Handbook on Sexual Violence (16 page)

At a time when female rape accusations were regarded as dubious, Brownmiller engaged in an intensive sociological experiment to unearth the statistical evidence that revealed rape was more common than civilians and government officials cared to believe and, in turn, she legitimated the use of the female voice against violence. However, Brownmiller tended to construct women as habitual victims. Although she used statistical evidence to reveal the indiscriminate nature of violent sexual crimes with regard to race, age and socio-economic status, she tended to ignore the possibility of sex as a variable factor in the rape equation. Within this context rape exists in purely heterosexual terms, as it is only ‘within the heterosexual world that most of us inhabit by choice, sexual violence is exalted by men to the level of ideology only when the victims are female and the victimizers are male’ (Brownmiller 1975: 293). For a text that strives to deconstruct the universalising assumptions about rape, it is surprising that the idea of a token victim is imagined and that the author argues for a ‘uniform response to a rape, or a uniform time for recovery’ (Brownmiller 1975: 361). Thus, when Brownmiller begins to examine the actual motivation of rape, she appears to express these in purely dichotomous terms.

The last chapter of Brownmiller’s book is titled ‘Women Fight Back’, which would superficially seem to suggest the possibility of female violence. In actuality it is a discussion of self-defence as a mode of protection in pre- emptive preparation for a worst-case scenario. As such, the chapter excludes the idea of women initiating violence and how this might function within a dialogic engagement with the passive construct of the victimised woman. While Brownmiller’s path-breaking feminist agenda provided a necessary expose´ of rape ‘myths’, the question that must be considered today is: how do we move on from a statistical or sociological study of rape and violence that constructs women as victims, in order to develop a more complex theoretical contextualisation that does not undermine the severity and injustice of the crime? Specifically in this essay, it is important to understand how we evaluate writing violence that is performed both against and by women, and ask: can illustrations of female-generated violence ever serve as a means of reclaiming the female experience?

One way of interpreting the physical realities of rape and sexual assault in literature is to compare the narrative framework with the literary form. In order to understand how form may be implicated in the wider discourse of sexual violence, it is useful to consider the work of Monique Wittig, a French Materialist feminist, who saw contemporary linguistic forms as an inadequate means of expression for women, and especially a problematic discourse for lesbians. She argues that the only way to manoeuvre a language saturated in heterosexist and patriarchal tenets is to dismantle it. Violently. In ‘For a Women’s Liberation Movement’ (1970) Wittig, along with other French feminists, emphasised the need for violent struggle in order to dismantle the inferior status of women in capitalist society, in particular their role as culturally constructed sexual objects. Radically, they state:

We don’t want to waste our energy and strength struggling against male chauvinism inside the already existing organizations. The time is past when we asked men ... for permission to revolt. No one can liberate another, one must liberate oneself.

(Wittig
et al
. 2005: 32–3)

Building upon her work in
Les Gu´erill`eres
(1969), where female revolutionaries carry out acts of violence metaphorically to represent their immediate social plight, Wittig assumes a mentality of violence in order to manipulate, and exist in, patriarchal society. More recently, in
Gender Trouble
(1990), Judith Butler argues that Wittig’s use of violence is not intended to ‘turn the tables’ or seek revenge against men, but rather to complicate the way violence is viewed. Furthermore, Butler explains how violence can be used in order to reveal suppressed truths: ‘[t]he violence of the text has the identity and coherence of the category of sex as its target, a lifeless construct, a construct out to deaden the body’ (Butler 1990: 172). By transferring the physicalities of violence onto the literary form, texts are able to highlight the complexities of rape and violence, and provide reclamation through narrative. The body of the text thus becomes analogous with the body of both victim and perpetrator, engendering and submitting to violence within an inescapable and self-perpetuating dialectic. In the subsequent section on literary history this more complex understanding will be explored and texts that have previously been read as representing women as victims of sexual violence re-excavated in order to destabilise the cultural conventions that have served to represent women as passive objects.

Literary history

There are a number of histories on literary representations of women and sexual violence, including those that are period specific, as well as works that address particular areas, such as post-colonialist surveys. The purpose of this
section is, however, not to reproduce such scholarship, but to challenge earlier literary approaches in order to understand how female subjectivity is embedded in the dialectic of victim/perpetrator. Traditionally, literary criticism has focused on the role of women as victims – of assault, domestic violence, abuse and rape – yet by excavating key textual moments, it becomes apparent that these manifestations of violence are more complex. The following examples have been organised into thematic categories – violent revenge and social circumstance – in order to develop an understanding of how women may be simultaneously victims and perpetrators of violence.

One of the most horrific rapes in literature occurs in Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus
where Lavinia, a young and innocent woman, is raped by the Empress’s two sons, Demetrius and Chiron. While the sexual assault happens offstage, its consequences are manifest as Lavinia emerges with her tongue cut out and her hands sliced off:

Dem. So, now go tell, and if thy tongue can speak, Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and ravish’d thee.

Chi. Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so, And if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.

(Shakespeare 1954: 54)

The mocking tone adopted by the young men suggests a vicious pleasure, not only from sexual gratification but also from the erasure of female agency. Unexpectedly, this negation of independent subjectivity is countered in the play with powerful revenge, as Lavinia evades the constraints of silence by taking a staff – replete with the metaphor of sexual transference – into her mouth and, using her ‘stumps’ as a guide, writes the names of her rapists. A bloody revenge ensues as Lavinia’s father, Titus, feeds the Empress a pie made with the flesh of her murdered sons. Rather than being passive victim, Lavinia helps engender a horrific retribution against another woman that matches rape and dismemberment with murder and enforced cannibalism.

In constructing this bloody narrative, Shakespeare drew upon Ovid’s tale of how Tereus rapes his sister-in-law Philomela and cuts out her tongue to conceal his identity from his wife, Progne. Philomela, however, weaves a tapestry depicting the assault and the two sisters revenge themselves by murdering Tereus’s son and serving him as a dish of meat to his father. The metamorphosis of the characters into birds does little to undermine the graphic violence and, as in
Titus Andronicus
, the women turn from being victims into perpetrators of violence, uniting against their male kin.

Not all texts represent female violence as a vengeful response to an immediate and bloody assault; some represent women as perpetrators of violence because of social circumstance. These accounts need to be located within the dominant patriarchal discourses of the periods in which the works were written; for example, the lack of female independence experienced by medieval women may be evidenced by their lack of legal rights, in particular, rape that was interpreted by the law as an act of theft against the senior male within a woman’s family and not a crime of assault against the female victim (see also Chapters
1 and
3 by D’Cruze and McGregor respectively, who discuss this idea). Chaucer refers to this legal practice in
The Tale of the Wife of Bath
where a knight rapes a maiden but is redeemed when he agrees to marry a hag, the magic ‘other’ of the ravished woman. The sexual consummation of the marriage is often read as revealing the desire of the narrator – the middle- aged Wife – to bed a handsome and virile young man. However, the initial rape is paralleled by the Wife’s experience, in that she is first married when she ‘twelf yeer was of age’, was ‘bet on every bon’ by her fourth husband, and hit so violently by her fifth spouse that her ear ‘weex al deef’ (Chaucer 1992: 27, 46 and 49). In these circumstances, perhaps her final retaliation, when she floors her husband with a punch on the ‘cheke’ (Chaucer 1992: 54), should not be read as the stereotypical action of a hardened and aggressive older woman, but as the final breaking point of someone who has suffered years of legally condoned abuse. Chaucer offers us no conclusive judgement on the Wife, but the text illuminates how women suffered injustice and sometimes had the strength of character to fight back.

A more tragic figure may be found in Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Thorn’, which focuses on the plight of a pregnant young woman who has been jilted

by her betrothed and, after the baby’s death, descends into depression, sitting beneath the thorn tree ‘by day and night, in rain, in tempest, and in snow’ (Wordsworth 1988: 72). The poem’s narrator offers no sympathy, under- standing or evidence, instead recounting local gossip:

. . . but some will say

She hanged her baby on the tree,

Some say she drowned it in the pond . . . I’ve heard the scarlet moss is red

With drops of that poor infant’s blood; But kill a new-born infant thus!

(Wordsworth 1988: 77)

The plight of an unmarried mother and the abusive nature of the rumours are ignored by the narrator, whose judgement is harsh and moralistic, yet the poem offers a more complex understanding of her situation, giving the last lines to the woman:

Oh misery! Oh misery!

‘O woe is me! Oh misery!’

(Wordsworth 1988: 78)

It is impossible to determine whether or not the woman has committed infanticide rather than continue to suffer the censure and denunciation of society, or whether the baby simply died. At the same time, her voice evinces an overwhelming grief and the title of the poem, ‘The Thorn’, rather than ‘the thorn tree’, suggests both continued pain and the image of Christ as he is made to wear a crown of thorns. Wordsworth constructs the woman as both ultimate victim (Christ) and definitive perpetrator (a mother who murders her child), trapped within the dialectic of society’s opinion of unmarried mothers. When exploring how women and violence are represented in literature, it is essential to recognise that while female characters are shown as victims (of rape, physical and verbal abuse, as well as social values that privilege men), at the same time, they are also depicted as perpetrators of violence. In the four examples drawn from canonical authors the crimes committed by, enabled by, or attributed to, women range from murder, cannibalism and physical abuse, to infanticide. Contemporary recognition of how brutality against women is often paralleled by female violence needs to be located firmly within a literary tradition of ambiguity. In the next two sections of the chapter, this dialectic of victim/perpetrator will be investigated in relation to more recent writing:

Angela Carter’s
The Passion of New Eve
and an extract from Liam Murray Bell’s new novel,
rubber bullet, broken glass
.

Textual analysis: Angela Carter,
The Passion Of New Eve
(1977)

In Angela Carter’s
The Passion of New Eve
the roles of perpetrator and victim are both complicated and conflated by the novel’s numerous acts of sexualised

violence performed and received by both men and women. As such, the novel offers a complex representation of gender identity that is further problematised by the novel’s setting – a dystopia in which unrestrained violence occurs at the hands of sexually and racially marginalised insurgents. The importance of social circumstance and place is thereby embedded in the conflict between victim/perpetrator and women/men.

The importance of dialectical representation may be identified in the novel’s locational contrasts: between East and West Coast America; between the city and the desert; and between the grotesque and the bare. For Carter, place and social circumstance are fundamental to understanding sexualised violence. As Peggy Reeves Sanday argues in ‘Rape and the silencing of the feminine’, the cultural consequences of rape vary according to the society in which it is committed, so that some areas are ‘classified as rape-free, others as rape-prone’ (Sanday 1986: 84). Sanday provides an example of a man committing rape in West Sumatra, with the possible consequence not only of having his ‘masculinity ridiculed’ but also having to ‘face . . . assault, perhaps death. . . . be[ing] driven from his village, never to return’ (Sanday 1986: 84). In examining the sociocultural implications of this rape she locates a trend that typically identifies rape-
prone
societies as imbuing women with less personal autonomy and government involvement (Sanday 1986: 85).

Cartographic discourse complicates the way we read the violence depicted in Carter’s novel, since it is enacted and endured in Western society where women, arguably, experience greater independence. In using the United States, Carter subverts the idea that rape is a primitive model of abuse only to be used by those existing outside of highly ‘civilised’ nations, demanding that sexualised violence is acknowledged to be as likely in Western culture as anywhere else. This covert embedding of sexualised violence in the West had been foregrounded by Brownmiller in 1975 two years prior to the publication of
The Passion of New Eve
and Carter engages with 1970s feminist discourse. Subsequently, Roy Porter focused more specifically on how the West straddles a fine line between using violence as a tool of gendered subordination while at the same time appearing to promote equality among the sexes: