So, Sir, When Did You Stop Raping Your Wife?

A few weeks ago, I received a copy of Philippa Wiat’s  1983 novel about Katherine Grey, Five Gold Rings. The novel opens with a chapter showing Katherine’s older sister, Lady Jane Grey, being cajoled, whipped, and finally raped by a man whose identity is concealed from the reader until the last line in the chapter: it is her father.

This episode is entirely fictitious; while there are certainly sins that could be laid at the door of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, incest and rape are not among them. The incident has little connection to the rest of the plot, most of which centers around Katherine Grey’s love affair with and marriage to the Earl of Hertford. It is apparently there only to arouse the reader’s loathing for the duke.

As a reader, I seem to be noticing more of these sort of episodes in historical fiction lately—incidents with no historical basis and with little literary justification for their existence. While I haven’t read enough of these episodes, fortunately, to speak of them as a trend, I’ve seen enough of them to be disturbed. A novel I recently read about Cleopatra Selene, for instance, had Octavian attempting to rape the preteen heroine shortly after her mother’s suicide, stopping only at the urging of his companion.  I’ve previously mentioned in this blog a novel set during the Wars of the Roses where a young and saintly Richard, Duke of Gloucester, witnesses a drunken William Hastings rape a virgin peasant girl, whom he has drugged; the girl later dies of the effect of the drug. The same author in another novel depicts John Morton as lusting after choirboys; in yet another one, Henry VII orders Elizabeth of York to have premarital sex with him so that he can test her virginity.  I’m not at all knowledgeable about Octavian, but I can attest from my own research that there’s no evidence whatsoever that Hastings was a rapist, that Morton was a pedophile, or that Henry VII forced Elizabeth of York into his bed.

Far more common, however, are novels that stop short of making their villain a sexual predator, but depict him as a brute in the marital bed. This is usually done by having a man consummate his marriage in a style that is little short of rape. With some historical figures, such scenes are almost a given: for instance, novelists are fond of having the newlywed Guildford Dudley deflower Jane Grey in this manner (the possibility that Jane might have enjoyed or at least tolerated sexual relations with a young and reputedly good-looking man being too painful a notion for many to entertain). Likewise, novelists, particularly admirers of Richard III, often have Edward of Lancaster brutally initiate Anne Neville into marriage, which not only underscores the hopelessly evil nature of the House of Lancaster but gives Anne’s second husband, the Duke of Gloucester, a fine opportunity to demonstrate his immense sensitivity when Providence finally places Anne in his bed. Such scenes have made it to the screen as well: in the miniseries “The Tudors,” George Boleyn, who would clearly rather be with a male partner, gets his marriage to Jane Parker off to a particularly bad start. Again, these episodes are ahistorical; we have no idea of what happened between these couples in bed.

So why include these scenes in novels? In the right hands, depicting sexual assault can be powerful and disturbing:  In Sharon Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour, for instance, there’s a scene very early in the book where a young servant girl is dragged off by Lancastrian troops and raped. That episode serves a purpose: it illustrates the horrors that war inflicts upon innocent bystanders, and it is also based upon fact, as the chronicles record that there was rape at Ludlow. The episodes like those involving the Duke of Suffolk, however, fulfill no similar purpose; they could have been left out of the novels in question without anything being lost thereby. Their sole raison d’être appears to be to make characters who are already being portrayed as villains several shades more black or (in the case of Hastings) to prevent the reader from according him any sympathy when he later dies at the hands of the saintly Duke of Gloucester.

Those men who are depicted as novelists as behaving brutally in the marital bed are a somewhat different matter. In one of my own novels, I have a man rape his wife: it is an aberration by a decent man in what has been a mostly happy marriage, and occurs at a time when the spouses are furious at each other and under great stress.  In some novels and historical films, those husbands who start off treating their wife badly do improve with time. (Even George Boleyn in “The Tudors” has a lovable side.) It is the other cases—those where the man’s behavior toward his wife is simply a continuation of his villainous behavior in every other sphere of his life, and where there’s no historical basis for such a characterization—that I find objectionable.

Writing about sexual relations between historical figures is a delicate matter, of course. With many historical couples, we can only guess about whether their marriage was happy or otherwise, and we know even less about what went on in the most intimate part of their lives. Some invention, therefore, is inevitable, and indeed inescapable if we are to write a readable novel. But for the responsible novelist, that literary license shouldn’t extend to ascribing sexual crimes or misdeeds to men that history never attributed to them simply because it’s too much trouble to add a few shades of gray to a character’s color palette.

21 thoughts on “So, Sir, When Did You Stop Raping Your Wife?”

  1. Good thoughts, maybe we live in an oversexed society. I do believe Jane & Guildford had a little fun together, and the Emperor Augustus was far too undersexed and calculating to go about raping girls!

        1. Yes, Augustus loved Livia but he slept with other women. There was nothing wrong with that in Roman society. Though there is no prof he committed rape (again, according to Roman morals; slave girls were not asked if they wanted to sleep with anyone) and surely not with a noble hostage like Cleopatra Selene.

  2. It’s funny, I never thought about this actively, but now I have I strongly agree… But then again, I’m also a “Shut the door” person with sex scenes unless it is actually truly pertinent to the plot 🙂

  3. Good points, Susan. I get irritated at this sharp dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ men as well. Marriage, and sex within marriage, is much more complex than this. Sex between unhappy marriage partners can be depicted as unhappy, unsatisfying and unfulfilling without descending into violence and rape. The duke and duchess of Exeter, for instance, didn’t enjoy a happy marriage yet had one (possibly two) children together. While I can’t see the consummation of that child being a blissfully happy time for either of them, it needn’t have been the result of ‘rape’. “I gritted my teeth and let him get on with it”/”I closed my eyes and imagined she was someone else” might be all a writer needs.

  4. I agree – the obligatory sex scene is too often violent in historical and contemporary novels as well. It seems like it is done for shock value in a lot of cases, but is not shocking as much as plain ugly.

  5. Fantastic post Susan! It is often said that the Victorians wrote so much about death because they couldn’t write about sex. What seems to be happening now is that we are getting ‘nasty’ and ‘violent’ sex/rape in novels, for no apparent reason at all. I’ve never come across that novel about Jane grey being raped by her father – there isn’t a shred of evidence for it, and as you say, it seems to have been introduced to show how ‘bad’ the author chose to make her father. I once read a book called ‘Henry VIII’s Secret daughter’, where Jane is the daughter of Henry VIII but thankfully not by his neice, who merely agrees to bring her up as her own. I know which of your novels you are referring to in which the husband forces himself on his wife – and I must say the scene is a powerful one that reflects the state of the marriage and the influence of a certain character on the husband. It is not gratuitious and is central to the plot. But how anyone can weave rape into the story of Jane Grey and her father is shocking.

  6. Btw, I have also found it disturbing that a recent novel about Piers Gaveston contains several unpleasant, violent and gratuitous rape scenes. There are a couple of novels that feature Piers being raped, but this one in particular features very little else. And it adds nothing to the plot!

  7. Pingback: It’s FICTION, Dammit! | Lit Asylum

  8. As ever, I’m late to commenting on my own post, but thanks, everyone for your responses! Akin to these books are the ones in which a villain is turned into a wife-beater–for instance, Hugh le Despenser the younger is depicted as beating Eleanor de Clare in one Isabella novel (I think it’s the one by Hilda Lewis, whose books I otherwise enjoy).

  9. Good point here. I just don’t understand why some authors feel like they have to insert these types of scenes into their books; most of this history is fascinating as it is and in no need of embellishment.

  10. I just got around to reading “Innocent Traitor” and I was shocked at the sex scenes between Jane and her husband for the reason stated in this post. Reading the reviews for the book many take the rape as fact when Weir has stated she wrote those scenes as an explanation of Jane’s alleged hatred for Guilford. This kind of projection is particularly tragic in my opinion because Guilford also lost his life and there is no proof that he attacked Jane.

    1. Thanks for visiting, Free Thinker! I agree with you entirely. By the way, are you a VCU student or faculty member? I went there in the late 1970’s!

  11. I think your novel is the first one on Jane Grey where she wasn’t raped by Guildford or beaten to within an inch of her life by her parents. Very refreshing!

  12. excellent post! I’m so sick of cartoonish vilification, particularly to make another character better in comparison

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