nevertheless enjoys D'Elmont's attentions and inwardly returns his desire. In this difficult situation, Melliora 'carry'd with her a World of troubled Meditations… but when she Reflected how dear that Person she had so much cause to fear, was to her, she thought her self, at once the most unfortunate and most Guilty of her Sex.' Melliora is the paradigm of the besieged maiden in amatory fiction, a maiden who, for all her innocence, victimization and passivity, is yet a «guilty» party. Even when she is held down on her bed and physically overpowered by D'Elmont, her own desire is cast as partially responsible for the event. For on the fateful night when the count has crept into her room to gaze on her asleep, she is already, unfortunately, dreaming about him. Just as D'Elmont begins to have second thoughts about taking advantage of her, Melliora undoes herself by talking in her sleep.
The resistless posture he beheld her in, rouz'd all that was Honourable in him, he thought it pity even to wake her, but more to wrong such Innocence, and he was sometimes Prompted to return and leave her as he found her… He, stooping to the Bed, and gently laying his Face close to her's, (Possibly Designing no more than to steal a Kiss from her, unperceiv'd) that Action, — 68- Concurring at that Instant, with her Dream, made her throw her Arm (still Slumbering) about his Neck, and in a Soft and Languishing Voice, Cry out, O! D'Elmont Cease, cease to Charm, to such a height-Life cannot bear these Raptures! — And then again, Embracing him yet closer-O! too, too Lovely Count-Extatick Ruiner!
'If he had now left her,' the narrator remarks dryly, 'some might have applauded an Honour so uncommon; but more wou'd have Condemn'd his Stupidity.' The near-rape that follows takes place in this complicated setting. Melliora is desiring, but still innocent (since she is asleep); D'Elmont is aggressive, but responsive as well. Haywood carefully shifts the burden of intention and responsibility for sexual violence, making rape itself less a separate category than an extreme case of (mutual) seduction, and destabilizing the positions of seducer and seduced.
As this example indicates, representations of rape and seduction are often hard to tell apart in amatory fiction; the crucial question of agency is difficult to resolve. By making rape and seduction versions of each other, amatory fiction challenges the agency-based distinction usually drawn between the two, demonstrating that choice and intention are always themselves constrained, overdetermined, and diffuse. But characteristically, the challenge operates to double purpose. By suggesting that all seductions are forms of rape, amatory fiction exposes the patriarchal strategy of making the victim guilty by proving that she was «really» seduced rather than raped; but by suggesting that all rapes are varieties of seduction, amatory fiction abets the familiar process of male exoneration, whereby victims are cast as complicit actors. Like its persistent interest in the guilt of vow-breakers helpless to keep their vows, amatory fiction's complex representations of seduction-as-rape and its refusal definitively to assign positions of aggressor and victim in seduction-rape scenarios constitute significant instances of Augustan society's efforts to interpret its own history.
Despite great popularity and relevance in their day, amatory fictions are now held in contempt. However interesting these texts may be as part of the Augustan cultural landscape, most critics still feel that they are simply not very good literature; their present value seems to be mainly that of rather embarrassing curiosities, 'justly neglected' (as John Richetti puts it) except by 'the most thorough of specialists or dedicated of graduate students.' But there are exceptions to this rule. Most -69- prominent among those who have recently championed amatory fiction as serious literature is Ros Ballaster, who has written the only fulllength study of the genre. Ballaster's important book joins a growing body of revisionist studies that suggest new ways to approach the question of value. Rather than denigrate (or praise) amatory fictions wholesale, critics might better ask why we define «good» literature as we do, how our assumptions about literary value still work to valorize some voices and exclude others, and how our capacities for pleasure might be augmented by respectful engagement with works we have been trained to resist or dismiss.
And as I have tried to suggest here, amatory fiction remains largely invisible for reasons other than its supposed poor quality. These texts are difficult to focus on because they seem to mar the picture: they fail to affirm traditionally valued purposes and strategies for reading, and they defy critical paradigms for realism. The brainchildren of sexually infamous and socially marginal women, they insistently represent a world where women's experiences of sexual power are central, and where such experiences conflate unexpectedly with political issues in the public world. They are obsessed with a limited number of recurrent ideas, especially with broken vows and with disturbing sexual relations in which seduction often looks a lot like rape, choice like constraint, and coercion like complicity.
But it may be precisely because of their traditionally defined liabilities that Augustan amatory fictions are in fact crucial to literary history now. Amatory fictions powerfully formulate acute Augustan social dilemmas, and expose assumptions and equivocations that later centuries have continued to hold dear. Behn, Manley, Haywood, and their peers re-present public issues of authority and accountability as issues of gendered power relations, making problematic the assumption that political relations and intimate relations are essentially different. They represent sexual contracts, subject as they are to interpretation and change, not as a special case but as the epitome of contract itself. They make explicit the difficulty of distinguishing complicity and force, whether in political or sexual relations, and so expose myths of definitive agency and accountability.
Positioned as they are at the fringes of respectable discourse and at the beginning of the century that laid the foundations of long-standing political and domestic structures, amatory fictions demonstrate the historical fabrication of authority systems that have come to seem eternal -70- and inevitable. Their challenges are not radical, programmatic, or sustained; they tend to capitulate to existing power arrangements. Yet intimations of resistance remain latent in acts of collusion. Defying codes for literary and moral respectability, amatory fictions invite us to turn a critical eye on our tendency to organize experience according to exclusionary categories. They offer us a chance to imagine alternatives to the rigid roles of victim and oppressor, and to understand history-social or literary-not as a process of competitively «rising» and «falling» groups or genres, but as a narrative of reciprocal pleasures, shared anxieties, and promiscuously mingling bodies and voices.
