My dissertation focuses on testimonies of sexual harm in the women-authored novels of the Romantic period. Using Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley as my primary case studies, I demonstrate how these woman writers bestow authority upon women’s testimonies of sexual harm. Unlike earlier versions of the seduction/rape plot that represented the male rapist-seducer's perspective of events alongside the female victim’s perspective,[i] these woman writers refused embed the perpetrator’s perspective in their narratives. Instead, these writers made the woman’s testimony of experience the only means of narrating sexual violation. Accordingly, these novelists present a version of sexual violation defined exclusively according to the victim’s own narration of experience, which encouraged readers to understand sexual harm according to women’s private sentiments of violation instead of legal definitions of harm or violation. Of course, some of these women writers wrote about sexual violation more directly than others, but what unites all these woman writers is a concern for harmful sexual arrangements and relationships within a patriarchal society and legal system.

My dissertation will read sexual harm mindful of, but decidedly against, legalistic reading procedures. Many feminist scholars have critiqued legalistic readings of sexual harm,[ii] and I see myself as answering Erin Spampinato’s call for feminist critics to read rape differently in a post-MeToo critical era.[iii] Instead of reading rape according to legal definitions of consent or non-consent, guilt and innocence, Spampinato urges feminist critics should embrace a phenomenological approach to reading sexual harm. This approach would not ask whether sexual harm happened by reading consent or nonconsent (the key preoccupations of the legal trial) but assume that it did. It would have a more capacious understanding of rape, not relegated to a specific bodily or penetrative act. It would trace how sexual harm manifests in the text and attend to its bodily, social, and psychological consequences. 

My first chapter will explore Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792), one of the first novels to enter directly into the ideological controversies of the French Revolution and  Smith’s fourth published novel. All of Smith’s former novels featured blameless women that were the victims of sexual predation, but Desmond is decidedly different. It features a male protagonist who does nothing, really, but witness and record the events around him. The novel features twin storylines: the domestic plot about the abusive marriage of Geraldine Verney (exclusively narrated by her and not Desmond) and the historical plot about the outbreak of the French Revolution. These plots only intersect through Desmond himself: he is rather extraneous to both plots but unites them purely because of his status as witness to both. I take this observation as a starting point and consider the novel as a meditation on the proper witness of cruelty and oppression. The novel links the violence of sexual abuse to the violence of political tyranny, and though Desmond is often powerless to change the circumstances around him, his sympathetic witness is central to Smith’s overall project in the novel.

My second chapter examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798). Though Wollstonecraft’s earlier work cautioned against novel-reading in women’s education, Maria marks a revaluation of the importance of women’s sentiments in identifying sexual harm and the novel as a powerful pedagogical tool. I point out that all the novel’s events of sexual harm are exclusively narrated by the harmed women themselves, and that the novel is a collection of upper- and middle-class women’s stories about their own sexual victimization—though these instances would not be understood as injustices according to contemporary law. The novel stages suspicion towards feminine feeling and women’s words through a legal trial about sexual crimes. I argue that the novel stages this suspicion towards women’s testimonies of sexual harm in order to critique it. Wollstonecraft embeds meta-commentary on romantic/credulous reading practices versus suspicious reading practices, modeled by Maria and Jemima. Ultimately, I argue that Maria teaches readers to trust women’s testimonies of sexual harm and privilege feminine feeling over the law in judgements about sexual harm.

The third chapter will deal with Jane Austen’s oeuvre, especially reading sexual desire and harm in Sense and Sensibility (1811). Diedre Shauna Lynch, Eve Sedgewick, and Alice Chandler have argued that Austen novels are primarily interested in representing good and bad sexual relationships. I take this as a starting point and observe the threat of sexual coercion or manipulation in the periphery of many Austen novels. I argue that Austen rejects the victimization narrative of earlier novels and presents women as co-conspirers in their own abuse. I also point out that Austen conceives of sexual harm primarily in terms of social ruin and reputational harm. I focus my attention on Austen’s Sense and Sensibility because it notably features a sexually harmed woman, Marianne Dashwood, as a protagonist. The novel is incredibly anxious about ascertaining proofs of mutual romantic feeling and implicitly asks whether we can ever really know the substance of another’s head and heart by testimony. In this way, Austen appears pessimistic about the reliability of words and gestures narrate sexual desire and violation. At the same time, nearly all of her courtship plots take a leap of faith and stipulate a word or gesture as a proof of good faith and mutuality.

The fourth chapter will consider Mary Shelley’s Mathilda (1819-1820), a story about the psychological harm inflicted on its title character by her father’s the articulation of his incestuous desire for his daughter. Because the key instance of sexual violation in the novel is verbal utterance, her father’s testimony of incestuous desire, I understand the novel as interested in the harm of words themselves and the potential refuge of silence. The novel provides many extended reflections on the futility of words and silence and solitude as refuge. Shelley presents the most pessimistic novel about the futility, and indeed pain, of women narrating past experiences of sexual harm, and conservatively suggests that given the cruelty of the world and the hopelessness of the legal system, perhaps it is better not to speak out at all.

My project contributes to literary scholarship in two major ways. First, I am furthering the work of feminist scholars like Eleanor Ty, Claudia Johnson, and Mary Poovey.[iv] I see my project of appreciating the narratological innovations of these women writers as feminist responses to earlier male-authored novels about rape/seduction as similarly revaluing women’s contributions to the novel form in the long eighteenth century. My dissertation also contributes to studies in Romantic literature as a major sub-field. I join Romantic literary scholars like Anne K. Mellor, Jacqueline M. Labbe, and Kate Singer by insisting that we redefine the Romantic era (and Romanticism proper) alongside women writers, who were actually more widely read and culturally influential in their respective era than many of the male poets that dominate contemporary critical discussions in the field.[v] My project shares in their conviction that we will achieve a more robust understanding of the innovations of the Romantic period by attending to women’s literary output in our definitions of the field. 

[i] Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748) is the paradigmatic example of this. For more on how the novel informs contemporary legal procedures and readings of consent in the rape trial, see Frances Ferguson, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel.” Representations 20, 1987. 88-112.

[ii] For the limitations of consent as a liberal fantasy of Enlightenment contract theory and political philosophy, see Carole Patemen, The Sexual Contract. Stanford UP, 1988. For a critique of the law’s prejudiced and misogynistic definition and procedures for reading consent (ex: it isn’t rape if she didn't fight or scream; in many cases, woman’s words are not reliable narrations of their sexual experience: no can really mean yes), see Catherine MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8.41. 1983. 635–58.; Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Harvard UP, 1987.; Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws. Harvard UP, 2005.

[iii] Erin Spampinato, “Rereading Rape in the Critical Canon: Adjudicative Criticism and the Capacious Conception of Rape.” Differences, vol. 32 no. 2: 122–160.

[iv] Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women. Novelists of the 1790’s. University of Toronto Press, 1993.; Claudia Johnson,Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago UP, 1988.; Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s. Chicago UP, 1995.; Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago UP, 1984.

[v] Anne K Mellor, Romanticism and Gender. Routledge, 1992.; Jacqueline M. Labbe, Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784–1807. Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.; Kate Singer, Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation. State University of New York Press, 2019.

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), 2023 

"Historicizing Clarissa's 'The Mad Papers':  Towards a Trauma-Informed Theory of the Novel"

Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Conference, 2021

"John Clare, Habitat, and Edmund Burke"