Premium
‘Help! Help! War wants to rape me!’: War and Rape in a Dutch Peace Play of 1678
Author(s) -
De Bruyn Yannice
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12578
Subject(s) - metaphor , representation (politics) , state (computer science) , history , gender studies , aesthetics , sociology , political science , art , law , linguistics , politics , philosophy , algorithm , computer science
Why was rape such a popular metaphor for war in early modern Dutch theatrical and visual culture? To address this question, this article considers a range of theatrical and visual representations of rape. When serving as a representation of state, the female body was often used to represent abstract processes such as the accumulation of wealth or inimical intrusion. These seemingly opposing processes are conjoined in a late seventeenth‐century Dutch allegorical play that not only features rape as a metaphor for war but also extends this metaphor to raise questions about national integrity and the deleterious effects of wealth accumulation.