The Ghost of Lucretia: Seduction and Consent in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie (original) (raw)

A ghost is haunting the eighteenth-century novel – the ghost of Lucretia, the chaste Roman matron who killed herself after being raped by Tarquinius and whose death ushered in the birth of the Roman Republic. With the rise of the epistolary novel in the eighteenth century, many great writers entered the scene to re-write the story of Lucretia, and new Lucretia stories emerged – among which Clarissa (1748) by the English novelist Samuel Richardson and Julie (1761) by the Genevan philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau are two great examples. Both novels are attempts to rehabilitate the virtue of a supposedly “fallen” woman: despite their “tarnished virtue,” the heroines Clarissa and Julie both provide new models for feminine virtue and female heroism. However, the question remains: under what value system are Clarissa and Julie deemed as “fallen” women, and who is it to determine whether they are “fallen” or not? In this project, I will show how Clarissa and Julie are not only physically seduced by men but also ideologically seduced by an aristocratic patriarchy that is perpetuated not just by men but also by women – and whether these young ladies have the free will to consent or not consent to this multi-layered seduction.