Cleveland State University EngagedScholarship@CSU English Faculty Publications English Department 12-1-2000 Irresolute Ravishers and the Sexual Economy of Chivalry in the Romantic Novel Gary Dyer Cleveland State University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cleng_facpub Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! Publisher's Statement Article originally published as Dyer, Gary, "Irresolute Ravishers and the Sexual Economy of Chivalry in the Romantic Novel," Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Dec 2000): 340-68. © 2000 by The University of California Press. Recommended Citation Dyer, Gary, "Irresolute Ravishers and the Sexual Economy of Chivalry in the Romantic Novel" (2000). English Faculty Publications. 26. https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cleng_facpub/26 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English Department at EngagedScholarship@CSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of EngagedScholarship@CSU. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Irresolute Ravishersand the Sexual Economy of Chivalryin the Romantic Novel GARY DYER - HZT theclimax ofJames Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) the American Indian Magua, findinghimself unable to kill his cap- tiveCora Munro as he has threatened,looks at her witha facial expression "in which conflictingpassions fiercelycontended." ' The situationhere evokes the climax of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, published seven years earlier, in which Rebecca is saved from being burned at the stake when the villain Brian de Bois- Guilbert abruptlyfalls dead, overcome by "the violence of his own contending passions."2 In this essay I explore how these historical novels from the Romantic period attempt to deal withthe problems attendanton the chivalrousdesire to defend women-chivalry that ultimately becomes inconsequential, Nineteenth-CenturyLiterature, Vol.