Why did the BBC choose to make rape look raunchy?
ONE question left millions of viewers aghast and horrified, as the credits rolled on BBC1’s Sunday night costume drama, Poldark – was that rape?
The answer is Yes: what else could it be called?
The small screen’s most popular romantic hero in years, Captain Ross Poldark (Aidan Turner), has squandered the adoration of countless fans as he committed the one crime we never thought him capable of doing.
Murder, yes – we’ve seen that in his eyes. Violent assaults, smuggling, perjury are commonplace to him. Poldark is a man of uncontrolled passions, and that is much of his attraction.
But rape... to most people it is the most repellent and unforgivable of all crimes, and today more than ever the emphasis is on consent before sexual intercourse.
Nobody who watched the brutal encounter in Elizabeth Poldark’s bedroom could have been under the illusion that she consented to sex with her dead husband’s cousin. She goaded him, she provoked him, but she never gave the smallest sign of permission.
More pertinently, the scene was shown in such unflinching and provocative detail that many viewers will be left wondering whether the BBC deliberately chose to ‘sex up’ the action. Incensed by the news that widow Elizabeth (Heida Reid) was to marry George Warleggan, his mortal enemy, Ross had galloped by moonlight to her mansion. He hammered on the oak doors and bellowed her name – all typical behaviour for our hot-headed Captain.
Even as he kicked the door down and took the stairs three at a time, no viewer could have foreseen what followed... unless, of course, they had read the saga by Winston Graham that inspired the series.
Hints weeks ago from inside the production suggested that the scene, taken from 1953’s fourth Poldark book Warleggan, had been watered down. Heida Reid said she had demanded changes, to ensure Ross seduced her character without compelling her into sex.
Aidan Turner was emphatic: ‘It is consensual,’ he said.
In fact, the scene broadcast last night did differ from the book. It was more graphic and violent than anything the author depicted, and went on much longer, in more explicit sexual detail.
Bosses at the BBC will find it difficult to refute the charge that they deliberately infused a violent sexual attack with erotic overtones, making rape look raunchy.
The scene begins with a furious row: Ross barges into Elizabeth’s bedroom and accuses her of planning to marry for money. The implication is that she is prepared to prostitute herself. Elizabeth angrily retorts that she is marrying to protect her young son, and then stares mockingly into his face. ‘Can you offer me anything else?’ she taunts.
Seizing her head, Ross forces her to kiss him. She struggles for several seconds before managing to push him away. He kisses her again, gripping her arms behind her back, to demonstrate that she cannot stop him. ‘Ross!’ she exclaims. ‘Hateful! Horrible! I detest you! You would not dare!’
‘Oh I would, Elizabeth,’ he snarls, ‘and so would you.’ In the book, the scene continues, ‘He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed.’ And there the chapter ends.
On screen, the action continues for another 20 seconds, as Ross pushes her on to the four-poster bed and pins her down. Elizabeth’s hands claw at his sides as he pulls up her dress. Then her body language begins to change: she clutches at his head and responds to his kisses, before starting to moan as his lips touch her neck.
In the last moments of the scene, her eyes are closed, her head flung back, her neck arched in ecstasy.
The only interpretation that allows the Captain to retain any claim to decency is that Elizabeth desired to be ravished, and that he understood her wishes even though her words were telling him the opposite.
‘She wanted it really’: that would be the weakest defence possible in court. Hardly any better would be his plea that she had been flirting with him for months. You don’t have to be a feminist firebrand to feel that a little teasing over the dinner table is not an automatic invitation to aggressive sex.
However different morals were 220 years ago, never in history has it been acceptable for a man to kick his way into the bedroom of a female friend who trusts him, and physically impel her into sex. The BBC has taken a scene from a book that had at least a wisp of ambiguity, and turned it beyond any shadow of doubt into shameless rape.
In a curious coda, when Ross returned to his wife Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) the next morning she lashed out and knocked him flat in the farmyard dirt. In the eyes of many disillusioned viewers, that’s exactly where he belongs.