In 1873, a Georgia court heard the appeal of Myron Wood against his earlier conviction in a seduction case involving Emma Chivers. Wood was a reverend, schoolmaster, and Civil War veteran, a pillar of the community in Decatur, the seat of DeKalb County, in northeast Georgia. Chivers was fifteen when she first met Wood, who was her teacher at school and her pastor at church. She was the daughter of a destitute widow, so poor that Wood took the family into his own home to help relieve their poverty. But Wood had other motives. His own wife was terminally ill, and he seduced Chivers, promising her that he would marry her once his sick spouse died. Chivers trusted him, respected him, and probably somewhat feared him, and she submitted to his advances, the first time she had ever done so. A child was born, whereupon Wood went back on his word and denied all responsibility. This was the background to Chivers’s initial, successful lawsuit. On appeal Wood adopted a new strategy. He did not deny that the affair took place, simply that Chivers was ineligible for protection under the seduction statute as she was a lascivious girl, sluttish, and primed for sin. Wood’s lawyers marshaled an array of witnesses willing to testify to Chivers’s low morals and lustful nature. The sins of the mother were visited upon the daughter. A spinster was found who claimed that Chivers’s mother was rumored to have consorted with black men and may have even run a brothel in Atlanta. Classmates took to the stand. They revealed that Chivers was not in the habit of concealing her legs as a good Christian girl was expected to do. Some had seen her hug and kiss young men. Others noted her penchant for unfruitful fruit-picking expeditions with local boys. Was it not true, the counsel for the defense asked her, that she was known to go “blackberry hunting with young men and [bring] no blackberries back?”
The state supreme court sided with Wood. Emma Chivers, the justices ruled, was not a seducible woman.1
Seduction is normally conceived of as something that happens between individuals. The case of Myron Wood and Emma Chivers is one example among countless available that this is not the case. A casual survey of modern Western history reveals that as long as sex has been considered a private matter, seduction has been considered a public concern. For centuries, seduction had a legal dimension and today remains a perennial problem for human resource professionals in corporations and administrators at universities. For just as long, writers, dramatists, and filmmakers have relied upon the tales of seduction to titillate and provoke their audiences. The rise of seduction as a popular literary genre was simultaneous with the birth of modernity. Widely considered the first novel in English, Pamela (1740), is about the trials faced by a precariously employed young woman working for a wealthy and sexually rapacious young man. An absurd conceit for a book, one might say, though the immense popularity of this tale in its day is better understood when one considers its elements as being essentially indistinguishable from one of the great bestsellers of our own time, Fifty Shades of Grey (2011). Fictional seduction narratives entertain us in equal measure as they disturb us. Seduction draws into its dragnets a whole range of sensitive issues. To think about seduction as a social concern is to engage with matters of morality, philosophy, politics, class, race, and gender. If these subjects fascinate in fiction, then they scandalize in fact. Factual instances of seduction—broadly defined—have dominated the attention of headlines, courtrooms, and legislative bodies from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. All this to say, seduction very clearly has a social and cultural existence that can be charted, yet its history has never been written. There seems to be no clear reason why that should continue to be the case.
Every aspect of human experience has its history; the problem is identifying how best to measure it. The unit of measurement for the history of seduction is that strange and powerful thing, the seduction narrative. The basic claim of this book is that the seduction narrative is a product of the modern world and serves as a vehicle for the exploration of modern values, modern experiences, and modern concerns.
This is not to say that seduction never existed in fact or fiction before the onset of modernity. The moons of Jupiter are named for four of Zeus’s most celebrated seductions. The nymph Io he enshrouded in darkness and then turned into a snow-white heifer to conceal her from his jealous wife. Callisto, the “Arcadian virgin [who] suddenly caught his fancy and fired his heart with a deep-felt passion,” he approached in the guise of her mistress, the goddess Diana, before taking her in his arms and revealing his identity. To win the Phoenician princess Europa, he “discarded his mighty sceptre and clothed himself in the form of a bull.” Once he had lured her to sit on his back, he swam out to sea, taking her all the way to Crete, where they eventually had three children together. To secure the Trojan youth Ganymede, Zeus took the form of an enormous eagle and swooped down from the skies and carried him away to Mount Olympus. All these stories are recorded in the Metamorphoses, written by the Roman poet Ovid, who is arguably more famous for authoring the first-ever seduction manual, the Ars Amatoria, in the second century BC. Ovid’s frank treatment of seduction scandalized the emperor Augustus, and Ovid was sent into exile on the Black Sea. Whatever tribulations he experienced in his own lifetime, Ovid’s legacy endured. In the premodern world he was the paradigmatic writer on seduction, name-checked by Chaucer and Shakespeare and avidly read by every educated young man. Indeed, Ovid’s influence was so great that it became an inspiration for perhaps the first proto-feminist analysis of seduction. Writing in the early fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan mocked the clerks who lived by Ovid’s sexual commandments while lamenting that the sexual culture his writings had helped forged made life impossible for women. For a beautiful woman to keep herself chaste, de Pizan wrote, is “like being in the midst of flames without getting burnt” on account of her having “to fend off the attentions of young men and courtiers who are eager to have affairs.”2
Classical writers aside, the other major influence on how premoderns thought about seduction was Christianity. In the Christian tradition, the problem of seduction had begun not with Ovid but with Eve in the Garden of Eden. From the earliest days of the Christian faith, theologians had identified the first woman, Eve, and consequently all women, with lust. Saint Augustine had claimed that mankind’s original sin was the lustfulness uncovered in Eve after she ate the apple at the serpent’s urging. Augustine believed that the “legacy of Eve” was the “sorrow she brought into the world” through her discovery of her sexuality. As a result of this mythology, early Christian culture was astonishingly misogynistic. Saint Jerome was so aghast at the carnality he associated with women that he counseled chastity for men wherever possible. Indeed, he identified men with sexual restraint (with “the virtue of continence”), whereas women were marked with the “command to increase and multiply” associated with the expulsion from Eden and with “the nakedness and the fig-leaves which speak of sexual passion.” The writer and apologist Tertullian described women as “each an Eve … You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the first deserter of divine law.” For the eleventh-century Benedictine monk Saint Peter Damian women were “bitches, sows, screech-owls, night owls, she-wolves, blood suckers … harlots, prostitutes, with your lascivious kisses, you wallowing places for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits, demi-goddesses, sirens, witches.”3
The consequence of theological misogyny was a literary tradition in which the dominant seduction narrative was that of a woman seducing a man. In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, this trope was mocked by the female narrator who describes how men, drunk on Ovid, Jerome, Tertullian, and all the rest, came to believe that women were intrinsically licentious and that they “cannot keep the vow of marriage.” When at the end of the fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain discovers that the witch Morgan Le Fay has been toying with him throughout the tale, he gives vent to his frustrations concerning male powerlessness in the face of female manipulation:
But it’s no wonder a fool should lose his senses and be brought to his downfall through the wiles of women. For Adam in this world was misled by one, and Solomon by several, and Samson after him—Delilah was his ruin—and David afterwards, was blinded by Bathsheba and suffered much misery. Since all of these were deluded, it would be a fine thing to love them well without trusting, if a man could do it.4
Many of these concerns spilled over into the popular fear about witches. “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust,” intoned the Malleus Maleficarum, the classic treatise on the subject, “which in women is insatiable.”5
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these attitudes began to soften. The continental tradition of courtliness popularized by writers like Baldassare Castiglione and Philip Sidney encouraged socializing among the sexes—at least at an elite level—and emphasized that courtship could be an aesthetic pleasure and not a moral hazard. This attitude is certainly in evidence in Shakespeare’s comedies, where the game of love is played out in an endless carnival of disguise, gender confusion, and enchantment. In figures like Richard III, who as the Duke of Gloucester seeks to seduce the widow Lady Anne, gloating that he will triumph though he has “nothing to back my suit at all, But the plain devil and dissembling looks,” Shakespeare also looks forward to more modern conceptions of the seduction narrative, where men are predators and women are prey.
These precursors are interesting, but they feel intellectually apart from our modern conceptions of sexual morality and sexual experience. The cause of that distance—and the reason that this book begins at the start of the eighteenth century and not before—is the Enlightenment. The seduction narrative was made possible by a series of intellectual developments and value shifts that arose out of this period. Specifically, three new modes of thought gave rise to the modern seduction narrative: liberalism, materialism, and feminism. All three had an interconnected influence on one another. A theological conception of the world (one where the devil was abroad in society, witches met in covens, saints worked miracles, and angels intervened in the lives of men) was replaced with a material understanding of reality based on our perceptions of measurable phenomena. This in turn led to the development of liberal political theories that invested individuals with rights, responsibilities, and autonomy over their own lives. Taken together, these two developments undermined millennia of reflexive misogyny and put what was long known as “the woman question,” now known as feminism, at the center of public debate.
This can all sound quite abstract, but there were real-world consequences. Take the example of marriage. Between 1600 and 1800 there was a revolution in marriage norms. At the beginning of the period, arranged marriages were a common and unremarked-upon feature of daily life. By the turn of the nineteenth century, it was considered barbaric to coerce anyone into marriage. The ideal was now companionate marriage where man and woman met, bonded, and freely chose to enter into wedlock. Writing in the Spectator (the magazine he co-founded) in 1711, liberal essayist Joseph Addison declared that “those marriages generally abound most with love and constancy that are preceded by a long courtship. The passion should strike root and gather strength before marriage be grafted on to it.” This attitude was basically unchallenged by the end of the eighteenth century—but it raised a raft of issues. If marriage was now a private choice, then individuals, especially women, had to be trusted to make their own decisions. But could they be trusted to make the right ones? What if they were deceived? If they were misled, were they owed any special sympathies or even particular legal protections? Conversely, if men were judged to have behaved in a deceptive or exploitative manner, how were they to be dealt with? Should they be punished? Should they be reformed? Or, as the hackneyed saying goes, is all fair in love and war? As we shall see, these questions occupied the attention of some of the most celebrated minds of the past. They still concern us now.
Underpinning all these debates is a more fundamental question. The Enlightenment is sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason—a time when rational thought supplanted superstition and ignorance and the world was metaphorically illuminated by the light of logical thinking. This is not the entire story. While it is true that most Enlightenment thinkers rejected theology in favor of empiricism, systematic investigation, and the scientific method—in other words, in favor of materialism—this did not lead all of them to a dogmatic faith in the power of reason. When they studied themselves, some philosophers found that they were far from logical. Observing his own brain trying to make sense of the world, philosopher David Hume concluded that his mind was “a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” Hume believed that these fleeting sensations and momentary impulses—what he called the passions—influenced human behavior more than rational thought. Hume was not alone in reaching this conclusion. The question as to whether reason or passion exerts greater sway on human decision-making was one of the foundational debates of the Enlightenment. And it is with us to this day.6
The argument of this book is that this debate has survived in the seduction narrative. This finds expression in the fact that seduction narratives come in two forms. Each takes a different side of this debate. Each tells a complementary story about the modern world. In the classic seduction narrative—what we might call the “Villainous” kind—the seducer uses guile, deception, and mental games to overcome their target’s resistance. It implies a psychological vulnerability on the part of seduced—a fact reflected in the etymology of the word: se + ducere, to lead away. Seduction assumes one person is manipulating another, leading them away from their true preferences. This was the basis for the crucial legal distinction between rape and seduction. Whereas rape was coercive, seduction admitted consent while assuming that consent had somehow been degraded by the techniques of the seducer. As one New York court put it in 1896, “to constitute seduction, the defendant must use insinuating arts to overcome the opposition of the seduced and must by wiles, without force, debauch her.”7 In common law the classic example of seduction was a woman who agreed to sex after accepting a disingenuous marriage proposal. This, in the eyes of society and the law, was a species of fraud, as consent had been obtained by a lie. Early-nineteenth-century feminists campaigning for increased legal protections for women and girls understood the threat of seduction as being pervasive. In a pamphlet from 1910, one wrote that
Every human atom is endowed with some primeval instinct of self-preservation, and it is this instinct which must be relied upon to give its danger signal. Yet it cannot be expected to do its work, if hampered by the toils of unreasoning and prejudiced ignorance.8
Seduction—the “ultimate inferno”—was brought about by the assault on the rational mind “by the toils of unreasoning and prejudiced ignorance.” Nowadays the language used to describe such scenarios tends to focus on structures of power and patterns of grooming and assault. The common feature is that the seduction narrative dramatizes powerlessness. This is why from Clarissa (1748) to Cruel Intentions (1999), the victims of seducers are portrayed as naive, unworldly women. This is not to say that there have not been seduction narratives featuring women seducing men—as we shall see, this has been a recurring countercurrent from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first—simply that they rely on the premise that men are the powerless playthings of predatory, powerful women, a contention that has lacked credibility for almost all recorded history. This speaks to the political, feminist dimension of these seduction narratives. They tell a story about women’s place in society. They allegorize their oppression.
If the villainous seduction narrative dwells on psychological vulnerability, the other kind of seduction narrative focuses on the power of reason. Enlightenment philosophers believed that individuals were endowed with reason and could use it to make decisions in their own best interests. In one of the foundational manifestos of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers of the United States declared that among the “unalienable Rights” of free men were “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The other kind of seduction narrative—the one that portrays the seducer as a hero, not a villain—is intensely interested in that pursuit. Throughout this book we shall meet writers and intellectuals who believed that the rational pursuit of sexual pleasure was an endeavor characteristic to the enlightened individual. In England, one of the earliest champions of this position was the writer and dramatist Henry Fielding, who considered men and women’s desires natural “and productive not only of corporeal delight, but of the most rational felicity.” In continental Europe, philosophers like Voltaire and Casanova argued much the same. Nor was it just men who trumpeted the virtues of sexual freedom. The pursuit of what she called “rational desires” was central to the intellectual project of Mary Wollstonecraft. Among the Romantics, Free Love was embraced in theory and practice by women such as Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont as much as it was by men like Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this view of human sexuality became basically unchallenged. From James Bond to Brigitte Bardot, seducers were celebrated in the culture as symbols of sexual freedom, free agents who had unburdened themselves of the irrational prejudices of custom, religion, and taboo. In the twenty-first century, the rise of algorithmic online dating represents the triumph of seduction as a logical exercise.
These rival traditions in the seduction narrative—reason versus passion; the seducer as hero versus the seducer as villain—coexist. They are, in fact, deeply intertwined. This book covers a period of three centuries, and both kinds of narrative exist in every time and in every place that is studied. Indeed, the foundational conflict between reason and passion that is at the heart of this history is often found within seduction narratives themselves. For example, in the eighteenth-century novel The Man of Feeling, the seduced and betrayed Emily Atkins contrasts her passionate abandon with her seducer’s cold, calculating nature:
It was gratitude, it was pride, it was love! Love which had made too fatal a progress in my heart, before any declaration on his part should have warranted a return: but I interpreted every look of attention, every expression of compliment, to the passion I imagined him inspired with, and imputed to his sensibility that silence which was the effect of art and design.
This dynamic tension between reason and passion also accounts for another recurrent theme in this book: the use of hypnosis as a metaphor for seduction. As we shall see in the chapters on Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, hypnotism was a potent symbol of seduction, as it was a transitional psychological state that bridged the worlds of reason and passion. Seduction is bewildering, exciting, and dangerous because it occupies this gray zone of agency. It is also precisely for this reason that seduction has repeatedly been the subject of legal interest. As we shall see in the later chapters of this book, the legal principles that brought Emma Chivers to the courtroom in the 1870s were born of passionate public debates about the limits of rational sexual decision-making and consequently with the limits of consent.
This tension creates paradoxes—contradictions that will surface again and again in this narrative. Those who believe that individuals are prone to violent passions and vulnerable to manipulation tend to argue for the creation of laws and rules that will try to rationally regulate sexual desire. As we shall see, the successful campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to bring about a body of law to police seduction mobilized these “Villainous” seduction narratives to achieve their goals. Out of the chaos of the passionate mind was born the need for a set of logical legal codes. Yet these supposedly rational laws were quickly revealed to be capricious themselves. As the example of Emma Chivers showed, far from being impartial, seduction laws were used to police arbitrary boundaries of class, race, and gender.
Conversely, the “Heroic” seduction narrative uses the claim of rationality to advance a culture of sensual revelry. From the hedonism of Enlightenment London, Paris, and Venice, to the Free Love doctrines of the Romantics, to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, sexual rationalism has been used to justify a culture of pleasure, permissiveness, and emotional authenticity. Yet time and again, the promise of sexual freedom in theory has run up against the problem of sexual freedom in practice. The dream of emotional authenticity underpinned by a model of rational decision-making has all too often led to a reality of sexual exploitation motivated by an unfeeling transactionalism that conceals itself within a masque of sexual liberation. At the height of the Sexual Revolution, Germaine Greer observed as much when she wrote in The Female Eunuch that “sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearteningly than ever before.”9
These paradoxes, these brawling contradictions, are the engine of this book. But what follows is not an attempt to endlessly restate the arguments made in this introduction. These are intended to function only as the poles, pegs, and guy ropes that give structure to the marquee of the book. Crowded under the canopy are a dozen or so major figures, and a selection of minor figures, through whose lives and relationships and writings the history of seduction will be explored.