Rape on the Restoration Stage

Abstract

In her essay Rape, Voyeurism, and Restoration Stage, Jean Marsden quotes a passage from Otway's The Orphan (1680), in which a young page describes his reaction to seeing heroine, Monimia, in bed:These lines, Marsden writes,draw attention to Monimia's sexual attractiveness, establishing her as erotic object. The emphasis is on act of looking; page's words invite us to imagine bed and white and swelling breasts. The passage also invites audience to rediscover this erotic spectacle in person of actress who enacts Monimia, whose breasts would be clearly visible. (189)True: a description of white and swelling breasts certainly invites us to imagine white and swelling breasts-though speech fairly clearly creates a contrast between fully clothed Monimia on and nearly naked body that greets speaker's gaze every morning. But what is status of page's gaze? Does it, as Marsden suggests, direct and represent unanimous gaze of entire male audience? Is this moment a microcosmic abstract of Restoration theatrical experience?Obviously not. The speaker is a sex-crazed child experiencing first stirrings of puberty. His prurient curiosity and tale-bearing about sex is an important catalyst in bringing about tragedy, in which one brother surreptitiously takes his twin's place in Monimia's bed, without realizing that pair are married and that act is therefore incestuous. The page's heated imagination certainly reflects sexual obsessions of slightly older males, but it is an idiosyncrasy of his personality and age group-one that has tragic consequences. Marsden's reading, however, never entertains possibility that page might be critically observed, imperfect, or indeed intensely objectionable. His eyes are those of Restoration audience. Even though played by a girl, he is Male Gaze incarnate.By 1976, when Robert D. Hume decisively transformed study of Restoration drama with his The Development of English Drama in Late Seventeenth Century, it seemed that squabble over morality of Restoration comedy was long over.2 Hume's concern was not to mount yet another challenge to Macaulay, whose day seemed long done, but to deal with more recent aberrations: inadequately based generalization, or thesis-driven search for profundity. Now, however, battle over morality has emerged in a new form, for a prominent sub-genre of criticism has arisen whose concern is not meaning of plays, or their staging, or their cultural reception, but their-alleged-exploitation and gratification of male lust. Restoration drama has, once again, become pornographic. In another milestone in criticism of Restoration drama, Doug Canfield's Tricksters & Estates, there is searching analysis of sexual dynamics of Restoration comedy, and ways in which its plots engage with gentry's need for eugenic self-perpetuation.3 Few other critics, however, have dealt so subtly with sex in relation to procreation, and with both in relation to specific configurations of class and culture.4For Marsden, for example, not only is Restoration audience fitly represented by a sex-mad pubescent, it is complicit in rape:the rape becomes physical manifestation of desire perpetrated by rapist but implicit in audience's gaze. Thus audience, like rapist, enjoys actress, deriving its pleasure from physical presence of female body. (186)[T]he proliferation of rape scenes, she urges, coincides with appearance of actresses upon British stage (185). Similarly, Elizabeth Howe stresses titillation of rape scenes: the sense of actress's body being offered to audience as a piece of erotic entertainment.5Both Howe and Marsden rightly observe that rape is far more common in post- than in pre-Restoration drama. Yet how far is this a direct consequence of emergence and exploitation of female players? …