Feminist tropes: corsetry and rape in Saul Dibb’s The Duchess

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate the deployment of feminist tropes – tropes that are used to indicate a character’s or text’s feminist credentials – in Saul Dibb’s 2008 film, The Duchess. I argue that this film is representative of a broader subgenre of postfeminist historical ‘chick flicks’, which, by privileging identifiably feminist characters, produces a version of feminism and feminist history that circulates in popular culture in particular ways. By taking as my focus the tropes of corsetry and marital rape, both of which are historical artefacts that are presumed to be resolved within a postfeminist cultural context, I explore the ways that The Duchess establishes its feminist sensibility in relation to historical modes of oppression, while simultaneously obscuring the ways that women’s bodies continue to be policed and constrained in contemporary societies.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on this article. In addition, the author is grateful to both the University of Western Australia and the University of Queensland for their sponsorship of the UWA-UQ Collaborative Workshop, from which this article is borne.

Notes

1. For example, depictions of corsets (and other forms of ‘constraining clothing’) occur in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), Mike Newell’s Mona Lisa Smile (2003) and, briefly, Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (2005); another fictionalized rape is depicted in Niki Caro’s (2005) North Country, while Rodrigo Garcia’s Albert Nobbs (2011) draws out and makes more explicit than its source texts Albert’s experience of gang rape.

2. See Endnote 1.