Defining Rape Internationally: a Comment on Akayesu’ (First Published 2005) in Are Women Human? and Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, Mass
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Notes PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION 1. Catherine A. MacKinnon, ‘Defining Rape Internationally: A Comment on Akayesu’ (first published 2005) in Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 237. 2. Susan Ehrlich, Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 1. 3. Sue Lees, Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996), p. xiii. 4. Cheryl Brown Travis, ed. Evolution, Gender, and Rape (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2003), responding to Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2000). See in particular Emily Martin, ‘What is “Rape”? – Towards a Historical, Ethnographic Approach’ in Travis, pp. 363–81. 5. Jacqueline W. White and Lori A. Post, ‘Understanding Rape: A Metatheoretical Framework’ in Travis, pp. 383–411 (p. 401). 6. This notwithstanding the rape of men and sexual violence perpetrated by women, which also raise such questions, but are not my focus here. 7. See Karen Bamford, Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, eds Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (NY and Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001); Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The ‘Heroic’ Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1999); Linda Woodbridge and Sharon Beehler, eds Women, Violence, and English Renaissance Literature: Essays Honoring Paul Jorgensen (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003). 8. See Introduction, notes 3 and 4, below. 9. Eileen Allman, Jacobean Revenge Tragedy and the Politics of Virtue (NJ, Ontario and London: Associated University Presses, 1999), p. 17. By contrast, Barbara J. Baines argues that ‘many Jacobean plays uniformly reflect the binary construction of woman, [and thus] also expose the misogyny inherent therein’. Representing Rape in the English Early Modern Period (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), p. 226. 10. Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 11. See also Garthine Walker, ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England’, Gender & History x (1998), 1–25 (16). 12. Walker, ‘Rereading Rape’, pp. 20, 19. 13. See below, pp. 12–14. Carolyn Sale also argues that in many legal treatises the idea of a woman’s consent could only work against her. 235 236 Notes ‘Representing Lavinia: The (In)significance of Women’s Consent in Legal Discourses of Rape and Ravishment and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’ in Woodbridge and Beehler, p. 7. 14. This may provide one explanation for Wolfthal’s finding that ‘Europeans did not gradually progress to a more enlightened view of rape’ (p. 180). 15. Baines, p. 67. 16. See Chapter 3, pp. 71–4. Cynthia E. Garrett has valuably extended my analysis of this topos in identifying its rise between 1590 and 1610 as a result of Thomas Heywood’s translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, in ‘Sexual Consent and the Art of Love in the Early Modern English Lyric’, SEL xliv (2004), 37–58. 17. See below, p. 2 (and note 3) and pp. 9ff. 18. Christopher Cannon, ‘Afterword’ in Robertson and Rose, pp. 411–16 (p. 411). 19. See below, p. 9. 20. Baines, p. 261. 21. See, for example, Katherine Eggert, ‘Spenser’s Ravishment: Rape and Rapture in The Faerie Queene’ in Robertson and Rose, pp. 381–409. 22. Christine M. Rose, ‘Reading Chaucer Reading Rape’ in Robertson and Rose, pp. 21–60 (p. 34). Similarly, Woodbridge and Beehler suggest that texts deploying the ‘no means yes’ topos may be ‘inviting us to recognize that the brutality of rape is altogether different from the eroticism of sexual desire’ (p. xxiii). 23. Susan Frye, ‘Of Chastity and Rape: Edmund Spenser Confronts Elizabeth I in The Faerie Queene’ in Robertson and Rose, pp. 353–79 (p. 370). 24. Robin L. Bott, ‘ “O, keep me from their worse than killing lust”: Ideol- ogies of Rape and Mutilation in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’ in Robertson and Rose, pp. 189–211 (pp. 203, 202). This controversy is also discussed by Kim Solga in the context of the theatricality of rape, who argues that Lavinia is ‘an actor in a play that goes awry’. ‘Rape’s Metatheatrical Return: Rehearsing Sexual Violence among the Early Moderns’, Theatre Journal lviii (2006), 53–72 (64) and Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), chapter 2. 25. Bamford, p. 79. Similarly, I cannot agree with Elizabeth Robertson’s contention that ‘just after rape, a woman’s subjectivity is released from the social constraints that determine not only her value or worth as property, but also her identity’ (‘Public Bodies and Psychic Domains: Rape, Consent, and Female Subjectivity in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’ in Robertson and Rose, pp. 281–310 (p. 285), but, analogously, this disagreement is over the degree of agency we might each attribute to the raped early modern woman. 26. For instance, Bamford concludes that not all the plays are ‘equally misogynist, nor equally simple’, citing Shakespeare as ‘offering more room for resistance’ (p. 160), in contrast to Michael Hall’s reading of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece as ‘legitimiz[ing] rape in a particularly dishonest way’. ‘Lewd but Familiar Eyes: The Narrative Notes 237 Tradition of Rape and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece’ in Woodbridge and Beehler, pp. 51–72 (p. 68). Baines makes what she describes as a ‘precarious’ distinction between the ‘merely salacious’ Master F.J. and the ‘pornographic’ The Unfortunate Traveller (pp. 144–5). 27. For an account of how such ‘critical binarism’ has failed to reconcile feminist and post-colonial positions, and the implications of this for reading the attempted rape of Miranda in The Tempest, see Jessica Slights, ‘Rape and the Romanticisation of Shakespeare’s Miranda’, SEL xli (2001), 357–79. Such binarism is perhaps closer to being avoided in the model suggested by Solga, who in examining early modern drama in performance attends to how plays ‘simultaneously reproduce and critique the performative processes of that evasion [of sexual violence]’. It thus ‘offers a space in which to interrogate the terms of that effacement’. Violence, pp. 11, 66. 28. Sid Ray, Holy Estates: Marriage and Monarchy in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Selinsgrove: Susquehana University Press, 2004), p. 18. Comparably, Helen Cooper argues that medieval and early modern romance evidences a belief in the ‘desirability of active female desire’ to which its misogyny provides ‘background noise’. Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 220, 269. 29. Robert N. Watson and Stephen Dickey, ‘Wherefore Art Thou Tereu? Juliet and the Legacy of Rape’, Renaissance Quarterly lviii (2005), 127–56 (127). 30. See p. 132, below. 31. See in particular: Danielle Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000); Josephine A. Roberts, ed. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania by Lady Mary Wroth (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Renaissance English Text Society, 1995; rpr. 2005) and Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller, eds The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania by Lady Mary Wroth (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Renaissance English Text Society, 1999). The 1621 edition of the first part of Urania is also available in a facsimile edition: The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works: Part 1: Printed Writings 1500– 1640, vol. 10, selected and introduced by Josephine A. Roberts, general editors Betty S. Travitsky and Patrick Cullen (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996). 32. See in particular Peter Beal’s Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 and the Perdita Project for early modern women’s manuscripts, directed by Elizabeth Clarke. 33. Particularly relevant to future studies of rape is the fact that ‘manu- script was a place where poems could do things which they could not do in the more glaring light of print’ such as ‘play[ing] with indecency’. Helen Hackett, ‘Joshua Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 Nov. 2009, pp. 4–5. 238 Notes 34. Patricia Demers, Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England (London, Toronto and Buffalo: Toronto University Press, 2005), p. 242. 35. Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2000), p. 3. 36. Marion Wynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance: Relative Values (Basingstoke and NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 4. 37. Summit, p. 168. 38. Erin E. Kelly, ‘Mariam and Early Modern Discourses of Martyrdom’ in Heather Wolfe, ed. The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680 (NY and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 35–51 (p. 49, n. 14). 39. See, for example, Danielle Clarke, ‘Speaking Women: Rhetoric and the Construction of Female Talk’ in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne, eds Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (Abingdon and NY: Routledge, 2007), pp. 70–88 (p. 75). 40. Danielle Clarke, ‘Introduction’ in Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke eds ‘This Double Voice’: Gender and Writing in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan and NY: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 1–15 (pp. 6–7). 41. Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 174. 42. See below, p. 123. Indeed, Wolfthal finds that ‘rape was on the minds of medieval and early modern women’ (p.