‘A Prisoner on the Rack’: Marital Rape, Consent, and the Gothic in Late-Nineteenth-Century Colonial Women’s Writings

Abstract

This article explores how marital rape was represented in the fiction and non-fiction writings of four colonial female authors–Barbara Baynton, Ada Cambridge, Louisa Lawson, and Rosa Praed. It examines how these women conceptualised marital rape as a form of domestic violence or ‘cruelty’ in marriage, intrinsically linked to other forms of marital violence such as physical and mental abuse, and with marital rape representative of the unacceptability and immorality of a husband’s total control over his wife’s body. It also analyses how these literary representations differed from discussions about marital rape and domestic violence by suffrage agitators such as Rose Scott and Maybanke Anderson. The article argues that Baynton, Cambridge, and Lawson used the language and tropes of the Gothic in order to generate understanding for and empathy with wives and their inability to consent in the marital bed. This article therefore illuminates the intersecting conversations by both female authors and suffrage agitators in late-nineteenth-century Australia about married women’s right to consent, domestic violence, and acceptable marital masculine behaviour, highlighting how access to Gothic tropes allowed colonial female authors to foreground women’s bodily autonomy and depict marital rape in the level of graphic detail that suffrage agitators could not.