the origins of harm

part III: The Flame and the Flower

Content warning: In this newsletter, I discuss marital rape laws and bodice rippers at length. Bodice rippers are romance novels that feature the heroine experiencing sexual violence at the hands of the male main character, who will eventually be in her consensual romantic partner. 

This is the third part an updated and revised version of a project originally published in 2022. Part I about the history of the marital rape exemption is here and Part II about the history of depictions of marital rape in novels before 1972 is here.

John Leech’s satirical take on the Rape of Sabine of Women, depicting the women in Victorian clothing, 1850s

introduction (part iii)

Part II of the updated project ended with acknowledging that the start of any SEO’d thinkpiece about consent in romance starts with The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen L. Woodiwiss (1972). I start Part I of this project with references to it!¹ And now we’re actually going to discuss it. The book is often spoken and written about as if the concept of “consent” was foreign to its author, characters, and readers as an explanation for why a romance that starts with a rape could be so popular.

Maya Rodale in an interview with Glamour Magazine from 2019:

[Glamour]: For many, The Flame and the Flower is the original romance novel. While it came out in 1972, it established the model that romance novelists still use today. But there are many instances of sexual assault in it, and the heroine ultimately ends up with her abuser. How have these novels evolved, in relation to consent, ever since?

Maya Rodale: It was rape [in The Flame and the Flower], let's just be clear. But the way we look at it now, is that those stories were written in a time when women weren't allowed to desire sex—I'm sorry—“good women” weren't allowed to desire sex.² So this was a way to show it on the page, without a woman having to ask for it. But as the real-life standards changed about women’s desire—and how they could vocalize that desire—you see that change within the genre.

[GM] When did the romance community really start to grapple with the fact that these sex scenes were, in fact, rape—and move away from them?

Rodale: In the early 2000s, when I started really reading romance, we still had what we called the “forced seduction” theme…³

The History of Consent in Romance at Book Riot by Nikki deMarco, 2022:

The primordial text that gave validity to this idea that romance is nonconsensual is The Flame and Flower, which is thought to be the first book of the bodice ripper genre…Yes, there were consent issues in romances written in the 1970s and ’80s, but that’s likely because of the societal understanding of consent was different than it is today. Writers were writing for the moment they were living in...In 1972 when The Flame and the Flower was published, marital rape was still legal.⁴ Nebraska was the first state to outlaw marital rape in 1975, although the term “rape” wasn’t used. It wasn’t until 1993 that marital rape was outlawed in all 50 states; North Carolina was the final state to change its laws.

Author Cathy Maxwell in Publisher’s Weekly:

“In those books in the ’80s, we didn’t see [the male lead] as a rapist. We saw him as a virile man who was so taken with this woman that he would do anything to have her. I think it’s important to go back to those books and realize that, even though there was a traumatic event, at the same time, in the course of that story, we find people who begin a dialogue and begin to gentle themselves into a meaningful relationship, and that the hero is not demeaned by that gentleness.”

Author Sarah Maclean at Publishing Perspectives

“The genre is evolving just as women’s role in society evolves. The Flame and the Flower begins with the hero raping the heroine, and ends with their happily ever after—something that speaks to the much larger issue of women and sex in the 1970s…In these early books, lack of consent gave permission to women—heroine and readers alike—to explore their sexuality without shame. Essentially, at a time when good girls weren’t supposed to have sex for pleasure, these scenes gave them permission to be sexual and be ‘good.’…That’s changing in the world, thankfully, and so we see it changing in romance as well.”

The Flame and the Flower gets to be a starting point because it has explicit sex on the page.⁵ Never mind that so much of what has been published in the last two decades, especially in historical romance spaces, is actually a clearer descendent of Georgette Heyer, even when there is sex on the page. So we reckon with this text and histories have to have all these caveats about what things were like “back then.”

But when I read The Flame and the Flower two years ago for the first edition of the project, I found a book deeply concerned with consent in sex and one that absolutely acknowledged what sexual violence was happening. In no world could I read this book and think that Woodiwiss or Brandon and Heather or the readers of book could not conceptualize consent as important factor in romantic relationships. In fact, discourse that suggests that martial rape was not understood to be rape is contradicted by how characters within this book, published in 1972, talk about sexual assault.

The Flame and the Flower: a close-reading

As discussed in the earlier parts of this series, societal understanding of consent is not the same thing as the legal understanding of consent in a marriage. Representations of rape within a marriage in books written well-before marital rape exemptions (were removed in Great Britain and the United States (discussed in Part II) belie the idea that people of this time period could not conceive of coerced or violent sex within a marriage contract, even if that action was not yet criminalized as rape. Language in The Flame and the Flower continues to show that the law was not the vanguard in the application of these concepts.

In The Flame and the Flower, Heather Simmons is a penniless orphan. Her father gambled away their fortune and now she lives in the country with a mean aunt who physically abuses her. Her aunt’s brother, William Court, offers to help her find a teaching job in town and Heather jumps at the opportunity leave her abusive relatives. But the promised school is actually a brothel and the man intends on raping Heather. As they are struggling, Heather grabs a knife. Though he is able to unhand her, her assailant falls on the weapon and dies.

She flees while wearing a silk dress and two men see her and cajole her onto a ship, thinking that she is a street sex worker. Heather doesn’t understand what they want from her, thinking instead that they’ve possibly arrested her for murder. The captain of the ship is Brandon Birmingham and he interrogates her, further suggesting that she is under arrest. Brandon has been told that she has come willingly onto the ship, so he initially believes her resistance is coyness. But the scene is unequivocally a rape scene, with Heather saying “No!..Leave me alone! Let me be!” She has “panic” and “pain,” and while Brandon might be “gentle” afterwards, this is not a scene where Heather is remotely convinced by seduction.

Brandon thinks the scene is not a rape, assuming Heather’s resistance was playacting, thinking of “her calm, reserved acceptance of the situation when she first entered the cabin, her light and playful resistance, and then the sporadic, inexperienced assistance she had given him in bed and now this endless weeping and the blood on the sheet.” But this is dramatic irony—the reader knows that Heather misunderstood why she was brought onto the ship, knows why she was so weak that her resistance was so light and are in Heather’s head when she thinks about how “every [resisting] move she made only abetted his intent” to herself.

Brandon’s lack of acknowledgment of the rape at this moment does not mean that either Woodiwiss, reader or Heather thinks the event was not a rape. The next morning Brandon even tells her “I can’t even imagine why you peddled your virginity as you did, taking the chance that you might have been raped and lost it for nothing.” Brandon assessment of the situation is the first of many miscommunications between the pair, based on assumptions about each other’s identities. The gap between his knowledge and reality is emphasized, so his belief should not be read as an objective conclusion or endorsed by the text.

Brandon assaults her again and intends for it be a seduction, attempting to give her pleasure, but Heather is clearly not convinced. She thinks of the event in terms of violence, afterwards dreaming of being able to cleanse the experience from her body: “She longed for a steaming tub bath so that she could soak in it and remove from her body every trace and remembrance of him, of the fine mist of sweat that had moistened his body and then hers, the feel of his hands upon her, the memory of his smothering kisses. Everything. Every tiniest bit of evidence that she had been his.”

When Brandon leaves Heather alone on his ship, she manages to escape by holding one of his men at gunpoint and she returns to her wretched aunt. Despite being sent back to terrible circumstances, Heather does not romanticize the life offered by Brandon as his mistress—she thinks of him purely in violent terms, again emphasizing the that book has no qualms about naming the act as violent. When she dreams of Brandon, these are not sexual dreams where she is afraid of sexuality awakened by him (à la Nosferatu or another vampire tale, where a monster is a metaphor for sexuality) because her “Dreams of William Court were just as frightening.” Brandon is strictly a sexual predator in her mind, not a romantic notion.

When Heather’s aunt discovers she is pregnant from Brandon’s assault, Heather says of the rape: “His men found me and took me to him and he forced himself upon me. God’s truth.” Heather is unequivocal in her characterization of the event, though she manages to avoid telling her aunt about her brother’s death. Heather’s conniving aunt sees an opportunity to get some blackmail money from Brandon, a rich merchant, so she uses her husband’s connections to threaten prosecution, not of the rape, but of piracy and crimes related to his shipping business. Unless Brandon marries Heather, he will go to prison. So they marry.

Much of the rest of their relationship, outside driving external conflict, is Brandon and Heather talk about consent at length in The Flame and the Flower and Brandon earning Heather’s consent is actually a central concern of the book. I think other bodice rippers follow this pattern more successfully, but it is the literal plot of this one.  

In a scene where Brandon and Heather are talking about their new marriage and he is grabbing at her, he makes a comment about her seemingly having less resistance post-marriage: “You are more willing now, my love, than you were before. Does marriage make it so different?” But Heather responds: “What do I have to say in the matter? You will rape me as you did before, whether I struggle or not.” Heather specifically is acting with less physical resistance to Brandon not because of the marriage, but because she knows he can and will overpower her if he chooses, but she makes it clear that her consent has not been obtained simply because of their marriage. 

Brandon does reference his “husband’s rights” in this conversation, but what he does not do is argue that now, because of the marriage, it could literally not be criminal rape. Here, Heather not only names the first assault as rape, but uses that word to describe potential sex-without-consent post-marriage. Even Brandon, when he finally decides to assert his “marital rights” (hundreds of pages and many negotiations later) and he fears Heather won’t consent, he thinks to himself “Damn, it’s come to rape.” Whether Woodiwiss is historically accurate in Brandon’s understanding of the criminality of rape or not, here both a hero and heroine in a book in 1972 (pre-removal of any marital rape exemptions in the United States) articulate that if a man had sex with his wife without her consent, it would be rape. 

This scene reveals neither a depicted turn-of-the-18th-century society, nor a United States in the 1970s, that cannot conceptualize that forced sex could happen in a marriage. It is just two historical moments where the forced sex within a marriage is not the crime of rape. Criminalization of the rape is the non-factor for Heather’s thinking, not her lack of consent. Instead, Brandon is threatened with imprisonment if he does not marry Heather, but not for rape, even though his initial assault of her would meet the standard for common-law rape, aided evidence-wise by her status as a virgin prior the encounter. Woodiwiss writes in the plot a way that Brandon could be incarcerated, even if not for the crime of rape, because of Heather’s family connection to the magistrate. 

The lack of punishment for the rape is not really lamented in part because the available punishment would hurt Heather more. Heather and her family don’t want Brandon to go to prison as retribution for the initial rape and the threat of the piracy charges is based on falsities and manipulation of their social connections. Her family wants her out of their hair and Heather agrees to the marriage so her child will be legitimate, with Brandon’s financial and legal protection. Within the plot, given the option for something that might look like retributive justice, the choice is offered by Heather’s family, and consented to by Heather, to instead aim at something more like restoration. 

Heather, who does not relish the idea of being married to her rapist, notes that her child would be in a better position, legally, if they manage to get Brandon to marry her and she does want that. If Brandon were actually prosecuted for her rape or the false charges, Heather’s problems would not be solved, but continued—she would still be an unwed, teenage mother, with an illegitimate child and unsympathetic family. And Brandon would lose his financial ability to support her, which he had already offered before her pregnancy, offering a position as his mistress. Though reluctant to marry Heather, he does immediately agree to provide for her and the unborn child again when he learns the news of her pregnancy. 

It seems important in this discussion about how marital rape exemptions might have affected romance novel readers’ relationship with sexual assault on the page to point out that the novel that is so often mentioned alongside this theory, there is an option for imprisonment for the assailant and the heroine chooses a non-carceral option.

Heather’s ability to control what happens to Brandon in this moment, and the lack interest in Brandon actually going to prison, particularly for the sex crimes, is in dialogue with another change in the legal system being made in the second half of the twentieth century. This period is when some prosecutors’ offices adopted policies for “no-drop prosecution.”⁶ These policies would commit their offices to prosecuting gendered violence whenever they have sufficient evidence, independent of the victims’ wishes. These policies were adopted because of a perception by anti-violence that gender violence was under prosecuted simply because of a lack of effort by prosecutors and police officers. Feminist lobbyists in the 1970s and 1980s often encouraged this practice.⁷ 

However, these policies can lead to a bevy of well-documented negative consequences for victims’, ranging from revictimization during the process of going through the court system to economic consequences if the victim is financially dependent on their abuser and their abuser loses income, to charges ranging from civil contempt to perjury being brought against the victim themselves.⁸ This is one example in the legal system where heroines in 18th and 19th century settings like Clarissa from Clarissa (discussed in Part II) and Heather had more power to determine the means of justice available to them, even if the means that they choose might seem unsatisfactory to some readers. 

Heather seeks justice outside of a mandated prosecution. This depiction of justice may be suspect to some readers, I think it is fair to consider aspects of the justice system that could be seen as worth escaping, while in the confines of a fictional world. For Brandon, that's incarceration. For Heather, it’s a prosecution that would not undo any harm and in all likelihood would exacerbate it. 

Within the actual text of the book, this is not a case of rape being condoned as non-harm by the legal system or the heroine, it is the case the legal system failing to provide a satisfactory solution to any of the harms suffered by Heather. Instead, in order to get her happily-ever-after, something extrajudicial and interpersonal must happen. Brandon must earn back his marital rights through negotiations and delivering on promises not to hurt Heather again. Brandon’s intention with Heather transforms across the book and their sexual relationship is only reconsummated after he is sure that she wants to have sex with him.

He does threaten rape during this denouement, having reached his breaking point of celibacy while trying to court his wife. But in an inversion of the initial encounter, the reader again has access to Heather’s mind, except this time we know that sex would not be rape, while Brandon is unsure. The reader knows she has fallen in love with him and wants to have sex with him—his interpretation of her reticence is once again another miscommunication between the couple.

Whether this plot makes for, or could ever make for, a satisfactory ending comes down to personal preference, but it is inaccurate to say it is a book is not concerned with consent. The structure of the romance is about Brandon earning and obtaining Heather’s consent and times when they have sex or might have sex without consent are regularly and consistently named as rape, even when they are married and it would not legally qualify in the 1800s or 1972.

The next part of this project will look at later examples of transforming consent politics in book after The Flame and The Flower, within the context of the changes to marital rape laws that happen in the last quarter of the 20th century.

1. Primarily because this project is a response to these think pieces.

2. Random media off the top of my head that came out before or in 1972 with explicitly horny, sympathetic heroines: What’s Up Doc? (1972), Ball of Fire (1941), North by Northwest (1959). Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is both a sex worker and horny! M*A*S*H premiered in 1972 and Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan is the butt of jokes because the object of her horniness is lipless and spineless Major Frank Burns, but she is not a “bad woman” because she is horny. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) has a central metaphor about a blooming sexuality and an all-time, beloved heroine. Tapestry by divorced, single mother Carole King came out in 1971!

These are truly random examples that I just thought of, but my major problem with these sweeping statements about what sexuality from women “used” to be accepted assumes a homogenous morality across an entire country during an entire time period, buying into the nostalgia that Christian fascism uses as nostalgia bait.

Even books where a woman is punished for her sexuality, literature is often the venue for condemning a world that rejects these women. Emma Bovary dies by suicide, but the bourgeoise are condemned. Tess Durbeyfield is executed, but the bourgeoise are condemned. Countess Ellen Olenska is ostracized by New York society, but the bourgeoise are condemned. There’s a theme here.

Of course there were communities that shamed women for having sex—these also existed when I was a teenager (I grew up in one!) and they certainly exist now. But the idea that it is something “used to happen” and we’ve overcome it is ahistorical, foolish and patronizing to older women.

3. Coming back to this in a future part of the project.

4. See: this whole project why I think this is a flattening claim about the link between law and literature.

5. Hint for my next big project: legal history of pornography and romance novels for romance readers.

6. This is a law review note from 1994 that considers the negative consequences of no-drop policies, but ultimately endorses them still. Angela Corsilles, No-Drop Policies in the Prosecution of Domestic Violence Cases: Guarantee to Action or Dangerous Solution, 63 FORDHAM L. REV. 853 (1994). https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=3143&context=flr,

7. Nichols, A. J. (2014). No-Drop Prosecution in Domestic Violence Cases: Survivor-Defined and Social Change Approaches to Victim Advocacy. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 29(11), 2114-2142. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260513516385 (Original work published 2014)

8. Negar Katirai, Retraumatized in Court, 62 Ariz. L. Rev. 81 (2020)