An Alphabet of Feminism #18: R is for Rake
R
RAKE
Men, some to Business, some to pleasure take;
But ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake.Alexander Pope, Epistle II: To a Lady, Of The Characters of Women (1743)
Why Do The Good Girls…
It is one of the principal views of this publication: to occasionally venture outside the female sphere and see what the chaps are doing. DASTARDLY DEEDS would seem to be the answer in many cases focused around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the word rake first came into being.
A spot of rakish gardening: the 'Temple and Chamber of Venus', in the grounds of West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire. Photo par Hodge.
I am frequently asked, with a wry smile, ‘So, was your dissertation on garden implements?’, to which I invariably respond, with a smug one, ‘Well, yes.’ You see, rake as ‘a dissolute man of fashion’ derives first from rake as ‘an implement consisting of a pole with a crossbar toothed like a comb at the end’ for ‘drawing together hay etc. or smoothing loose soil or gravel’… you know, a ‘rake’. In this form, the word is (at least) Old English (raca) from the proto-Germanic rak- (‘to gather or heap up’), and rake in its many applications to people springs first and foremost from the compound term rakehell (c.1560). This, in turn, comes from the (apparently common) phrase ‘to rake out hell’ (first cited around 1542), meaning ‘to search’ or, perhaps more appropriately, ‘comb’ out the infernal regions. A rakehell, then (= ‘an immoral person’ or ‘a scoundrel’) is someone than whom there is no-one worse, even should you ‘comb through Hell’. Tut tut.
Oh, what an odious Creature is a Rake!
In this early incarnation, the rakehell is a broadly classless figure who basically spends most of his time making a nuisance of himself. By 1687, he had lost his suffix, and, in the form rake, became defined as ‘an aristocratic man of dissolute and promiscuous habits’. Historically, these ‘habits’ boil down to drinking, swearing, whoring, and causing public disturbances (‘rioting’). Ever a sensualist (and sworn enemy to marriage), his iniquities always involve sexual depravity, often grotesquely extreme: Shadwell’s Don Juan feels ‘forced to commit a rape to pass the time’. Dr Johnson was less than impressed with such goings-on, and he defined a rake in his 1755 Dictionary as ‘A loose, disorderly, vitious, wild, gay, thoughtless fellow; a man addicted to pleasure’. Nevertheless, the true rake is protected from proto-ASBO consequences by his pedigree, which is the only difference between him and a ‘common’ criminal / rakehell.
It is in this ‘hellish’ yet aristocratic form that the rake first becomes defined as that archetype hanging out in the gangs….sorry, ‘clubs’ that the ever-hysterical Victorians dubbed ‘Hellfire Clubs‘. These were either groups of aristocrats dressing up as monks and nuns to commit acts of bestial iniquity, or sedate philosophical and political discussion groups, depending on the fruitiness of the historian. The overlap is more overlapp-y than you might think, and it relates to rake‘s satellite term, and secondary meaning, ‘libertine’. As libértin, this word is all over c18th French literature, which has no real cognate for rake as a distinct term, and it is in this form that rake gives us the Libertines (Pete Doherty) and The Libertine (Swoony Depp). Relating, as you might think, to our word liberty via Latin’s liberta, libertine can mean anything from ‘free translation’ and ‘free thinking’ (the revolutionary ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ among other things) to the sexual excess and decadence (‘freedom’, or indeed ‘free love‘) associated with John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and perhaps even Doherty himself (depending on whether or not you think celebrity is the twenty-first century’s aristocracy).
Never trust a man in a pastel pink two-piece. Robert Lovelace prepares to abduct Clarissa Harlowe, by Francis Hayman.
Set Me Free.
Given this libertine background, it is unsurprising that, in its second wave as ‘The Order of the Monks of Medmenham’, the rakish ‘Hellfire Club’ was associated not only with Sir Francis Dashwood (defined by Wikipedia as ‘an English rake and politician’, and responsible for the horticulture displayed above, left), but also with notables like William Hogarth, the liberty-obsessed Benjamin Franklin and even Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (a close friend of Mary Astell, the ‘first feminist’).
Perhaps, then, this sexual excess could be connected with burgeoning ideas about general freedom, and here we must ask the obvious question: female rake, yes or no? The dictionary says ‘yes’, but cites as proof Pope’s line that ‘every woman is at heart a rake’, closer to an eighteenth-century “‘cor, she’s askin’ for it'” than acknowledged sexual equality. So, institutionally at least, the female rake always risks sliding into the Other Category, as the harlot, which must be at least partially because women were less likely to espouse rakishness as part of a broader public life. The closest we seem to get to an actual love’em’-and-leave’em she-rake is the upper-middle-class lesbian: Anne Lister‘s diaries record her pursuit of local girls, her habit of dressing in male garb, and her nickname ‘Gentleman Jack’. And of course a particularly saucy woman is always free to wear her hat at a ‘rakish‘ angle (where rakish = ‘dashing, jaunty or slightly disreputable’) as modelled by the celebrity adulteress Georgiana ‘Keira Knightley’ Cavendish , Duchess of Devonshire (who was getting it on with THE Earl Grey: libertea, geddit?!!).
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What Women Want.
Meanwhile, middle-class intellectuals were determined to shelter poor Woman from such degenerates. They had to: for even the most virtuous young ladies are dangerously susceptible to rakish charm! What is more, they always believe (poor souls) that their chaste beauty and noble virtue can save a rake from himself! (…Katy Perry, anyone?) Samuel Richardson in particular seems to have lived in perpetual horror of just such folly, endlessly repeating his fear of the ‘dangerous but too commonly received notion that a reformed rake makes the best husband‘ and crying ‘But MADAM!’ to those young ladies who wrote to him describing the seductive appeal of his own rake, Clarissa‘s Robert Lovelace. To this, Mary Wollstonecraft:
It seems a little absurd to expect women to be more reasonable than men in their LIKINGS, and still to deny them the uncontroled use of reason. When do men FALL IN LOVE with sense? When do they, with their superior powers and advantages, turn from the person to the mind? And how can they then expect women, who are only taught to observe behaviour, and acquire manners rather than morals, to despise what they have been all their lives labouring to attain?
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Well, quite. Excuse me, I have to rearrange my hat.
Further Rakish Adventures:
- Jane Austen’s Mr Willoughby (A Rake Determined To Marry Well).
- The Dastardly Mr Wickham (A Lazy Lower Class Rake)
- William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress
- The West Wycombe Caves and West Wycombe Park – A rakish sort of National Trust day out.
NEXT WEEK: S is for Ship
Having managed to avoid most of Alexander Pope’s writings, I think the only context in which I’ve seen “rake” applied to a woman is in wearing a hat at a rakish angle. I am left wondering two things:
(1) Has anyone, other that Alexander Pope, called women “rakes” in this way?
(2) Is it possible to wear anything other than a hat in a rakish way? I don’t think I’ve seen the word applied to any other item of apparel. Perhaps there is some kind of connection with “fascinator” for a very minimal hat.
1. They have, but off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you who… if i have time later in the week, I shall dig out my Big Book of Rakes and look it up. But, yes, they have.
2. I suspect the hat thing is largely because there are few other items of clothing you are actually capable of wearing at an angle. There was a vogue for loosely tied belts a while back, but I think that’s stretching it a bit. The fascinator would certainly seem linked, but then galleries around the world are bursting at the seams with portraits of women in ginormous hats, often rakishly posed (that portrait of the duchess of devonshire is par for the course). Have always been particularly fond of this one: http://www.backtoclassics.com/gallery/peterpaulrubens/the_straw_hat/
I suspect part of the point here too is that, as you will see from a quick google, ‘at a rakish angle’ is now so oft-used a phrase as to amount to a cliche.
I am really fascinated by the Gentleman Jack link, which led me on to the entry about the so-called Ladies of Llangollen.
I think there should be a post about them soon…
You write, Hodge: “So, institutionally at least, the female rake always risks sliding into the Other Category, as the harlot…”
With William Hogarth’s Rake’s and Harlot’s Progresses in mind, it’s tempting to consider a harlot as a female rake. But there are big differences between harlots and rakes. A harlot usually has sex in exchange for money. A rake indulges in sex for sexual pleasure or (more often, I suspect) for pleasure in conquest. There are surely several elements to this difference, but one must be an imbalance between the sexes in terms of power (not least economic power).
Yup. The ‘female rake’ is a harlot. Viz: She’s not a rake. She’s a whore.
I was intrigued to note that a lot of Wollstonecraft’s dislike of libertinage was predicated on her belief that there was a God, and an afterlife: “Supposing for a moment, that the soul is not immortal, and that man was only created for the present scene; I think we should have reason to complain that love, infantine fondness, ever grew insipid and palled upon the sense. Let us eat, drink, and love, for to-morrow we die, would be in fact the language of reason, the morality of life; and who but a fool would part with a reality for a fleeting shadow?” I think that once one has a society with true sexual equality — clearly still some way off — then libertinage can be fully reclaimed as part of a radical anarchist tradition, and one that can also be entirely compatible with the emancipation of women (it could be argued that a fair portion of de Sade’s _Philosophy in the Boudouir_ is so compatible).
Yeah. The political implications of libertinage are particularly interesting, and the rake really fell into disfavour during the c18th as a result of the oft-cited ‘moral middle classes’ (Richardson being the archetype). Rochester himself (arguably the ur-Rake) always seems to be using his debauchery as a political statement about nihilism (cf his poem ‘on nothing’ which is simultaneously metaphysical and, er, grossly physical, playing with a common term for a vagina) (he was also commonly thought to be an atheist), or about power– one argument for the origins of the rake is that it was a response to the civil war, and the perceived loss of aristocratic power: there was a sense that the Old World of upper-class impunity and the Divine Right of Kings had vanished and (depending on who you listen to!) either that therefore it should be nostalgically recreated or that it should be parodied and mocked, to deflate it and make everyone feel more comfortable about subscribing to it.
*tangent*
And I completely agree with your point about the emancipation of women / radical anarchist tradition, although it’s interesting (and dispiriting) how hard it is to imagine a world of true sexual equality.
I think that libertinage has rarely, in ever, benefited women. It may be that the rise of the women’s movement in the 1970s was partially fueled by a perception that the much-vaunted “permissiveness” had failed to improve the lives of women in general. (I add “in general” in case someone counters with “what about…?” but, off the top of my head, I can think of individual women who fared very badly as a result of “permissiveness”, but none who did spectacularly well.)
As a writer of fiction, I feel called-upon to imagine things. And I agree with Hodge, it is extremely hard to imagine a world of true sexual equality. Worlds I can imagine tend either to patriarchy or matriarchy.
Taking a wider view, it isn’t easy to imagine a world of true equality of any kind. Fortunately, as a writer of fiction, I don’t feel called upon to imagine such a world. Storylines arise from the tensions created by inequality.
I do not wish to claim that biology is the sole determinant of our behaviour. Nor do I wish to make any sweeping generalisations about “all men” or “all women”. But, those caveats aside, there is a link between sexual desire/behaviour and the replication of our genes. Biologically, women have a greater investment in their children than men do — if only because the number of children it’s possible to a woman to have is much smaller than the number a man might potentially sire. That being so, it seems to me that — biologically — the way of a rake or libertine makes more sense for a man than for a woman.
If my late mother could read this, she would probably be pleased to conclude that biology is on the side of female fidelity. She was a woman who set great store by respectability. I believe, though, that some research indicates that my mother would be wrong. The evidence seems to show that women are most likely to be unfaithful to their partners at the most fertile point in their cycles. The conclusion seems to be that a significant number of women are (unconsciously) looking for the best genes for their future children at the time when this matters most. But this urge towards infidelity is quite different from the rake’s more constant promiscuity.
What I’m attempting to say is that women (in general, but not all women) and men (in general, but not all men) are different from one another. The differences may often be subtle, but they are important.
All of this touches upon matters to which I’ve given a lot of thought recently. My current novel in progress is called “Jane and Eaquellety”. It is set in a future in which the eaquelles are an elite, rather than equals. A process called gynogenesis has been perfected whereby one woman can fertilise another woman’s egg. The Empress (so much for equality!) seeks to become the first woman in history to have more than a thousand children. (It is set in the sixteenth year of her reign, and it is unclear whether she has yet achieved this objective.) Gynogenesis will produce only female children, and all girls conceived through its agency are eaquelles by right of birth. The most usual route to eaquellety, apart from this, is to give birth to one of the Empress’ daughters. My narrator (Jane) is not (yet) an eaquelle… All of this draws heavily on equality and inequality; sexual fidelity and infidelity… issues which seem central to this rakish discussion.
I think it’s less to do with biology and more to do with sociohistorical structures. The rake’s plotline, as it were, usually involves the seduction (often with attendant social rack and ruin) of a lady – the toppling of her off her pedestal of unattainability (and often virginal purity). Clarissa would, I think, be a classic example.
Now, women who adopted aspects of the rakish lifestyle or persona, conducting affairs with women in a kind of butch/femme manner, would also be playing with the gender roles described above.
I think that women in a femme role (read: most women of the day) would have had difficulties adopting the “rake” persona to seduce men, because they were operating from a level which society cast as socially subordinate to men. So the virginity of the men they would have been seducing is neither assured nor prized in the way that the female “maidenhead” is. It therefore becomes a different sort of game – one which, in the eyes of society as a general whole, predisposes the “harlot” narrative on the woman rather than the rake role… so she becomes a “seductress” instead.
That’s my two penn’orth on it, anyway.
The question of whether it’s more to do with biology, or with sociohistorical structures, seems to be a restatement of the nature versus nurture debate. And, as always, the answer appears to be “it’s both”. Beyond that, I doubt whether biology and sociohistorical structures are as easily divorced as one might believe. Those structures, surely, arise from we (as humans) being the animals that we are, which is (I suppose) to say our biology.
I think that dichotomous thinking is probably always (at least a little bit) wrong. I’m attempting to avoid saying “a multi-faceted approach is right, and a dichotomous one is wrong” because that, in itself, looks very much like a piece of dichotomous thinking.
What I wrote about dichotomous thinking reminded me of the Rhythm Model advocated in “Feminist Counselling in Action” by Jocelyn Chaplin. (Various editions: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=pd_rhf_s_1?ie=UTF8&search-alias=stripbooks&keywords=Jocelyn%20Chaplin.) She contrasts this with the hierarchical Control Model, which she represents as pyramid with a pair of opposites — one firmly above, the other firmly below. The Rhythm Model, by contrast, shows a serpentine form slipping between the paired opposites. The serpentine form reminds me of this book’s subtitle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hathor-Rising-Secret-Power-Ancient/dp/0952423308/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1
Bother!!! Having posted that link to Alison Roberts’ book, I see that she’s changed the subtitle. It’s now: “The Secret Power of Ancient Egypt”. But, in my older copy, it’s “The Serpent Power of Ancient Egypt”… which is what I had in mind.
I am struck by the similarity (in both sound and meaning) between “rakehell” and the more modern “raise hell”/”hellraiser”. Is this a coincidence, or was the coining of “raise hell” prompted by a dim recollection of “rakehell”?
It may well have been – to ‘rake hell’ is originally to ‘stir hell up’ in search of someone worse than a rake. But it probably changed over time to mean simply ‘stir hell up’ (to make a nuisance of yourself).