In the United States between 1830 and 1860, seduction became a national preoccupation; work as varied as the incredibly popular city-mysteries fiction of George Lippard and Ned Buntline, to newspaper stories, magazine articles, and reform tracts all portrayed the seduction of young women as a principle sign of society’s decline. As seduction was perceived to be an increasing social threat in nineteenth-century America, reformers, lawyers, novelists, and others began to call for specific legal reforms – arguing that seduction should be changed from a property crime against a woman’s male guardians to a civil crime against society. I demonstrate that this shift was in large part caused by the pervasive representation of seduction in popular fiction and the wider cultural sphere during the antebellum period. “Seduction” was generally understood to involve sexual encounters that resulted from some level of initial familiarity between a man and a woman, which then led to verbal and physical coercion or force. These initial crimes of seduction were portrayed as perpetuating a host of other crimes, including abduction, abortion, suicide, and particularly prostitution.
Drawing on a wide breadth of archival materials including trial reports, newspapers, reform society tracts, serialized sensational novels, and bawdy male magazines, my paper examines how these texts forged a new discourse around legal responsibility, sex, punishment, and “crimes against society.”
About the presenterKatherine Thompson
With a PhD in literature with an emphasis on cultural studies, my research focuses on popular fiction and culture of the nineteenth century United States. I am particularly interested in the construction of gender in working-class subcultural spheres.