Believe Beatrice

 Stripped of its trappings of period melodrama, Percy Bysshe Shelley's verse drama The Cenci is a modern story. In many ways—specifically—it's a #MeToo story. It's the story of a woman who is sexually victimized by a powerful man (her own father, in this case), and who is unable to obtain justice through the existing mechanisms of the state because no one will believe her accusations. 

It's essentially the same story that played out during the Pete Hegseth nomination to run the Defense Department. Hegseth faced accusations of rape and various kinds of abusive behavior toward women. He retreated behind the claim that the most prominent allegation against him was anonymous—conveniently leaving out the fact that the anonymity was due to a non-disclosure agreement that he insisted she sign. 

When this was pointed out to Hegseth's team, they said they would waive the NDA. But—speaking out of the other side of their mouth at the same time—they also made it clear they might pursue a retaliatory and harassing defamation suit against the woman if she did so. Like the men who persecuted Beatrice Cenci, in short, they would use threats to wring from her whatever answer they preferred. 

Ultimately, she did not testify at his confirmation hearing—probably for the same reasons that Beatrice Cenci declines to denounce her father in the courts. Namely: no one would believe her; or they would, but would back him anyway. And the man she accused has so much power and such an obvious track record of ruthless vindictiveness that no rational person would put themselves in that danger. 

As Beatrice Cenci reasons in Shelley's play—when asked her reasons why she does not take her father's case directly to the powers that be: 

Think of the offender's gold, his dreaded hate,

      And the strange horror of the accuser's tale,

      Baffling belief, and overpowering speech;

Hegseth's version of events, by the way, is that the encounter occurred—but that it was entirely consensual. This led some of the Democrats at the confirmation hearing to point out: so, even by your own admission you—at the very least—betrayed your marriage vows. What does that say—they wanted to know—about how you would keep faith in office with the American people? 

Hegseth responded—in essence—that he admits that he's an imperfect person, which is why it's fortunate that he "is redeemed through my lord and savior Jesus Christ." (A degree of antinomianism worthy of the psychopathic protagonist of James Hogg's great satire on Calvinism, the Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.)

This line, too, is quite Cencian. As Shelley observes of his characters in the preface to the drama: some readers may find it hard to accept that they speak so freely of God and religion while they perform such awful deeds. 

As the character Lucretia says of Mr. Cenci—the sexual predator—in the play: 

'T is true he spoke

      Of death and judgment with strange confidence

      For one so wicked; as a man believing                           

      In God, yet recking not of good or ill.

That could well serve as a summing up of Hegseth's behavior at the confirmation hearing as well. He spoke with strange confidence, for one so wicked, of his certainty of redemption! It would seem that, however much he prates of God, he in fact knows nothing of good or evil.