ABSTRACT
This chapter explores dramatic shifts in the understanding and perception of consent presented in the eighteenth-century novel. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa establishes a rape narrative in which resistance is futile and consent is absent in the moment of violation. Authors of the late eighteenth-century feminist novel build on this intervention, using the testimony of rape survivors as the lens through which to view the transformation from ‘innocence’ to dishonour and to scrutinise the impossibility of negotiating clear consent under patriarchal tyranny. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays endow their heroines with knowledge of their non-consent and physical violation. This consciousness gives a voice to those traditionally oppressed into silence. The act of violation dehumanises these characters: society no longer views them as individuals, but as objectified sexual bodies. These authors engage with recognised philosophical theories to undermine the value placed on sexual innocence as a measure of moral worth, and instead view enforced chastity as a means of controlling female autonomy within a patriarchal society. For a wronged woman to maintain a relentless presence amidst a literary tradition of silenced victims is an act of defiance, enabling written and verbal testimony of collective trauma to educate both a contemporary and modern readership.
