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5 Sexual Violence, Sexual Transgression and the Law in Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice
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Published:February 2024
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Abstract
Feminist criticism regarding Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799) often focuses on Mary, the protagonist, who refuses to marry her rapist. This paper expands on this focus by considering the protagonist’s mother, also named Mary, who had a consensually ambiguous, extramarital sexual relationship with a criminal. Through the parallels between mother and daughter, the novel underscores a double bind for the late eighteenth-century woman: an extramarital encounter must either be legal rape or a woman’s punishable transgression, with no room for grey areas. This essay argues that the novel underscores the limits of male-authored rape laws, which actively harm sexually transgressive women. The younger Mary’s resistance to her rapist offers a glimpse at what a woman-centric version of justice could be, in which there is recourse for rape survivors and room for women to enact their agency.
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