Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives

Violence and Violation

Sorcha Gunne, Zoe Brigley Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136615849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The essays in this volume discuss narrative strategies employed by international writers when dealing with rape and sexual violence, whether in fiction, poetry, memoir, or drama. In developing these new feminist readings of rape narratives, the contributors aim to incorporate arguments about trauma and resistance in order to establish new dimensions of healing. This book makes a vital contribution to the fields of literary studies and feminism, since while other volumes have focused on retroactive portrayals of rape in literature, to date none has focused entirely on the subversive work that is being done to retheorize sexual violence.

Split into four sections, the volume considers sexual violence from a number of different angles. 'Subverting the Story' considers how the characters of the victim and rapist might be subverted in narratives of sexual violence. In 'Metaphors for Resistance, ' the essays explore how writers approach the subject of rape obliquely using metaphors to represent their suffering and pain. The controversy of not speaking about sexual violence is the focus of 'The Protest of Silence, ' while 'The Question of the Visual' considers the problems of making sexual violence visible in the poetic image, in film and on stage. These four sections cover an impressive range of world writing which includes curriculum staples like Toni Morrison, Sarah Kane, Sandra Cisneros, Yvonne Vera, and Sharon Olds.

1 Introduction

Feminism without Borders: The Potentials and Pitfalls of Re-theorizing Rape

Zoë Brigley Thompson and Sorcha Gunne

I

Tonight, a first movement, a pulse,

As if the rain in bogland gathered head

To slip and flood: a bog-burst,

A gash breaking open the ferny bed.

Your back is a firm line of eastern coast

And arms and legs are thrown

Beyond your gradual hills. I caress

The heaving province where our past has grown.

I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder

That you would neither cajole nor ignore.

Conquest is a lie. I grow older

Conceding your half-independent shore

Within whose borders now my legacy

Culminates inexorably

II

And I am still imperially

Male, leaving you with the pain,

The rending process in the colony,

The battering ram, the boom burst from within.

The act that sprouted an obstinate fifth column

Whose stance is growing unilateral.

His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum

Mustering force. His parasitical

And ignorant little fists already

Beat at your borders and I know they’re cocked

At me across the water. No treaty

I foresee will salve completely your tracked

And stretchmarked body, the big pain

That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again. (Heaney 1998: 127)

We begin this introduction by citing ‘Act of Union’ by the Northern Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. The controversy and difficulty of representing rape is condensed in this poem where Heaney speaks from the point of view of imperial England which sexually and politically subjugates its colony, Ireland—the province of Northern Ireland is subsequently born from this union—with an act of rape. Heaney’s pun on the word ‘union’ equates the domination of imperialism with the gendered violence and violation of rape (cf. Longley 1986; Coughlan 1992; Moloney 2007; Brearton 2009). In her reading of the poem, Patricia Coughlan contends that it is ambiguous whether this is indeed a rape or a seduction, claiming that this ambivalence is demonstrated because the speaker ‘regrets the pain of his partner’s imminent childbirth’ (Coughlan 1992: 106). This note of ambiguity is in our view overpowered by the violence embedded in the structure and language of the poem. The two halves of the poem present bastardized versions of the English sonnet, yet the lack of iambic pentameter and regular rhyme indicate a loss in the form. Initially, Heaney does frame the poem as a seduction, but only to immediately undermine this with the specific use of words like ‘gash’, ‘breaking’, ‘thrown’ and ‘heaving’, which foreshadow the violence to come. At the end of part ‘I’, the discordant chime of ‘legacy’ and ‘inexorably’ continues into part ‘II’ with ‘imperially’ and ‘colony’. The rhymes in the second half of the poem highlight the mounting forces of opposition to English imperialism (wardrum/fifth column) and in the final couplet, the finality of ‘pain’ and ‘again’ suggests that the body of the woman/country continues to be violated without any hope of escape or healing.

Heaney unproblematically equates the violated land to the violated woman, drawing out this metonymic comparison as the eastern coast of Ireland is the woman’s back and the landscape her body. The speaker in the poem is ‘the tall kingdom’ over her shoulder—the rapist leaving his ‘legacy’. Heaney uses the metaphor of rape as a means to understand imperialism without considering the violence and violation at the heart of the act or the implications that this has for woman’s subjectivity. His use of the eponymous symbolism that equates the violation of women’s bodies with the rape of land and culture has been challenged by feminists for perpetuating the view of women’s bodies as a resource, property or guarded secret belonging to men. There is, however, a possible source of partial redemption to Heaney’s binaristic conceptualization of gender and unequivocal equation of a conquered land with a raped woman’s body, as evidenced by the note of ambiguity mentioned by Coughlan. By hinting at seduction only to consequently emphasize violence and violation, Heaney subtly critiques the rape culture that defends itself by characterizing rape as ‘seduction’. Thus, beyond the symbolism of woman and land, the act of representing the rape might be challenged.

Despite this, graphic representation of sexual violence constitutes what some feminists see as a second violation, and Heaney’s dehumanization of the woman as a piece of ‘opened ground’ verges on the exploitative.¹ Sexual violence in literature presents feminism with a dilemma that goes to the core of its aims and objectives. As the critic Jyotika Virdi contends:

As feminists we are caught between a rock and a hard place: the erasure of rape from the narrative bears the marks of a patriarchal discourse of honour and chastity; yet showing rape, some argue, eroticizes it for the male gaze and purveys the victim myth. How do we refuse to erase the palpability of rape and negotiate the splintering of the private/public trauma associated with it? (Virdi 2006: 266)

The dilemma that Virdi contemplates raises the question of whether rape narratives should be represented, theorized or discussed at all. As Tanya Horeck asks in Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film, ‘What are the ethics of reading and watching representations of rape? Are we bearing witness to a terrible crime or are we participating in a shameful voyeuristic activity?’ (Horeck 2004: vi). Irene Gedalof warns too that ‘[f]oregrounding women, making them “visible, useful and knowable”, can be a way of constraining them within power relations that continue to be informed by gender hierarchies’ (1999: 183). For second-wave feminism the primary objective was to put rape on the agenda in an effort to prevent it from occurring. Now what is at stake is not just whether we speak about rape or not, but how we speak about rape and to what end.

This volume investigates literary rape narratives that refuse voyeurism and exploitation. In re-theorizing rape, Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives aims to incorporate arguments about trauma and resistance in order to establish new spaces for the subjectivity of the women who either have been raped or have been threatened with rape. Although the chapters in this volume emerge from different theoretical, cultural and national standpoints, they are bound together in terms of their commitment to developing feminist theorizing of rape. We foreground women’s stories by female—and in one case male—authors to create a more equal dialogue (which is currently lacking) and to create a space for the integrity of women’s responses to rape. As the literary critic Rosemary Jolly argues, ‘We need to develop ways of speaking about violence in literature which go beyond the safe, exclusive condemnation of certain representations of violence’ (1996: xiii). These radical readings of rape narratives confront the uncomfortable and shocking nature of sexual violence in ways that are themselves shocking and uncomfortable and break the mould of the victim/perpetrator binary that dominates patriarchal discourse and much of the subsequent feminist debates.

In seeking to break the victim/perpetrator binary, the collection builds on feminist critiques of the eighties and nineties, developing the trajectory of volumes such as Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver’s Rape and Representation (1991) or Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1993). While feminist theorists like Higgins and Silver or Brownmiller have quite rightly focused on challenging Western representations of gender and sexual violence, this volume foregrounds narratives about rape that challenge assumptions. In the twenty-first century, the most urgent task for feminism is to build on the work of late twentieth-century feminism(s) by recognizing the subversive work being done by modern and contemporary writers on the subject of sexual violence. These reconfigurations of rape narratives are important as feminism(s) attempts to move beyond the victim/perpetrator binary; in the words of Higgins and Silver, ‘rape and rapability are central to the very construction of gender identity and […] our subjectivity and sense of ourselves as sexual beings are inextricably enmeshed in representations’ (Higgins and Silver 1991: 3). In other words, as Horeck explains, representing rape plays an important role ‘as a scenario through which questions are posed about masculine and feminine identity, sexuality and sexual difference, and the origins of culture’ (Horeck 2004: 9).

In posing such questions about gender identity, sexual difference and culture, the chapters tend to focus on literary texts, although some do discuss art, theatre and screen representations. In our view, it is particularly important to focus on literature, because the use of language in the courtroom, the media and the literary text has masked the pervasiveness of sexual violence. Over 15 years ago, Higgins and Silver were calling for an ‘unravelling’ of ‘cultural texts that have obsessively made rape […] “unreadable”’ (1991: 3). This blanking of rape as a subject for political debate and reform is enabled by practices of language, an idea which recalls Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse’s claim in The Violence of Representation that writing is not only ‘about violence’ but also can be ‘a form of violence in its own right’ (1989: 2). There is still then a need to ‘recuperate what has too often been left out; the physical violation and the women who find ways to speak it’ (although it is important to note that sometimes silence can be just as communicative as voluble speech) (Higgins and Silver 1991: 3).

How to express physical violation through speaking or silence is the focus of the chapters in this volume, as they discuss the subversive and elliptical narrative strategies by writers (mainly women) when dealing with rape and sexual violence. These narratives might appear in fiction, poetry, memoir or drama. Some of these narratives are autobiographical (e.g. Zoë Waxman’s analysis of women’s Holocaust testimony), but there is also room for semi-autobiographical and fictional texts that create some interesting comparisons. Although all of the texts discussed are in the English language, the scope of the collection is inclusive, encompassing narratives from around the world, because in the spirit of ‘feminism without borders’, we wish to create a broader scope that does not privilege Western narratives of white, middle-class women. As such the model of feminism without borders or transnational feminism is a useful starting point. As Chandra Mohanty compellingly postulates:

Feminism without borders is not the same as ‘border-less’ feminism. It acknowledges the fault lines, conflicts, differences, fears, and containment that borders represent. It acknowledges that there is no one sense of a border, that the lines between and through nations, races, classes, sexualities, religions, disabilities, are real—and that a feminism without borders must envision change and social justice work across these lines of demarcation and division. I want to speak of feminism without silences and exclusions in order to draw attention to the tension between simultaneous plurality and narrowness of borders and the emancipatory potential of crossing through, with, and over these borders in our everyday lives. (2003: 2)

Mohanty’s definition concords with Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal when they explain that transnational feminism ‘requires a feminist analysis that refuses to choose among economic, cultural and political concerns’ and foregrounds ‘critical practices that link our understanding of postmodernity, global economic structures, problematics of nationalism, issues of race and imperialism, critiques of global feminism, and emergent patriarchies’ (Kaplan and Grewal 1999: 358). Transnational feminism thus recommends maintaining the cultural specificity of women’s experience while putting them in conversation with each other to create a feminism(s) that is more inclusive and representative. This collection provides such a conversation, resonating with Anne McClintock’s thesis in Imperial Leather (1995) that ‘race, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other; nor can they be simply yoked together retrospectively like armatures of Lego’ (McClintock 1995: 5). McClintock contends that race, gender and class are interdependent ‘if in contradictory and conflictual ways’; in other words, these categories of identity are ‘articulated categories’ (5). This idea is particularly relevant to rape narratives, since as Horeck suggests, rape narratives challenge not only ‘sexual politics,’ but also ‘ethnic and racial tensions, and the contested boundary between the real and the imaginary’ (Horeck 2004: vi). Horeck argues, like McClintock, that it is not productive to detach gender from class, ethnicity, sexuality, diasporic identity or alternative types of otherness. This point is also elucidated in Joanna Bourke’s study, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present, in which she notes that traits of otherness combine in rape myths to further condemn victims of rape such as working class women or African-American women.

Indeed, the concept of otherness in relation to rape and sexual violence has been discussed by many postcolonial critics, including Frantz Fanon (1967), Edward Said (1978), Gayatri Spivak (1988), Irene Gedalof (1999), Ann Laura Stoler (1991), Laura E. Donaldson (1993), Jenny Sharpe (1991, 1993) and Nancy L. Paxton (1999).² The force of global imperialism has left in its wake a hierarchical social order that is heavily encrypted with a binary model of male/female, superior/inferior, dominant/subordinate, for as Said incisively argues, ‘[i]mperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control’ (Said 1993: 271). Imperial ideology hinges on the concept that those that are considered to be inferior need to be ruled. This notion has created a complex relationship between the colonized and the colonizer, as the colonized is stripped of agency and subjectivity under imperial rule. Therefore, the process of decolonization involves the colonized (who are categorized as weak, inferior and effeminate) redefining themselves and the social order in an attempt to gain subjectivity. What Said does not explicitly take into account in this particular instance is the role of the female body in both imperial and anti-imperial ideology (cf. Kennedy 2000: 37–44). The female body is a site over which imperial power is exacted and therefore is crucial to both imperial and nationalist ideologies. As Anne McClintock notes:

Controlling women’s sexuality, exalting maternity and breeding a virile race of empire-builders were widely perceived as the paramount means for controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial body politic, so that … sexual purity emerged as the controlling metaphor for racial, economic and political power. (1995: 47)

As evidenced by Heaney’s poetry, particularly ‘Act of Union’, woman tends to become a metaphor for the nation, and as such often fu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword: ‘An Unsafe Subject’
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Feminism without Borders: The Potentials and Pitfalls of Re-theorizing Rape
• Part I: Subverting the Story
• Part II: Resistance Metaphors
• Part III: The Protest of Silence
• Part IV: The Question of the Visual
• List of Editors and Contributors
• Index