The 'Tyrant Rapist', Discourses of Matrimony and the Persistence of Patriarchal Political Ideologies in Early Modern Literary and Artistic Fiction.

The thesis will focus on the early modern literary and artistic trope of the 'tyrant rapist' (Rudolph 2000): a narrative structure in which the uncontrollable lust functions as an argument for overthrowing a tyrannous monarch. It will argue that the fictional trope of the 'tyrant rapist' conveys a narrative in which performance of rape by a male leader on a female subject paradoxically functions as a hyper-masculine act of violence and also evokes the (Protestant) discourse of marriage. Stuart ideology naturalises authoritarian rule by likening monarchic political authority to Protestant patriarchal marital authority, in which man and women spiritually combine within a hierarchical union that places man as reasoning 'head' and woman as subordinate, oversexed 'body'. This ideology argues that a subject's disobedience to the king - their 'head' - was contrary to God's lay (Schocket 1975). The research will investigate how the Protestant marital discourse of subsumption, which typically appears in literary descriptions of the relationship between 'tyrant rapist' and victim, destabilises the monarch's political authority by presenting the lustful 'tyrant rapist' as subsumed into a (gendered) hierarchical relationship within which they are no longer 'head'. This trope will be viewed as a way to engage the political ideology about tyranny in a society where there was no political freedom of expression and 'attempts to reflect critically on contemporary events or leading figures was particularly risky' (Greenblatt 2018). The research will examine the motivations for the initial appearance of the use of marital discourse between rapist and victim and demonstrate how this narrative evolves structurally throughout the seventeenth century in response to political ideology. Using Dolan's argument that modern Western models of marriage are 'inherited' from early modern Protestant ones (Dolan 2008) the research will also ask whether fears and ideologies surrounding sexual assault today are congruent with early modern structures of subsumption and sexual union. The research will build on the hypothesis that by acknowledging the historic roots of our contemporary ideology surrounding sexual assault, we can better understand, and where necessary change, outdated approaches toward the treatment of rape in our modern society.