ABSTRACT
The relationship between sexual violence and American identity has been complicated by factors peculiar to life in the New World. In addition to the political dangers of exoticism, sexual crimes invoked the socio-economic disorders of class instability in late eighteenth-century American culture. The chapter explore the relationship between justice and gender in the law and literature of late eighteenth-century America, and consider textual representations of sexual crime in connection with the prison reforms getting underway in the nation’s capital of Philadelphia during these years, as well. By the Revolutionary period, America’s legal system also had diverged from its British counterpart in ways germane to its treatment of sexual crime. Juridical reformers sought to obviate the inordinate burden sexual crimes placed on women, without redistributing the power that underwrote early national law. The liberating explosions of attempted rape, violent death, and threatened necrophilia complete a pattern of sexual violence in Charles Brockden Brown’s novel.
