Abstract
If recent publishing lists on the eighteenth century are any indication, ours is an era of renewed fascination with the aristocratic rake and the fine lady. For the former, the Georgian decades are represented as having afforded a limitless playground for the pursuit of pleasure and sexual gratification, for the latter, new opportunities for social mixing and the occasional discrete liaison. Yet our absorption with the plenitude and vicissitudes of Hanoverian high life ironically not only mimics our historical subjects’ own sense of entitlement, but also reinscribes their gendered oppositional morality, as the male rake becomes the object of amused, if voyeuristic, admiration and his female counterpart of rueful embarrassment or even denigration. I have had personal experience of the continued vitality of these distinctions: after delivering a plenary lecture on the courtesan Teresia Constantia Phillips to the regional branch of an American eighteenth-century studies society (a forum which delights in papers on the exploits of a Hervey, Boswell or Wilkes), I was frostily informed by a participant that some people and some behaviours were not suitable for academic discussion (and neither, he implied, were some speakers).
I think, in Honour and Justice, there should be some lesser Punishment [for seduction], than that of eternal Infamy, affix’d to a Crime in Which [men] are the principal Aiders and Abetters, or else that the Crime should be equally odious in both: for at present the Thief is exempted from Punishment, and it is only the Party despoiled who suffers Death.
Teresia Constantia Phillips, A Letter Humbly Address’d to the Right Honourable the Earl of Chesterfield (1750)
The [Tahitian] women coquet in the most impudent manner, and shew uncommon fondness for Foreigners, but are all Jilts and coax the Foreigners out of anything they can get: and will not comply to sleep with them, unless … the bribe be very great and tempting.
Johan Reinhold Forster, The Resolution Journal (1773)
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Wilson, K. (2003). The Female Rake: Gender, Libertinism, and Enlightenment. In: Cryle, P., O’Connell, L. (eds) Libertine Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522817_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522817_7
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