Rake (character)

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The Tavern Scene from A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth.
The Tavern Scene from A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth.

A rake is defined as a man habituated to immoral conduct. Rakes are frequently stock characters in novels. Often a rake is a man who wastes his (usually inherited) fortune on wine, women and song, incurring lavish debts in the process. The rake is also frequently a cad: a man who seduces a young woman and impregnates her before leaving, often to her social or financial ruin. To call the character a rake calls attention to his promiscuity and wild spending of money; to call the character a cad implies a callous seducer who coldly breaks his victim's heart. These men are also known as heels. A bounder is an 'ill-bred, unscrupulous man', the social inferior of the cad.[1][2][3][4] During the English Restoration period (1660–1688), the word was used in a glamorous sense: the Restoration rake is a carefree, witty, sexually irresistible aristocrat typified by Charles II's courtiers, the Earl of Rochester and the Earl of Dorset, who combined riotous living with intellectual pursuits and patronage of the arts. The Restoration rake is celebrated in the Restoration comedy of the 1660s and 1670s.[5] After the reign of Charles II, and especially after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the cultural perception of the rake took a dive into squalor. The rake became the butt of moralistic tales in which his typical fate was debtor's prison, venereal disease, or, in the case of William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress, insanity in Bedlam.[6]

The rake is often portrayed as a heavy drinker or gambler. An earlier form of the word was rake-hell, a form reshaped by folk etymology to mean someone who stokes the fires of Hell, making them hotter. The actual etymology of the word is from the Old Norse reikall, meaning "vagrant" or "wanderer"; this was borrowed into Middle English as rakel (possibly via Dutch rekel, meaning "scoundrel").

Well known fictional rakes and cads include:

Historical figures who have informed the stock character include:

The stock character of the rake can be contrasted with some others. The town drunk is frequently intoxicated, and impoverished by heavy drinking, but here the focus is on the character's alcoholic state rather than on sexual excess; the town drunk is typically older than the rake.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ See generally, Jean Gagen, "Congreve's Mirabell and the Ideal of the Gentleman", in PMLA, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Sep., 1964), pp. 422-427.
  2. ^ David Haldane Lawrence (2007) "Sowing Wild Oats: The Fallen Man in Late-Victorian Society Melodrama", Literature Compass vol. 4 no. 3, pp. 888–898 (2007)
  3. ^ Cad and bounder distinguished
  4. ^ Bounder: American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd edition.
  5. ^ Harold Weber, The restoration rake-hero : transformations in sexual understanding in seventeenth-century England (Univ. Wisc., 1986; ISBN 029910690X).
  6. ^ John Harold Wilson, A Rake and His Times (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Young, 1954).