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Gender and Culture Series
Rape and Representation
Rape does not have to happen. The fact that it does--and in the United States a rape is reported every six minutes--indicates that we live in a rape-prone culture where rape or the threat of rape functions as a tool for enforcing sexual difference and hierarchy."Rape and Representation" explores how cultural forms construct and reenforce social attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence. The essays proceed from the observation that literature not only reflects but also contributes to what a society believes about itself.Fourteen essays by authors in the fields of English, American and African-American, German, African, Brazilian, Classical, and French literatures and film present a wide range of texts from different historical periods and cultures. Contributors demythologize patriarchal representation in literature and art in order to show how it makes rape seem natural and inevitable.Contributors the editors, John J. Winkler, Patricia Klindiest Joplin, Susan Winnett, Ellen Rooney, Copp?lia Kahn, Eileen Julien, Marta Peixoto, Kathryn Gravdal, Carla Freccero, Nellie V. McKay, Nancy A. Jones, and Froma I. Zeitlin. Their work raises pressing--and often difficult--questions for feminist criticism.
Unknown Binding
First published October 15, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 28, 2015
Focus is mostly on French works, but several the essays are interesting - in particular the one about Tess and the one about French rape law in the Middle Ages.
June 8, 2023
• [Introduction: Rereading Rape]
• Focusing on the tales told (or not told) by voices within texts, by authors, and by critics, the contributors to this collection chart the complex inter¬ sections of rape and representation, revealing their inseparability from questions of subjectivity, authority, meaning, power, and voice. The added recognition that the term representation cuts across boundariesofjuridical,diplomatic,political,andliterarydiscourses sustains the assumption underlying this book: that the politics and aesthetics of rape are one.
• **AESTHETICS OF RAPE***
• the act of rereading rape involves more than listening to silences,- it requires restoring rape to the literal, to the body: restoring, that is, the violence—the physical, sexual violation. READING THE VIOLENCE BACK INTO TEXTS
• Where, if anywhere, do literary texts offer possibilities of resis¬ tance? Is there, as Carla Freccero asks below, a "feminine difference" in texts about rape authored by women, and if so, where and how is it inscribed? Do women who write of rape—and until recently, especially among white women in the Anglo-American tradition, these have been few in number—find a way out of the representa¬ tional double binds confronting those women who attempt to escape their entrapment in the patriarchal story? Do women of color within the United States or "third world" women, who have addressed the taboo subject more often and more openly, offer subversive perspectives?
• [1. The Education of Chloe: Erotic Protocols and Prior Violence by Winkler]
• Longus’ D+C: Eros' experiment (having two handsome teens raised as farmers instead of something better, as foster parents wanted) will display in turn the relative contributions of nature, culture, and happenstance to the erotic education of two attractive teenagers.
o D+C is not about the natural growth of erotic instinct but about the inadequacy of instinct to realize itself and about the many kinds of knowledge, education, and training required both to formulate the very meaning of spontaneous feelings and then to act on them.
• My central topic here will be the inherent violence of the cultural system discovered by Daphnis and Chloe and the unequal impact of that violence. As will appear below, the novel contains a serious and repeated inspection of the forms of rape to which Chloe—and to a certain extent Daphnis—is subject and also a determined but ultimately unsuccessful effort to distinguish Daphnis as “good" suitor from the bad rapist-suitors. The sweetness of its overall tone cannot hide, perhaps does not try to, the pain of the experience.
• Though pretty, the text illuminates erotic protocols.
• D and C imitate a myth but the sinister and essential elements of force, so vivid in the mythos as just related by Longus, are missing in the young lovers' imitation. Daphnis and Chloe play at rape without taking it seriously. Their imitation on tippy-toe is very pretty; their obliviousness is potentially more serious.
• And other vignettes of rape hidden, sinisterly.
• [2. The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours by Joplin]
• Tereus, having raped Philomela, cut out her tongue to prevent discovery. But she weaves a tell-tale account of her violation into a tapestry (or robe) which Sopho¬ cles calls "the voice of the shuttle." If metaphors as well as plots or myths could be archetypal, I would nominate Sophocles' voice of the shuttle for that distinction
• The play is lost, but the words “voice of the shuttle’ remain.
• For Philomela, rape initiates something like the "profound upheaval" Levi-Strauss describes as the experience of "backward subjects" when they make "the sudden discovery of the function of language.
• We are not castrated. We are not less, lack, loss. Yet we feel like thieves and criminals when we speak,7 because we know that something originally ours has been stolen from us and that the force used to take it away still threatens us as we struggle to win it back.
• What in the text "the voice of the shuttle" feels archetypal for the feminist? The image of the woman artist as a weaver. And what, in the context, feels archetypal? That behind the woman's silence is the incomplete plot of male dominance, which fails no matter how extreme it becomes
• But Tereus wants her not for her beauty, but for power. The exchange of women is the structure the myth conceals incompletely. What the myth reveals is how the political hierarchy built upon male sexual dominance requires the violent appropriation of the woman's power to speak.
• "What does this mean except that women are treated as signs, which are misused when not put to the use reserved for signs, which is to be communicated?"
• The exchange of women articulates the culture's boundaries, the woman's hymen serving as the physical or sexual sign for the limen or wall defining the city's limits.
• Once Procne receives Philomela's text, reads it, interprets it, and acts upon it by rescuing her, myth creates a dead end for both the production and the reception of the woman's text. The movement of violence is swift and sure: there is hardly any pause between Procne's hatching of a plot and its execution.33 Nor is there any hesitation between Tereus' recognition that he has devoured his own child and his choice to rise up to kill the bloody sisters. The space most severely threatened with collapse is that between Tereus and the sisters themselves. Here the gods intervene: the three are turned into birds. But paradoxically, this change changes nothing. Metamorphosis preserves the distance necessary to the structure of dominance and submission: in the final tableau all movement is frozen.
• 3. The Marquise’s ‘O’ an the Mad Dash of Narrative by Winnett
• Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O: heroine nearly raped by Russian troops, saved by Count
• As most everyone knows, the NONSCENE to which I have referred is probably the most delicately accomplished rape in our literature.2 After saving—and, we will find out later, raping—the Marquise and conquering her father's fortress, the Count departs with his troops. He comes back and rapes her, ends up marrying her.
• Reduced to a "dash" to which the reader will not pay any particular attention, the rape will achieve representation only through the narrative of its consequences, and this narrative will necessarily focus upon the mind and body of the (unconscious) victim rather than on the mind and body of the rapist. To the extent, then, that the reader ultimately "knows" about the rape without having had to encounter it in the text and thereby experience it affectively, s/he complies in what I hope to show to be broader cultural processes that relegate to the "heroine's plot” particular untold stories of male violence. THESIS
• It's not that a veil is being drawn over something the Marquise and/or reader knows is happening; rather, neither is conscious that any¬ thing of significance is happening at all—and this unconsciousness that the reader temporarily shares with the Marquise will be of the utmost significance in the novella's drive (one could say "dash") toward signification. INTERESTING
• The closural processes that lead to the novella's happy end depend first upon our reading the rape as an accident, an unpremeditated, impulsive act about which the Count is subsequently truly remorse¬ ful, and second upon our regarding rape as something for which one can indeed adequately atone, something that, in the text's own words, can be assimilated into "the old order of things"
• In a recent essay, Cora Stephan traces what she sees as the deterioration of war from a personalized, ritualized, profoundly regulated male game to an anonymous, technologized enterprise of unspecified gender She regards today's warfare as all the more murderous be¬ cause its repertoire of martial arts—which differ from other forms of data processing only through their (usually) unseen and (fortunately) unimaginable consequences—no longer enable one plausibly to act out the drama of his (or her) honor. “is it simply laughable, ridiculous, when a ritual of salutes, swords, and military discipline unfolds over the inferno” …"the heartbreakingly masculine endeavor to maintain forms, regardless of the obstacles" SO INTERSTING
o Modern war violates rules that are supposed to distinguish male violence [force]8 from everything that is held to be wom¬ anish. It unchains the furor. It is insidious and deceiving, it breaks with a gender-specific division of labor, it no longer differentiates between soldiers and civilians, and its modi op- erandi have robbed men of the privilege of bearing weapons.
o BUT HERE STEPHAN NEEDS THE VERY CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS AS DO THE ADVOCATES OF WAR
o It is obvious that any ritual of order, especially such a ritual as war, where a real enemy has to be trusted to obey, as it were, a gentleman's agreement to abide by the rules, requires that its Other—uncontrolled violence—be clearly designated and gendered. As long as this Other is gendered female, war functions as a solemn ceremony of male bonding and a political institution at the same time as it remains a terrifying expression of violence and an aggressive, if unconscious, enactment of male fear of women.10 In her nostalgia for a time when "war was an affair of culture," Stephan forgets to examine how the arrangements that encode violence into civilized gestures provide for the excesses that these gestures can neither accommodate nor negotiate.
• The Marquise of O juxtaposes "lustful animals" who attempt to rape the Marquise in the heat of battle and the French-speaking gentleman who rescues her, only to rape her himself in a quieter (and less textually conspicuous) moment.
• In what amounts to a gesture of etymological downward displacement, the womb (hyster) of the Marquise becomes the locus of the representation and working through of the Count's hysterical conflict.
• to say that The Marquise of O is the story of a rape is to decide that the novella is about something it takes conspicuously ingenious measures to exclude from representation.
• 5. Periphrasis, Power, and Rape in A Passageg to India by Silver
• Periphrasis, defined most simply as "the use of many words where one or a few would do," has, like all figures, a more devious side.
• Where we would have the naming of the crime (attempted rape against Adela) and its perpetrator exists only a periphrasis, a gap. Continually talking around this unspecified center, the text ironically generates more words to produce less meaning.
• Early MS had a desctiption of assault! Later, Forster says in the cave it is either a man, or the supernatural, or an illusion. A hysterical repressed, overly intellectual New Woman who fantasizes and is haunted by sex ghosts. In this reading, we might add, Adela wants to be raped.
• The experience that she speaks as violation or rape, and read it not in terms of sexual desire or repression, but in terms of a deployment of sexuality within a system of power that posits a complex network of sameness and difference. Within this system, what is at stake is both gender difference and racial difference, with manifold lines of power crisscrossing the social and textual field. To read the novel from this perspective is to see it as a study of what it means to be rapable ,a social position that cuts across biological and racial lines to inscribe culturally constructed definitions of sexuality within a sex/gender/power system. THESIS
• Meh
• 6. Lucrece by Kahn
• while in comparison to Tar- quin she says little before the rape, Shakespeare virtually turns the poem over to her after it. In copious lament, in apostrophe, sententiae, and ekphrasis, she explores the meaning of what has happened to her and her feelings about it.
• Given the stridently patriarchal ideology in which the character is coded, then it is supremely pertinent to ask the question Mary Jacobus asks: "Is there a woman in this text?"
• After her violation, Lucrece loses our sympathy exactly in proportion as she gives tongue…Prince's phrase links Lucrece's speech with a physical organ and makes it sound unseemly (even faintly obscene) for her to use that organ to speak about her violation.
• While I agree with Jonathan Goldberg that "it is not necessarily a sign of power to have a voice, not necessarily a sign of subjection to lose it," I do not consider the speech of Shakespeare's characters removed from social practice and cultural signification
• Shakespeare's text, I believe, is no ta "mystic writing pad" from which male and female voices, untouched by constructions of gender outside the text, emerge and into which they also disappear
• What does it mean, then, for Tarquin's heroic will, turning out¬ ward toward Lucrece as a Vesta figure, a figure of the self, to rape her? I suggest that it is precisely this transgression that allows Shakespeare to create a heroic male subject in whom the contradic¬ tions of the dominant ideology are internalized and set at war.
• Being raped does grant Lucrece a voice— the voice of the victim. But the terms of her victimage do not constitute a vantage point distinct from the patriarchal ideology that generated Tarquin's act.
• But Lucrece did resist; as we saw, she argued against Tarquin at some length and when he seized her cried like a "poor lamb" until he smothered "her piteous clamours" with her nightgown (lines 673-686). In Lucrece's eyes, though, what counts as resistance?
• The poem ends with the rout of the Tarquins, carried out by Collatine and his kinsmen but authorized by Lucrece's account of the rape and her suicide. Thus she as a woman plays a peculiarly heroic role in the foundation of the Roman republic. Man I don’t KNOWWWW
• [Rape, Repression, and Narrative Form in Le Devoir de violence and La View et demie by Julien]
• Le Devoir de violence, by Malian writer Yambo Ouolo- guem (Paris: Seuil, 1968), and La Vie et demie, by Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi are formally innovative novels of the postcolonial period that expose the brutality of autocratic and totalitarian regimes.
• This particular use of image may seem to ignore the particularity of female sexuality: sexual violence and rape become near transparent signs of something else. Yet sexual violence in these texts is elucidated, if we read carefully, by the context of political violence. Rape, these texts suggest, is not an aberration, not a singularly sick act, nor an individual problem in an otherwise healthy society. Rape is represented, then, not as an isolated, gratuitous instance of violence that can be read metaphorically—that is, as an abstracted image of human disorder, ugliness, and disenfranchisement. It is portrayed rather, as the French term viol makes clear, metonymically, as a quintessential act of violence in a context of rampant abuse, both political and sexual.
• Meh
• [Rape and the Textual Violence in Clarice Lispector by Peixoto]
• Cixous' critical and fictional texts about Lispector (the boundary between them is tenuous) reveal a deep, though somewhat suspect, sympathy. With the words of another woman from a foreign place Cixous establishes a tender dialogue, and in these words she discerns multiple mirrorings of the dynamics of her own texts.
• A superlative reader of the nuances of gentleness in Lispector, Cixous nevertheless presents a tamed version of her texts, stripped of their disturbing pull toward violence.
• Cixous privileges in Lispector traditional and ideologically conservative feminine stereo¬ types (woman as mediator, as benevolent nature, as Good Mother).4 Yet the context for gentleness in Lispector is often a field of textual interactions charged with violence. I would like to examine this textual violence by focusing on a persistent issue in Lispector's fiction: writing the victim.
• In one of Lispector's best-known novels, The Passion According to G. H. (1964), this "reality" inheres in a cockroach: a female narrator watches it closely, kills it, then, in a sort of mystical communion, tastes its substance. In this tense encounter, observation yields repulsion, identification, and dizzying reversals of relative power as the woman feels engulfed by the cock¬ roach, which is in turn victimizer and victim. I think it fair to say that in Lispector narrative demands a victim or, conversely, the victim demands narrative.
• But how, from what perspective and with what investments, does one write the victim's experience?
o 1. (via rape stories) she distances and naturalizes violence against women
o 2. The strategy for writing the victim becomes, though, no longer a containment within ideological and narrative structures that minimize violence but involves, on the contrary, an unleashing of aggressive forces. She begins calling into question the suspect alliances of narrative with forces of mastery and domination
• [Alice Walker’s ‘Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells’: A Struggle Towards Sisterhood by McKay]
• Transformed into a question, the title of Walker's text probes the moral dimensions of black women's ambivalences toward sisterhood with white women especially on the issue of black-on-white rape. Is it possible, she is asking, for black women to "advance Luna" (raise their voices in unconditional outrage for the white-woman victim) without violating the meaning and memory of the lives of Ida B. Wells and the myriad other named and unnamed black men and women who devoted lifetimes and careers to the campaign against lynching or the innocent black victims of that bloody crime?
• Focusing on the tales told (or not told) by voices within texts, by authors, and by critics, the contributors to this collection chart the complex inter¬ sections of rape and representation, revealing their inseparability from questions of subjectivity, authority, meaning, power, and voice. The added recognition that the term representation cuts across boundariesofjuridical,diplomatic,political,andliterarydiscourses sustains the assumption underlying this book: that the politics and aesthetics of rape are one.
• **AESTHETICS OF RAPE***
• the act of rereading rape involves more than listening to silences,- it requires restoring rape to the literal, to the body: restoring, that is, the violence—the physical, sexual violation. READING THE VIOLENCE BACK INTO TEXTS
• Where, if anywhere, do literary texts offer possibilities of resis¬ tance? Is there, as Carla Freccero asks below, a "feminine difference" in texts about rape authored by women, and if so, where and how is it inscribed? Do women who write of rape—and until recently, especially among white women in the Anglo-American tradition, these have been few in number—find a way out of the representa¬ tional double binds confronting those women who attempt to escape their entrapment in the patriarchal story? Do women of color within the United States or "third world" women, who have addressed the taboo subject more often and more openly, offer subversive perspectives?
• [1. The Education of Chloe: Erotic Protocols and Prior Violence by Winkler]
• Longus’ D+C: Eros' experiment (having two handsome teens raised as farmers instead of something better, as foster parents wanted) will display in turn the relative contributions of nature, culture, and happenstance to the erotic education of two attractive teenagers.
o D+C is not about the natural growth of erotic instinct but about the inadequacy of instinct to realize itself and about the many kinds of knowledge, education, and training required both to formulate the very meaning of spontaneous feelings and then to act on them.
• My central topic here will be the inherent violence of the cultural system discovered by Daphnis and Chloe and the unequal impact of that violence. As will appear below, the novel contains a serious and repeated inspection of the forms of rape to which Chloe—and to a certain extent Daphnis—is subject and also a determined but ultimately unsuccessful effort to distinguish Daphnis as “good" suitor from the bad rapist-suitors. The sweetness of its overall tone cannot hide, perhaps does not try to, the pain of the experience.
• Though pretty, the text illuminates erotic protocols.
• D and C imitate a myth but the sinister and essential elements of force, so vivid in the mythos as just related by Longus, are missing in the young lovers' imitation. Daphnis and Chloe play at rape without taking it seriously. Their imitation on tippy-toe is very pretty; their obliviousness is potentially more serious.
• And other vignettes of rape hidden, sinisterly.
• [2. The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours by Joplin]
• Tereus, having raped Philomela, cut out her tongue to prevent discovery. But she weaves a tell-tale account of her violation into a tapestry (or robe) which Sopho¬ cles calls "the voice of the shuttle." If metaphors as well as plots or myths could be archetypal, I would nominate Sophocles' voice of the shuttle for that distinction
• The play is lost, but the words “voice of the shuttle’ remain.
• For Philomela, rape initiates something like the "profound upheaval" Levi-Strauss describes as the experience of "backward subjects" when they make "the sudden discovery of the function of language.
• We are not castrated. We are not less, lack, loss. Yet we feel like thieves and criminals when we speak,7 because we know that something originally ours has been stolen from us and that the force used to take it away still threatens us as we struggle to win it back.
• What in the text "the voice of the shuttle" feels archetypal for the feminist? The image of the woman artist as a weaver. And what, in the context, feels archetypal? That behind the woman's silence is the incomplete plot of male dominance, which fails no matter how extreme it becomes
• But Tereus wants her not for her beauty, but for power. The exchange of women is the structure the myth conceals incompletely. What the myth reveals is how the political hierarchy built upon male sexual dominance requires the violent appropriation of the woman's power to speak.
• "What does this mean except that women are treated as signs, which are misused when not put to the use reserved for signs, which is to be communicated?"
• The exchange of women articulates the culture's boundaries, the woman's hymen serving as the physical or sexual sign for the limen or wall defining the city's limits.
• Once Procne receives Philomela's text, reads it, interprets it, and acts upon it by rescuing her, myth creates a dead end for both the production and the reception of the woman's text. The movement of violence is swift and sure: there is hardly any pause between Procne's hatching of a plot and its execution.33 Nor is there any hesitation between Tereus' recognition that he has devoured his own child and his choice to rise up to kill the bloody sisters. The space most severely threatened with collapse is that between Tereus and the sisters themselves. Here the gods intervene: the three are turned into birds. But paradoxically, this change changes nothing. Metamorphosis preserves the distance necessary to the structure of dominance and submission: in the final tableau all movement is frozen.
• 3. The Marquise’s ‘O’ an the Mad Dash of Narrative by Winnett
• Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O: heroine nearly raped by Russian troops, saved by Count
• As most everyone knows, the NONSCENE to which I have referred is probably the most delicately accomplished rape in our literature.2 After saving—and, we will find out later, raping—the Marquise and conquering her father's fortress, the Count departs with his troops. He comes back and rapes her, ends up marrying her.
• Reduced to a "dash" to which the reader will not pay any particular attention, the rape will achieve representation only through the narrative of its consequences, and this narrative will necessarily focus upon the mind and body of the (unconscious) victim rather than on the mind and body of the rapist. To the extent, then, that the reader ultimately "knows" about the rape without having had to encounter it in the text and thereby experience it affectively, s/he complies in what I hope to show to be broader cultural processes that relegate to the "heroine's plot” particular untold stories of male violence. THESIS
• It's not that a veil is being drawn over something the Marquise and/or reader knows is happening; rather, neither is conscious that any¬ thing of significance is happening at all—and this unconsciousness that the reader temporarily shares with the Marquise will be of the utmost significance in the novella's drive (one could say "dash") toward signification. INTERESTING
• The closural processes that lead to the novella's happy end depend first upon our reading the rape as an accident, an unpremeditated, impulsive act about which the Count is subsequently truly remorse¬ ful, and second upon our regarding rape as something for which one can indeed adequately atone, something that, in the text's own words, can be assimilated into "the old order of things"
• In a recent essay, Cora Stephan traces what she sees as the deterioration of war from a personalized, ritualized, profoundly regulated male game to an anonymous, technologized enterprise of unspecified gender She regards today's warfare as all the more murderous be¬ cause its repertoire of martial arts—which differ from other forms of data processing only through their (usually) unseen and (fortunately) unimaginable consequences—no longer enable one plausibly to act out the drama of his (or her) honor. “is it simply laughable, ridiculous, when a ritual of salutes, swords, and military discipline unfolds over the inferno” …"the heartbreakingly masculine endeavor to maintain forms, regardless of the obstacles" SO INTERSTING
o Modern war violates rules that are supposed to distinguish male violence [force]8 from everything that is held to be wom¬ anish. It unchains the furor. It is insidious and deceiving, it breaks with a gender-specific division of labor, it no longer differentiates between soldiers and civilians, and its modi op- erandi have robbed men of the privilege of bearing weapons.
o BUT HERE STEPHAN NEEDS THE VERY CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS AS DO THE ADVOCATES OF WAR
o It is obvious that any ritual of order, especially such a ritual as war, where a real enemy has to be trusted to obey, as it were, a gentleman's agreement to abide by the rules, requires that its Other—uncontrolled violence—be clearly designated and gendered. As long as this Other is gendered female, war functions as a solemn ceremony of male bonding and a political institution at the same time as it remains a terrifying expression of violence and an aggressive, if unconscious, enactment of male fear of women.10 In her nostalgia for a time when "war was an affair of culture," Stephan forgets to examine how the arrangements that encode violence into civilized gestures provide for the excesses that these gestures can neither accommodate nor negotiate.
• The Marquise of O juxtaposes "lustful animals" who attempt to rape the Marquise in the heat of battle and the French-speaking gentleman who rescues her, only to rape her himself in a quieter (and less textually conspicuous) moment.
• In what amounts to a gesture of etymological downward displacement, the womb (hyster) of the Marquise becomes the locus of the representation and working through of the Count's hysterical conflict.
• to say that The Marquise of O is the story of a rape is to decide that the novella is about something it takes conspicuously ingenious measures to exclude from representation.
• 5. Periphrasis, Power, and Rape in A Passageg to India by Silver
• Periphrasis, defined most simply as "the use of many words where one or a few would do," has, like all figures, a more devious side.
• Where we would have the naming of the crime (attempted rape against Adela) and its perpetrator exists only a periphrasis, a gap. Continually talking around this unspecified center, the text ironically generates more words to produce less meaning.
• Early MS had a desctiption of assault! Later, Forster says in the cave it is either a man, or the supernatural, or an illusion. A hysterical repressed, overly intellectual New Woman who fantasizes and is haunted by sex ghosts. In this reading, we might add, Adela wants to be raped.
• The experience that she speaks as violation or rape, and read it not in terms of sexual desire or repression, but in terms of a deployment of sexuality within a system of power that posits a complex network of sameness and difference. Within this system, what is at stake is both gender difference and racial difference, with manifold lines of power crisscrossing the social and textual field. To read the novel from this perspective is to see it as a study of what it means to be rapable ,a social position that cuts across biological and racial lines to inscribe culturally constructed definitions of sexuality within a sex/gender/power system. THESIS
• Meh
• 6. Lucrece by Kahn
• while in comparison to Tar- quin she says little before the rape, Shakespeare virtually turns the poem over to her after it. In copious lament, in apostrophe, sententiae, and ekphrasis, she explores the meaning of what has happened to her and her feelings about it.
• Given the stridently patriarchal ideology in which the character is coded, then it is supremely pertinent to ask the question Mary Jacobus asks: "Is there a woman in this text?"
• After her violation, Lucrece loses our sympathy exactly in proportion as she gives tongue…Prince's phrase links Lucrece's speech with a physical organ and makes it sound unseemly (even faintly obscene) for her to use that organ to speak about her violation.
• While I agree with Jonathan Goldberg that "it is not necessarily a sign of power to have a voice, not necessarily a sign of subjection to lose it," I do not consider the speech of Shakespeare's characters removed from social practice and cultural signification
• Shakespeare's text, I believe, is no ta "mystic writing pad" from which male and female voices, untouched by constructions of gender outside the text, emerge and into which they also disappear
• What does it mean, then, for Tarquin's heroic will, turning out¬ ward toward Lucrece as a Vesta figure, a figure of the self, to rape her? I suggest that it is precisely this transgression that allows Shakespeare to create a heroic male subject in whom the contradic¬ tions of the dominant ideology are internalized and set at war.
• Being raped does grant Lucrece a voice— the voice of the victim. But the terms of her victimage do not constitute a vantage point distinct from the patriarchal ideology that generated Tarquin's act.
• But Lucrece did resist; as we saw, she argued against Tarquin at some length and when he seized her cried like a "poor lamb" until he smothered "her piteous clamours" with her nightgown (lines 673-686). In Lucrece's eyes, though, what counts as resistance?
• The poem ends with the rout of the Tarquins, carried out by Collatine and his kinsmen but authorized by Lucrece's account of the rape and her suicide. Thus she as a woman plays a peculiarly heroic role in the foundation of the Roman republic. Man I don’t KNOWWWW
• [Rape, Repression, and Narrative Form in Le Devoir de violence and La View et demie by Julien]
• Le Devoir de violence, by Malian writer Yambo Ouolo- guem (Paris: Seuil, 1968), and La Vie et demie, by Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi are formally innovative novels of the postcolonial period that expose the brutality of autocratic and totalitarian regimes.
• This particular use of image may seem to ignore the particularity of female sexuality: sexual violence and rape become near transparent signs of something else. Yet sexual violence in these texts is elucidated, if we read carefully, by the context of political violence. Rape, these texts suggest, is not an aberration, not a singularly sick act, nor an individual problem in an otherwise healthy society. Rape is represented, then, not as an isolated, gratuitous instance of violence that can be read metaphorically—that is, as an abstracted image of human disorder, ugliness, and disenfranchisement. It is portrayed rather, as the French term viol makes clear, metonymically, as a quintessential act of violence in a context of rampant abuse, both political and sexual.
• Meh
• [Rape and the Textual Violence in Clarice Lispector by Peixoto]
• Cixous' critical and fictional texts about Lispector (the boundary between them is tenuous) reveal a deep, though somewhat suspect, sympathy. With the words of another woman from a foreign place Cixous establishes a tender dialogue, and in these words she discerns multiple mirrorings of the dynamics of her own texts.
• A superlative reader of the nuances of gentleness in Lispector, Cixous nevertheless presents a tamed version of her texts, stripped of their disturbing pull toward violence.
• Cixous privileges in Lispector traditional and ideologically conservative feminine stereo¬ types (woman as mediator, as benevolent nature, as Good Mother).4 Yet the context for gentleness in Lispector is often a field of textual interactions charged with violence. I would like to examine this textual violence by focusing on a persistent issue in Lispector's fiction: writing the victim.
• In one of Lispector's best-known novels, The Passion According to G. H. (1964), this "reality" inheres in a cockroach: a female narrator watches it closely, kills it, then, in a sort of mystical communion, tastes its substance. In this tense encounter, observation yields repulsion, identification, and dizzying reversals of relative power as the woman feels engulfed by the cock¬ roach, which is in turn victimizer and victim. I think it fair to say that in Lispector narrative demands a victim or, conversely, the victim demands narrative.
• But how, from what perspective and with what investments, does one write the victim's experience?
o 1. (via rape stories) she distances and naturalizes violence against women
o 2. The strategy for writing the victim becomes, though, no longer a containment within ideological and narrative structures that minimize violence but involves, on the contrary, an unleashing of aggressive forces. She begins calling into question the suspect alliances of narrative with forces of mastery and domination
• [Alice Walker’s ‘Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells’: A Struggle Towards Sisterhood by McKay]
• Transformed into a question, the title of Walker's text probes the moral dimensions of black women's ambivalences toward sisterhood with white women especially on the issue of black-on-white rape. Is it possible, she is asking, for black women to "advance Luna" (raise their voices in unconditional outrage for the white-woman victim) without violating the meaning and memory of the lives of Ida B. Wells and the myriad other named and unnamed black men and women who devoted lifetimes and careers to the campaign against lynching or the innocent black victims of that bloody crime?
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