Despite Richardson's occasional references to the broader project of law-making, his primary legal contribution to rape discourse in Clarissa was to show the importance of subjectivity in generating truths about the legally significant “facts.” This focus on the interior and the specific contrasts with the historical, nationalistic trauma discourse characterizing, for example, the relationship between adultery literature and jurisprudence described in Part I. Yet rape discourse carries nationalistic implications as well. At the most basic level, it makes explicitly English judgments about sexual morality. For example, Blackstone describes the common law definition of rape as distinguishing England from the rest of Europe because, while civil law does not recognize the rape of a prostitute as a crime,

English rape law thereby constructs prostitution as a potentially transitory state of being, in contrast to the discursively static harlots of the Continent.

More dramatically, eighteenth-century English writers used the motif of sexual violation to express cultural trauma over national identity and political stability in the face of the upheavals in France. British royalist Edmund Burke captured the horrors of the overthrow of French monarchy with reference to the sexualized physical violation of Marie Antoinette:

This chapter considers how nineteenth-century literary adjudications of rape complicated the ongoing jurisprudential project of defining English law as distinct from the civil law generally and the traumatic French legal order specifically.