Roth, Randolph A. "Spousal Murder in Northern New England, 1776-1865" in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Intimate Violence in Early America. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
Vigarello, Georges. A History of Rape: Sexual Violence in France from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001. Tr. by Jean Birrell from the French.
Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Conclusion:
Methodologically as well as in interpretations, the books and articles examined in this paper are quite different. Vigarello and Clark both examine the history of rape but from completely different frameworks. Vigarello examines four centuries of French legal and popular thought on rape to show how the crime of rape was defined and redefined throughout these four centuries. Whereas Vigarello tells us the history of many different definitions and treatments of rape, Clark uses to modern conception of the crime, in a much narrower time frame, to argue that it played a major role in the development and the regulation of the system of separate spheres. Walkowitz provides a similar argument in her treatment of late-Victorian London. There the discourses developed by W.T. Stead about “child prostitution” and by the media at large about the Jack the Ripper murders served to reinforce and re-regulate the boundaries of separate spheres. These discourses operated the same ways that those about rape did for Anna Clark’s period: they were used by patriarchy to frighten women from entering the public sphere. The last two articles are very different from the first three books. Ed Hatton examines a murder trial to show how ideas about male respectability and its relationship with violence were in flux, whereas Randolph A. Roth examines the differences in spousal murder patterns in Vermont and New Hampshire between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, arguing that shifts in broader cultural patterns of drink and sociability led to a dramatic increase in the spousal murder rate in both states.
All the books and articles presented in this paper offered interesting and more or less convincing arguments. There were, however, some weaknesses in each. Vigarello offers an interesting overview of four centuries of French social and legal thought about the crime of rape. However, while charting, essentially, how rape came to be invented as a crime, he does not thoroughly explain why French legal and social thought changed over the centuries. Were the changes as a result of a growing egalitarian marriage as several scholars of marriage have attested? Or are there other reasons? Furthermore and related, he does not address at all the hotly debated idea that rape was one of the means by which patriarchy subjugated women. If rape against adult women was not taken all that seriously as a crime until rather recently, there must be some sort of social or political explanation. Vigarello does not give us one, and this omission significantly weakens his treatment of the history of rape.
Go To Page: 1 2
