Gendering Violence: Re-thinking Coercion and Consent in Early Modern English Literature

“Gendering Violence: Rethinking Coercion and Consent in Early Modern English Literature” puts various cultural materials—including legal manuals, trial depositions and transcripts—from early modern England in conversation with drama and poetry of the period to reconceptualize the notion of violence. Through close examination of these materials, I assert that, for early moderns, violence was gendered and that acts of violence, including but not limited to sexual violence, can be both physical and non-physical. Records of prosecutions and punishments for lethal and non-lethal acts of violence indicate that there are consequences for performing acts of violence marked as aberrant for one’s gender. At the same time, acts of violence performed by female characters in the works of Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and William Shakespeare provide an expansive range of feminine modes of violence, including non-physical acts such as speech, and cuckoldry, which is available exclusively to women. Using legal records to contextualize the rhetoric of Middleton’s The Revenger's Tragedy, my first chapter performs a comparative reading of women’s claims of sexual harassment and sexual assault against men in the period and the language male characters use to defend their sexual crimes against women. Together, these two genres present a cultural narrative that portrays sex as a masculine need and male perpetrators of sexual violence as powerless to deny this need, ultimately suggesting that there is a double loss of agency in rape. The second chapter, on Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid's Tragedy, introduces the terms “facilitator” and “instrument” in order to argue that facilitated acts of violence are performed by an instrument who is both an active agent and a controlled subject. The facilitator is the guiding force, but may also find themselves in the position of a passive bystander who must depend on the actions of their instrument. Examining oppositely-gendered instrument-facilitator pairs, Melantius and Evadne, and Aspatia and Amintor, I show how gender asymmetry affects this dynamic at the same time that it underscores the unstable power balance on which facilitation depends. My third chapter analyzes the gendered rhetoric of violence in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, arguing that while scholarship has traditionally read Shakespeare’s inversion of the standard gender binary as comedic, Adonis’s plight at the hands of Venus in fact demonstrates numerous elements of sexual coercion. This reading demands that we acknowledge how women participate in sexual harassment and rape. My final chapter, on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, argues that, in dropping the juice of the “little western flower” into Titania’s eyes, Oberon commits an act of drug-facilitated rape (2.1.166). Returning to the language used by male perpetrators of sexual violence in the period, I demonstrate that, unlike them, Titania is truly powerless to resist her sexual urges. Thus, while Titania sexually violates Bottom, her actions are guided by Oberon—the true perpetrator of Bottom’s rape. These final two chapters explicitly engage with present-day concerns regarding sexual assault, the U.S. legal system’s understanding of consent, and the high prevalence of drug-facilitated and incapacitated rape on college campuses. My project is indebted to both feminist and presentist studies as I use the past to better understand contemporary discourses of sexual consent, agency, coercion, and violence. I also argue that bringing early modern texts into conversation with contemporary discourses can enrich humanities pedagogy.PHDEnglish and Women's StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149869/1/charisw_1.pd