ABSTRACT
In her novel The Victim of Prejudice, Mary Hays connects sexual exploitation to economic by making the male antagonist engage in both rape and land-enclosure. The female protagonist’s affinity for the “magic circle” of bourgeois sentimentalism, however, aligns her uneasily with the ethos of self-interest that drives her tormentor. Hays thus dramatizes how the contemporary response to rape sometimes shared the underlying premises of the offense it sought to punish. The common-law canons and Old Bailey trial transcripts suggest that, in cases of rape, the administration of private property and of female propriety was construed as the highest public good.
