarly conversation regarding the tale’s generic roots and affiliations. As Richard says in her introduction, her volume “aims to reposition Rasselas not just as a philosophical but also as an oriental tale” and to demonstrate the “utility of the oriental tale for exposing English enjoyment of—and concern about—the material luxuries and existential contingencies of an increasingly global culture” (13). [End Page 393] The claim of repositioning may be somewhat overstated, since Kolb’s introduction carefully traces Rasselas ’s orientalist sources and analogues, from Father Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia (which Johnson translated from Joachim Le Grand’s French version) to Hiob Ludolf ’s A New History of Ethiopia to Johnson’s own earlier forays into the writing of an “eastern” tale. Moreover, having examined the multiple classifications imposed on the text, Kolb concludes that “the application of so many differentiae suggests ... that Johnson’s book is a complex mixture of elements,” and settles on the inclusive term “oriental moral tale” (xxxiv–xxxv). Richard’s category may thus be both less innovative and more limiting than the introduction acknowledges. On the other hand, Richard provides a thoughtful analysis of Johnson’s discomfort with European imperialist ambitions, discovering in Rasselas a “detailed universalism” that speaks to Johnson’s respect for cultural diversity; in this, Richard echoes Thomas Keymer’s contention that “the environment of Johnson’s story is never presented according to the ‘orientalist’ stereotype as a desirable arena or legitimate target for colonial appropriation” (Keymer, “Samuel Johnson’s Message to America: What a Novel Written in Despondency Says about the Pursuit of Happiness,” Times Literary Supplement, 25 March 2009). Situating Rasselas within the conventions of oriental romance also aligns the text with accounts that seek to displace the agenda of commercial exploitation. As Ros Ballaster notes, “Oriental narratives often claim to be a more ‘moral’ traffic than the acquisitive traffic in goods” (Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 18). Richard argues that Johnson uses the formal apparatus of eastern tales “to show that the restlessness of human desire cannot be sated by all that power, money, and imagination can provide” (23) and to undermine (as in the episode set in the Arab’s harem) stereotypical fantasies surrounding oriental culture. These are productive insights, especially for twenty-first-century students who are alert to globalism and multiculturalism; an instructor could easily supply elements—satiric, epigrammatic modes, for example—that are omitted in this reading. Indeed, one of the pleasures of re-reading Rasselas in a version uncluttered by one’s own jottings or by voluminous explanatory notes is a re-engagement with this compressed and always provocative text. I noted afresh Johnson’s representation of the multiple technologies of surveillance...