Rape is the paradigmatic individual trauma. It is a total bodily violation that, unlike murder, is typically survived, leaving the victim with long-term psychological disruption. But, unlike more publicly accessible events like an assault with its visible wounds, rape fades into the realm of the private due both to the inarticulable nature of the wounds it leaves and the evidentiary and definitional challenges to proving it happened at all. One thread of cultural trauma theory shows how individual trauma may never become cultural trauma unless it is discursively acknowledged as such. While even our twenty-first-century society struggles to fully recognize rape trauma, eighteenth-century society was particularly unlikely to acknowledge it unless the “prosecutrix” fit a particular formal common-law definition of a truth-telling victim. If we search for the eighteenth-century rape victim in the common law memory, we find her primarily in the rules of evidence that gave her formal existence. This chapter will consider how those rules themselves, challenged by new literary conceptions of character, gradually became a form of chronic trauma in the common law imagination.

According to the common law rule, as understood in the eighteenth century, an alleged victim's “positive Oath of a Rape, without concurring circumstances, is seldom credited.” As Blackstone somewhat more decorously put it, “the party ravished may give evidence upon oath … but the credibility of her testimony, and how far forth she is to be believed, must be left to the jury upon the circumstances of fact that concur in that testimony.” Specifically:

In other words, a victim's account of a rape was insufficient in and of itself to meet the Crown's evidentiary burden of proof.