Handbook on Sexual Violence (17 page)

the rise of the West – its institutions, attitudes and destiny – has been deeply bound up with sexual violence, threat and reality . . . coexisting, uneasily, unstably, with a polity officially dedicated to equality between the sexes . . . [so that rape has become] the objects and effects of Western militarism and imperialism.

(Porter 1986: 232 and 231)

Carter’s use of a North American setting negotiates these covert practices, showing that, while sexual violence might be packaged differently in terms of the United States and the Western psyche, rape and sexualised violence remain part of a complex manipulation of sexual identity where the individual is both repressed and liberated.

This dialectic is realised through the narrative progression of the novel’s

protagonist, Evelyn (later transformed into Eve), who begins his sojourn in the grotesque landscape of New York City where ‘roaches swarmed on the floor

and the worm-eaten night-light of the city flooded in through a curtainless window’ (Carter 1977: 25). Unexpectedly, the landscape of the grotesque does not repulse Evelyn’s delicate English sensibilities, instead he finds it invigorating; it leads him to feel a ‘savage desire’ (Carter 1977: 25) that juxtaposes his tranquil English upbringing as a ‘[c]hild of a moist, green, gentle island’ with the ‘violence, fear [and] madness’ of New York (Carter 1977: 15). Finally, however, Evelyn’s lust for the danger that New York promises becomes misinterpreted as a promise of freedom that, in turn, renders him both a perpetrator and victim of rape.

It is in New York that Evelyn meets Leilah, the ‘blythe, callous, ghetto nymph’ (Carter, 1977:21); she is a visual representation of the dark and corrupt sensuality that he lusts after and his treatment of her – raping, impregnating, and leaving her to a Haitian abortionist who performs an irreparable procedure – leaves her as a despoiled victim. Leilah is ‘infected’ and forced ‘to go to hospital at the cost of all the rest of her furs, at the price of her womb’ (Carter 1977: 34). Evelyn’s initial objectification of women as sexual victims is, however, undercut later in the novel through the character of ‘Mother’, who depicts his act as abuse: ‘And you’ve abused women, Evelyn, with this delicate instrument that should have been used for nothing but pleasure. You made a weapon of it!’ (Carter 1977: 65–6). Even when Evelyn meets Leilah after he has been transformed into Eve, he still tries to rationalise his former assault, interpreting his own transformation as an act of vengeance on the part of women, asking ‘had [Leilah] really suffered when I’d fathered a child on her, was it real blood that spilled on the floor of the taxi when she came back to me, torn, mutilated, from the Haitian abortionist? And was my body her revenge?’ (Carter 1977: 172). Although Eve recognises that Evelyn left Leilah ‘torn’ and ‘mutilated’ he still seeks to justify male aggression by claiming this as a quest for justice, women’s desire to turn the tables against men.

The revenge performed upon Evelyn is analogous to Wittig’s determination to ‘revolt . . . [and] to liberate oneself’ (Wittig
et al
. 1970: 32–3), as the protagonist is violently transformed into Eve. Again Carter uses material space as a way of foregrounding sexual difference and the novel shifts in location from the furore of New York to the starkness of the desert: the East is replaced by ‘the abode of enforced sterility, the dehydrated sea of infertility, the post- menopausal part of the earth’ (Carter 1977: 40). The site of rebirth is called Beulah: ‘a profane place. It is a crucible. It is the home of the woman who calls herself the Great Parricide, also glories in the title of Grand Emasculator . . . but her daughters call her Mother’ (Carter 1977: 49). After the operation, an operation performed by Mother, Eve resides in a cell that is a ‘simulacrum of the womb’ (Carter 1977: 52). Sanday claims that ‘women are victims of phallic sadism because men are victims of uterine dependency . . . [I]t is male dependency on the feminine reproductive model for their masculine sense of self, power and control’ (Sanday 1986: 87). As a result of Evelyn’s violence against women, he is forced to rely on the womb he rejects in sexual assault and is recreated and fitted with a womb of his own, carried out by the ultimate symbol of matriarchal power, Mother.

This transformation is befittingly violent in response to the sexualised violence committed by Evelyn. In order to become woman, an instance of rape

must occur, an act which the female renegades under Mother’s control associate with being reborn, an act to ‘[r]eintegrate the primal form!’ (Carter 1977: 64). In the scene where Mother rapes Evelyn, stereotypical gender roles are reversed, especially in considering traditional narratives of rape, as Evelyn is the passive, submissive victim, who feels no sexual pleasure from the act, but instead performs the role of object:

[Mother’s] Virginia-smoked ham of a fist grasped my shrinking sex; when it went all the way in, Mother howled and so did I. So I was unceremoniously raped; and it was the last time I performed the sexual act as a man, whatever that means, though I took very little pleasure from it. None at all, in fact, for her thighs grasped me with the vigour of the female mantis and I felt only engulfment.

(Carter 1977: 64–5)

Mother is analogised to the female praying mantis known to tear the heads off her male mantis counterparts, metaphorically illustrating her role in the dismembering castration of Evelyn. The novel appears to create a binary division located in social circumstance: the patriarchal city of New York where men are predators and women passive victims, and the matriarchy of Beulah where women revenge themselves against male violence by making men suffer rape and physical assault.

The superficiality of this binary relationship is, however, complicated by the house of the poet Zero, a blatant misogynist who lives on a ranch in the desert with seven wives. After Eve escapes from Mother she is captured by Zero and brought to his ranch where she experiences a more violent and polarised form of assault, since the poet does not know of Eve/lyn’s past as a man. All women on Zero’s ranch are treated as subhuman; the wives are deprived of civilised modes of living as the poet believes women to be composed of ‘more primitive, animal stuff, and so did not need the paraphernalia of civilised society such as cutlery, meat, soap, shoes, etc’ (Carter 1977: 87). The subservient roles adopted by the women are, however, problematised by the fact that the wives fulfil this status complacently. Eve observes that Zero’s ‘wives . . . who so innocently consented to be less than human, filled me with an angry pity. When I saw their skins were often greenish due to the beatings [Zero] inflicted on them, I was moved by an anger they were too much in love with him to feel’ (Carter 1977: 108). Zero, in fulfilling the ‘myth of the heroic rapist’ (Brownmiller 1975: 289) manages to convince the women that they deserve his violent acts, indeed they actually desire and deify him: the wives ‘dedicated themselves, body, heart and soul to the Church of Zero’ (Carter 1977: 99). Indeed, the other women turn upon Eve, who has been manufactured by Mother as an ultimate sex symbol, because she receives the greatest attention from Zero. This envy leads the women to inflict violence upon Eve, enacting female against female violence, cutting Eve’s face: the foremost sign of her beauty.

The sexual violence Eve experiences as the eighth wife of Zero causes her to conflate her identity with his. After the first instance of rape, Eve remarks, ‘I was in no way prepared for the pain, his body was an anonymous instrument

of torture’ (Carter 1977: 86), then increasingly she feels a ‘sense of grateful detachment from this degradation’ (Carter 1977: 91), until finally she relinquishes her identity completely, saying, ‘I felt myself to be, not myself but he; and the experience of this crucial lack of self always brought with it a shock of introspection, forced me to know myself as a former violator at the moment of my own violation’ (Carter 1977: 102). Zero, unaware of Eve’s previous sex, reveals to her Evelyn’s identity as a male perpetrator of violence. Seemingly, however, what should be an epiphanic moment for Eve fails, as she still sees Evelyn as superior to Zero, and fails to acknowledge Evelyn’s past abusive acts.

The overarching point of location lies in Tristessa, the idealised Hollywood actress, with whom both Evelyn and Zero are infatuated. In considering media and popular culture representations of rape in the United States, Sanday argues that ‘the images . . . teach men to silence the vulnerable in themselves by objectifying and possessing the bodies of women’ (Sanday 1986: 99). This notion of repressed sexual dissatisfaction spiralling into sexualised violence is apposite when considering Zero’s relationship with Tristessa, who Zero claims through her own sexualised image left him impotent. As Eve learns, ‘[Zero] believed the movie actress had performed a spiritual vasectomy on him’ (Carter 1977: 92), a situation which can only be rectified through Zero’s usurpation of Tristessa’s sexuality, ultimately resulting in the ‘Witch, bitch, and typhoid Mary of [sterility’s]’death, who according to Zero, only spurns him because he is ‘Masculinity incarnate’ (Carter 1977: 104). Zero’s infatuation with Tristessa turns into obsession, as it is easier to locate his own inadequacies in an idealised starlet than in his own faulty masculinity. In contrast, Evelyn/ Eve’s infatuation with Tristessa is part of a fantasised idea of femininity. At the start of the novel, Evelyn imagines Tristessa as a feminine ideal, even though in his dreams of her she becomes the object of violent fantasy, ‘stark naked, tied, perhaps to a tree in a midnight forest under the wheeling stars’ (Carter 1977: 7). Towards the end of the book, when Tristessa is revealed as a biological male, Eve notes that the movie star’s perfection could only be born from a man’s imago, exclaiming: ‘
That
was why [Tristessa] had been the perfect man’s woman! He had made himself the shrine of his own desires, had made of himself the only woman he could have loved!’ (Carter 1977: 128–9, emphasis Carter’s). Whereas this fact repulses Zero, Eve is drawn to Tristessa more; for Eve this masculine identity makes Tristessa superior, implying that for Eve biologically female ‘women’ are inferior. Zero’s anger and repulsion culminates when he forces Tristessa, the biological male who wishes to be a woman, to have sex with Eve, who has been constructed as biologically female. Tristessa notes that he thought ‘I was immune to rape’ (Carter 1977: 137), but the sexualizsd violence of the novel cannot be contained either by biological sex or gender identity.

At the end of the novel Carter returns to the question of a justified violence as a pregnant Eve is reunited with Leilah who reveals that her real name is ‘Lilith . . . Adam’s first wife . . . Rape only refreshes my virginity’ and with Mother who has become ‘gentle’ and old (Carter 1977: 174). Even though Leilah seems to acknowledge that she has committed sexual violence against Evelyn, at the same time she merges with Eve and Mother and Tristessa to

form a compound femininity that suffers rape even as it enacts it. As such, Carter’s narrative contemplates whether or not female violence as a validated response might reclaim the female experience, utilising rape as a means of revenge or a way to alert society to the damage caused in abuse. As we will see, the authority of violence is often questionable and multitudinous, as different historical and social contexts construct violence as a vehicle of either redemption or destruction.

Textual creativity: Liam Murray Bell,
rubber bullet, broken glass
(2011)

My current work-in-progress is a novel entitled
rubber bullet, broken glass
that examines Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Specifically, the narrative focuses on the character of Aoife, a protagonist who moves from being a victim of the conflict to being a perpetrator of (sexualised) violence. This transition – following on from Wittig – is made in order to afford the character the ability to challenge both (male) discourses of violence and the constructs of gender itself, which as we explored earlier is categorised within Wittig’s work as ‘a lifeless construct, a construct out to deaden the body’ (Butler 1990: 172). The rationale for portraying this (female) character as engaging in acts of sexualised violence within the narrative – as this
section will explore – lies in the inherent inability of women to complicate the patriarchy inherent in Northern Irish society without also complicating their own sexuality and the status of their gender within existing discourses. As Robin Morgan argues, in her discussion of Palestinian women fighters, ‘The woman who rebels via the male mode can only do so up until the point where her own rebellion might begin’ (Morgan 1990: 211). That is, the female characters of the novel can only register their protest at perceived injustices via the existing (male) structures and, following on from this, can only do so until their gender begins to impact upon their ability to protest, at which point they must decide whether they wish to undergo a double rebellion against the constructs of gender itself. It is this contention that this case study will examine: the idea that if a woman wishes to subvert the discourses of violence in a conflict such as the Troubles – which has the subjugation of women inherent within it – then she is required to do so in a way that not only makes her voice heard as a participator in the violence – as a perpetrator – but also lays claim to a subjectivity for herself as a woman – as a female perpetrator.

The female characters of
rubber bullet, broken glass
, then, need to respond to and challenge the ‘male dominated, patriarchal relations that permeate’ (Little 2002) the Northern Ireland contemporary to the narrative. There are certain expectations of women within this patriarchal structure, involving a subjugation of women into the domestic sphere, with duties limited to the kitchen and the bedroom. This is borne out by the representation of the character of Josie in Edna O’Brien’s novel
House of Splendid Isolation
, in which her husband speaks of Josie by equating her to a horse: ‘Feed. Shovel. Ride. Woman and horse.’ (O’Brien 1995: 137) This presents women, within the literature of Northern Ireland, as often oppressed, and this also manifests in historical examples of degradation such as the ritualistic tarring and feathering

of Nationalist women who were seen consorting with British soldiers (see Aretxaga 1997: 152) or in the implicit tolerance of sexual violence evidenced by the domestic violence legislation which was amended by the Northern Ireland Assembly to specify ‘that it should be applied to married couples only and not to cohabitees, since the latter ‘‘chose to live in sin they would have to face the consequences’’ ’ (McWilliams 1991: 83). Women, in these discourses, are marginalised and categorised as being somehow lesser to men and answerable to (male) rule of law, whether that be through institutions of state, as in the latter example, or through the imposed laws of the paramilitaries, as in the former.

One method of rebelling against this assigned role is characterised, within my novel, by Aoife’s mother, Cathy, who responds to witnessing the death of her neighbour, Eamonn, at the hands of the British Security Services by withdrawing into silence. This form of protest, Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz argues, is necessary due to the essential maleness of the language itself, which ‘is inherently saturated by the male view of the world, and molded according to men’s experiences’, and in the face of this overwhelming inability to express their viewpoint with the language tools available, women find themselves lapsing into ‘mutedness’ (Diaz-Diocaretz 1989: 124). So, Cathy witnesses the death of her neighbour and finds that she is unable to speak of what she has seen:

Aoife’s mammy started to have problems with her mouth in the weeks after Eamonn Kelly was shot by the Brits. It started as a tingle, she told the doctor, like a cold sore forming at the corner of her lip, then it began to scour at her gums like she was teething. It was when it started to burn, though, like taking a gulp of scalding tea and swilling it around; it was when it began to feel like it had left the inside of her mouth and throat as nothing more than a raw and bleeding flesh wound; when every morsel of food or sip of water felt like swallowing a razor blade, this writhing agony that only got worse when she stretched it into a scream; it was only then that Cathy Brennan phoned for the doctor.

(
rubber bullet, broken glass
)

As a direct result of this psychosomatic pain, Cathy is medicated and becomes prone to long spells of silence. This can be seen as her response to what happens around her: an inability to articulate what she has seen leads her to withdraw.

The character of Aoife, by contrast, seeks to confront those responsible for the maiming of her brother, Damien, through a protest that – while often being repellent and, indeed, misdirected – is a more active response to the perceived injustice than her mother’s actions or the actions of the character of Josie in the O’Brien novel mentioned earlier, who outrages the paradigm of a housewife only insofar as cutting her hair short and trying to ‘mediate between’ (O’Brien 1995: 204) an escaped Republican gunman, McGreevy, and the police. The actions of Cathy and Josie do little to challenge the prevalent attitude which sees women as ‘passive and peace-loving’ (Pelan 2005: 82), but Aoife is able to assert herself more definitively against this demarcation of

gender roles by assuming the alter ego of Cassie, who performs sexualised violence in the same way as the prostitute in the urban legend that began this
chapter. This central premise for the narrative, of Aoife/Cassie actively pursuing a role as perpetrator, allows the character to follow in the footsteps of the Armagh women involved in the Dirty Protest
1
, who ‘demanded to be full militants of the IRA’ and in so doing were seen to be ‘criticizing a genderized system that held [women] as political subsidiaries’ (Aretxaga 1997: 143). Further to this, Aoife/Cassie seeks to cast gender to one side in her approach to violence, engaging with the existing discourses of violence without reference to her femininity. She challenges the traditional depiction of women as being synonymous with a ‘mothering nature that was contrary to violence’ (Aretxaga 1995) through her relentless pursuit of her victims. It would be difficult, I would argue, to categorise a passage such as this one as being inherently ‘female’:

My heartbeat quickens to the sound of his breathing on the other side of the door. As the door opens, I swing. You’d expect the bottle to shatter against his skull. It doesn’t. It thuds against his forehead and collapses him to his knees.

(
rubber bullet, broken glass
)

The objective, almost practical, tone of this narration does not conform to the idea of women as being, in some way, removed from violence. It doesn’t hold any gender signifiers, just as I would contend that the passage below from