ABSTRACT
This chapter explores subtextual questions about the masculine sides of both Diana and Helen in relation to their female vulnerability, in the first case, in terms of undesired marriage or undesired celibacy, and, for the second, traumatic sexual assault outside the timeframe of the story. Diana's masculinity can be recuperated in gender-political terms by attributing it to her obedience to her Jacobite father. Any Jacobite engagement in visible violence under her father's command is marginalized even more than the conventional threat to her sexual autonomy through unwanted marriage or a convent. Threats of sexual violence are displaced from Rowena onto the Jewish Rebecca, menaced by Brian de Bois Guilbert, but allowed to escape the ghastly fate that is projected onto Ulrica as another victim of mixed-race conflict. What was less in dispute was that normal heterosexual activity could be expected to be painful for the woman, so much so that even physiological damage was not unequivocal evidence of rape.
