“Thou maiest inforce my body but not mee”: Racializing Consent in John Marston’s The Wonder of Women

n Grandison, a Slave, v. The State (1841), Judge Nathan Green reversed the decision of the Tennessee circuit court ofWarren County for the assault, battery, and rape of Mary Douglass. While the indictment expressed that the accused did “feloniously ravish and carnally know” the said Douglass, it had omitted the victim’s race. According to Green, “[s]uch an act committed upon a black woman would not be punished with death. It follows, therefore, most clearly, that this fact”—the victim’s White race—“gives to the offense its enormity.” As Green’s cold assessment makes plain, rape statutes were designed with White female victimhood in mind. In the antebellum American South, it was not just the severity of rape that wasmitigated by the race of the survivor but the crime itself that could be effaced if the victim had not been White. The Mississippi Supreme Court in 1859 reversed another conviction in the lower-court ruling ofGeorge v. State, a case concerning the rape of a nine-year-old Black girl. George’s attorney argued that “the regulations of law, as to the white race, on the subject of sexual intercourse,