NONE OF THE FORMS of the novel adapted from European proto-
types has influenced American fiction more profoundly than the
sentimental tale of seduction. First of all, the seduction story
proper has never for long ceased to be written or read in the
United States; dismissed as old-fashioned, exhausted, intolerable,
it reappears not only as the best-seller but even as the advanced,
the New Novel. In the second place, the heroine of the seduction
struggle, the Protestant Virgin and redeemer first called Clarissa,
has continued to impose herself on American life and fiction alike,
outliving even the abandonment of the fable in which she con-
fronted the Seducer. Third, and most important of all, the long
uncontested reign in America of sentimental archetypes and
clichés has made it almost impossible for our novelists to portray
adult sexual passion or a fully passionate woman.

On the most popular level, of course, the combat of the pure
woman and the seducer-rapist has never been abandoned, though
it seems for a while to have been exiled to the drama and from
there to have passed to the moving pictures. The earliest cinema
assimilated the fallen archetypes of seduction along with many
others; and in one sub-form of the lowbrow Western, the tradi-
tional sex combat is played out to the present moment, the white-
hatted hero intervening just before the black-hatted villain man-
ages to violate the rancher's blond daughter. Even the old class
distinctions are dimly maintained, the seducer being given often
the status of dude, gambler, or banker, and wearing, until quite

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