Opium, Incapacitation, and Rape in Eighteenth‐Century Culture and Fiction

Abstract This article examines the expanded availability of opium through colonial trade and analyzes eighteenth‐century rape trials with unconscious victims. Through this lens, the study identifies the rising frequency of plots featuring incapacitated victims and asserts that women's bodily autonomy declined in eighteenth‐century fiction. With the most discussed drug‐facilitated rape in English literature—Richardson's Clarissa—as a primary influence, the article contends that by examining the history of drugged rapes, along with the historically specific forms of silence to which they gave rise, we can better understand our current culture's violent and troubling inheritance.