While scholars have examined sexual violence in William Blake's 1793 Visions of the Daughters of Albion (VDA), they have not explored the poem in light of legal discourse and the judicial culture of rape in eighteenth-century England. In the context of eighteenth-century laws on rape and testimonies from rape trials, this chapter examines Blake's characters in a metaphorical courtroom. The chapter examines not only how Blake's literary figures, like their real-life counterparts, put female sexuality and virtue on trial, but also how Blake criticizes – through his female protagonist-as-witness – a patriarchal culture that condemns any form of female sexual liberation, even when it results from assault. Rather than reprimanding a rapist or seducer, the poem shows a victim publicly pleading for her life and questioning the system of male authority and social scrutiny that forced her into a post-rape, downtrodden position. In reading VDA as an appropriation of eighteenth-century rhetoric on rape, I argue that Blake creates an imaginative text that turns ‘the courtroom’ on its end and envisions a redemptive space in which a seemingly disempowered rape victim – a ruined woman – vocalizes society's rather than a rapist's crimes against her person.

Rape Laws and Trials in Eighteenth-Century England

Eighteenth-century guides and commentaries written by judges and lawyers show that the legal system emphasized definition, diction, history, physical evidence, reputation and punishment when broaching the subject of rape.