The origins of rape culture, as a concept, lie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
in the well-known writings of such Romantic (and proto-Romantic) visionaries as
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schiller, Victor Hugo, and The Cenci’s author, Percy
Bysshe Shelley. These philosophers, dramatists, and poets articulated profound anxieties
regarding the influence of social structures on human evil—and Thomas Hardy, author of
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, channeled those same anxieties into his work, although he lived
much later. The modern conception of rape culture could not exist without these Romantic
pioneers, who developed a political and philosophical language that lets us denaturalize
and de-normalize sexual violence. In Romantic and post-Romantic literature,
we find critiques of rape culture powerful enough to rival anything in modern literature,
despite the two centuries that modern literature has had to refine its approach.
One might object to categorizing Tess of the d’Urbervilles, first published in
1891, as a Romantic text. 1891 does not fall within one of the timeframes thought to demarcate
the Romantic era: from the late eighteenth century to the 1820s in Germany and
the United Kingdom, and (by some accounts) from the 1830s to the 1850s in France and
the United States. Yet writers now identified as “Romantic” held chronological distinctions
like these in low regard. Victor Hugo, the iconic French Romantic, suggests as
much in the preface to his drama Cromwell (1827), in which he explains his theories of
literature’s evolution. “[We] have in no wise pretended to assign exclusive limits to the…
epochs of poetry,” he writes, “but simply… set forth their predominant characteristics.”
Hugo contends that each “epoch” or period of literature possesses its own “predominant
characteristics,” shared similarities in mindset that Hugo will later term an epoch’s
“germ.” These epochs lack fixed historical limits, so that one epoch’s germ might abide
for centuries. It therefore does not matter, from Hugo’s perspective, that Tess of the
d’Urbervilles takes the form of a Victorian novel. What matters is that Tess possesses a
Romantic germ; the novel’s character, not its publication date, ought to determine its categorization.
To that end, this thesis’s first chapter will locate the “germ” of a Romantic protest
against rape culture. It will discuss how the Romantic period’s most radical political and
philosophical theories tended to manifest in its dramatic literature, where those theories
sometimes helped to empower a critique of rape culture. This thesis’s second chapter will
explore how this radical Romantic framework functions in the context of Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s The Cenci (1818). It will illuminate that drama’s searing indictment of rape culture,
while also addressing the drama’s more frustrating aspects. This thesis’s third and
last chapter will then consider the influence of Romantic protest on Thomas Hardy’s Tess
of the d’Urbervilles (1891-2). It will demonstrate that Romantic literature informs Tess’s
critique of patriarchal structures, and underlies Tess’s compassionate, weaponized portrait
of its heroine. A brief epilogue will conclude this thesis, revisiting Romantic literature’s
ambitions to find what, if anything, it offers to our present moment of challenging
cultural and political turmoil.Bachelor of Art
