Toni Bowers – författare

Force or fraud - rape or seduction? This book examines the development, between the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the accession of George III in 1760, of the peculiarly modern habit of making that distinction on the basis of female responsive agency. It tells the story of how rape and seduction came to be distinguished according to measures of women's resistance and consent in low-brow "amatory" writing, and how at the same time amatory fictions interrogated the implications of their own procedures, implications still very much with us today. The amatory tales of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Richardson - early pioneers in British prose fiction - were immensely popular in their day. But they were also scandalous and controversial, not least because they so often depicted innocent young women under assault from men in positions of legitimate authority over them. Focusing on an ideologically-inflected strategy it calls "collusive resistance," Force or Fraud uncovers the paradoxical means by which formulaic late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century seduction stories wielded a surprising degree of power and influence - not only over female imaginations, publication lists, and leisure time, but also over the interpretation of one of the age's most troubling problems, the problem of constructing virtuous resistance to those in authority. Stories about the ambiguous seductions of young women helped British political subjects negotiate a period of dramatic change and uncertainty, and to imagine newly legitimate forms of resistance.

Through detailed examination of a wide variety of novels, plays, sermons, songs, popular engravings, portraiture, and propaganda from the period, Toni Bowers examines the eighteenth-century struggle to develop new ideals for virtuous womanhood. She shows how popular representations of mothers codified and enforced a model of motherhood naturally and inevitably, removed from participation in the public world, and presented other ideals as monstrous. At the same time, she points out, some of the most influential texts resisted the newly reduced vision of maternal excellence by imagining alternatives to domesticity and dependence. Addressing broader social and cultural issues, and drawing radical comparisons between past and present, Bowers argues that Western culture continues to be limited by its commitment to the contradictory maternal ideals established in eighteenth-century discourse.