Lili Pâquet. Australian Feminist Studies. Volume 33, Issue 97, 2018.
Introduction
During their lifetimes, one in 6 Australian women and one in 20 Australian men are sexually assaulted (Quadara and Tarczon 2012). It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that these survivors of abuse are part of the adult audience for films, television, and literature. Through their consumption of popular literature, rape survivors may become spectators to depictions of sexual violence and revenge. While Claire Henry refers to rape–revenge as a genre (2014, 4), this article follows Jacinda Read’s suggestion that it is rather ‘a narrative structure which has been mapped over other genres’ (2000, 25), particularly because—unlike Henry—I focus on literary examples. In these literary narratives, victims seek vengeance against their rapists, often outside legal avenues. While literature that converges rape–revenge, romance, and urban fantasy have been discussed in detail by Deffenbacher (2014), this article focuses on its specific manifestation in crime fiction and memoir.
In films and television, the violence of revenge is presented as cathartic but the violence of rape is condemned, and these responses are contingent upon the visual depiction of both. This contradiction leads me to ask, how does the highly visual aesthetic of rape–revenge adapt to written narratives? If rape victims make up a significant proportion of the audience, can rape–revenge offer a kind of therapy? In response to these questions, this article begins with discussion of the rape–revenge narrative and Elizabeth Grosz’s theories of corporeal feminism. I evaluate the shamed bodies of victims in literary rape–revenge and how they transform to embody vengeance (or fail to), in the literature of Barbara Wilson, Tara Moss, Y. A. Erskine, and Alice Sebold. These literary examples are then compared to Australian media examples of journalism about rape. I conclude that literary rape–revenge offers a more realistic and political response to rape than its filmic counterpart, specifically through its depiction of the corporeal female body, shame, and thwarted justice. However, heightened reality does not make literary rape–revenge more therapeutic than rape–revenge narratives that use violent spectacle.
Throughout this article, I have used the terms rape survivor and rape victim but I acknowledge that neither is sufficient. As Watt suggests, ‘these labels simplify the outcome of the narrative—the victim is to be pitied while the survivor is celebrated for strength and courage’ (2014, 71). As the literary examples demonstrate, there is rarely such a simple divide in experiences.
Corporeal shame
The rape–revenge narrative began to gain popular recognition in the 1970s following the release of controversial films such as Jack Hill’s Coffy (1973) and Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978) but has rarely been examined in written literature. The exception is Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), which has received scholarly attention by those such as O’Neill and Seal, who write that the novel can be ‘criticised for offering potentially titillating detailed descriptions of violence against women, such as Lisbeth’s rape, which seem to undercut the book’s claim to be a critique of misogyny’ (2012, 60). This is an interesting assertion, considering how rape–revenge narratives often establish the necessity of revenge by first showing the trauma of rape. As Claire Henry argues in her book Revisionist Rape-Revenge,
sympathy and justice for the victim still rely upon her being first established as innocent—that is, not drunk, not promiscuous, not careless … [S]pectatorial sympathy relies upon the spectacle of rape for visible proof—witnessing the rape scene increases both our empathy and our trust of the victim’s accounts. (2014, 87)
Despite the disgust provoked by rape scenes in film, the necessity of including them is questionable. There are uncomfortable correlations between rape–revenge and reality in the assertion that the rape must be witnessed to be credible. Larsson’s narrator does not relate the rape, which takes place ‘off the page’, but readers would not typically assume that the sex was consensual. Although a visual medium, film should not have different problems with the issue of consent. On the other hand, not showing the rape could replicate the silencing experienced by victims. The tension between witnessing rape and silencing and shaming victims is central to the rape–revenge narrative in literature, as developed throughout this article. These tensions are often illustrated through the physicality of the protagonist and how she is presented during and after rape. Put simply, her body is presented as innocent before the rape and transformed afterwards. The rape is the trigger for the physical transformation, which is symbolic of her internal transformation. Therefore, it is significant to critically approach the narrative mode through the prism of corporeal feminism.
Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of corporeal feminism is based upon the ways that ‘Patriarchal oppression justifies itself through the presumption that women, more than men, are tied to their fixed corporeality’ (1987, 5). In turn, this reduction of women to their corporeal bodies allows men more freedom mentally and physically. In her book, Volatile Bodies, Grosz writes,
The coding of femininity with corporeality in effect leaves men free to inhabit what they (falsely) believe is a purely conceptual order while at the same time enabling them to satisfy their (sometimes disavowed) need for corporeal contact through their access to women’s bodies and services. (1994, 14)
While men can traverse both public and mental spaces, women are anchored to their physical bodies, which are then used to justify the suppression of their autonomy and authority under the guise of ‘safety’. The rape–revenge narratives discussed herein feature women who are physically assaulted by men, but have often transcended material boundaries. The rape shames them, but they show that retaliatory violence can likewise shame the men who attacked them; their bodies can transform from weak and exploitable objects into violent weapons; and alternatively, they can wield mental and political power to shame their rapists, thus proving that they are able to use mental acuity in the same way as men. While it is incredibly troubling to present rape as a positive transformative event in a woman’s life, narratives about rape focus on the female body and violence in thought-provoking ways. In rape investigations, a woman’s body is the scene of the crime and thus becomes the subject of scrutiny. As American academic Tara Roeder argues, ‘dehumanizing treatment underscores the ways in which the very bodies of rape victims become public property, subject to analysis by those searching for evidence’ (2015, 23). As discussed later in this article, Australian media relies on the corporeality of the victimised and feminised body and rape–revenge narratives also rely upon the corporeal woman as both victim and avenger. In literature, the rape survivor’s body moves beyond its fixed corporeality in order to enact physical justice outside of legal institutions. The female body thus denies expectations socially and physically and, in this sense, rape–revenge can be a powerful and defiant narrative.
However, in rape–revenge literature and film, not only must the rape be ‘shown’ to establish innocence and believability, but the body of the protagonist must also be presented in a certain way. She must be innocent; that is, she must be sober, chaste, and much of the time also white and heterosexual. In Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky, she writes that her rapist was convicted because she represented an amalgamation of ‘lucky’ attributes, legally named ‘superficials’:
I was a virgin. He was a stranger. It had happened outside. It was night. I wore loose clothes and could not be proven to have behaved provocatively. There were no drugs or alcohol in my system. I had no former involvement with the police of any kind, not even a traffic ticket. He was black and I was white. There was an obvious physical struggle. (2011, 176)
This description of favourable ‘superficials’ is anything but superficial. One begins to question what happens to cases with victims who are not virgins, white, young, sober, or strangers to their rapists. The separation of this ‘innocent’ rape victim with the body of the avenging rape–revenge protagonist is a key part of the narrative. In a way the conventional rape–revenge narrative is about the transformation a woman goes through when she realises that the justice system primarily protects the interests of men and that she does not have to commit herself to a bodily female performance of innocence. The change from victim into avenger is a corporeal transformation that echoes the ‘casting off’ of male institutions.
It is worthwhile to further consider how the female body must be proven as ‘innocent’ in literary rape–revenge narratives before examining the vengeful body. Indeed, this performative body can yield fruitful ideas to a corporeal feminist reading. There are relatively few novels written from the first person perspective of the rape victim. One notable exception is the vicious rape of Barbara Wilson’s private detective Pam Nilsen in Sisters of the Road ([1986] 2013). The first person narrative allows for no sexualisation of the rape. Instead, it is described through an internal monologue of Pam’s experience to her selfhood:
he raped me. With a punishing violence that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with rage and hatred … I felt that whatever made Pam a person, whatever I knew or had known about myself was being crushed out of me, was spinning into fragments like a planet smashed by meteors. (198)
Illusions to outer space draw attention to the internal consequences of Pam’s rape; her isolation. It also draws attention to her body without sexualising it. She is ‘smashed’ and ‘crushed’ physically and metaphorically. This is reminiscent of Grosz’s argument about the links between the internal and the external features of corporeal feminism, of which she suggests, ‘rather than defining the subject in terms of a mind, as traditional philosophies have done, the subject’s corporeal existence can be explored from the “inside” as it were’ (1987, 9). Wilson writes about her protagonist’s rape as experienced through both body and mind. Rape as a violent physical act does not limit Pam to her body; she is still able to think metaphorically and logically. There is also a splitting of her personality from the planet she was before to the spinning fragments she is after the rape.
Following her rescue, Pam does not exact vengeance through violence, but struggles to heal. She reflects,
Over and over I saw myself as the patrolmen must have seen me, pants down, bleeding and exposed. Degraded and exposed. One of them, I’m positive, was turned on. I saw it in his eyes … If it had been Cagney and Lacey, the show would have stopped right there, with the dramatic moment of rescue. But somehow it didn’t. I had to go on living. (199)
The spectacle of rape as seen from the police officer’s male gaze is interpreted through Pam’s victimised gaze. The officer is complicit in her degradation. He sexualises her body and brings the metaphor of internal suffering to a sharp end by using his gaze to affix her to her body. This use of gaze in rape–revenge has links to Elspeth Probyn’s arguments about writing shame, which she believes has an ‘ethical implication’ (2010, 81). Put simply, shame transcends the personal embarrassment of characters to affect readers. As such, in rape–revenge shame can provide impetus for readers to consider their own views and assumptions about rape. Probyn argues that ‘Writing is a corporeal activity. We work ideas through our bodies; we write through our bodies, hoping to get into the bodies of our readers’ (76). In the scene of Pam’s rape, she is shamed by the police officer’s gaze, which she recognises as sexualising violence in a way her rapist has not (he is driven by ‘rage and hatred’ not sexual desire). Wilson confronts readers with a scene that associates the police institution with the sexualisation of violence against women, through the gaze on the female body. Furthermore, she sees herself through the officer’s gaze and thus demonstrates how she knows she is supposed to be seen. Once she thinks that she looks ‘degraded and exposed’, she feels shame. The gaze is an act that Pam recognises, internalises, and then responds to with an embodiment of victimisation. There are similarities between this description and Sebold’s description of walking home after her rape in Lucky (2011). She writes, ‘I was aware I was being stared at … But I wasn’t there. I heard them outside of me, but like a stroke victim, I was locked inside my body’ (22). Again, there is no dissociation with the mind, but rather a social awareness that ‘locks’ Sebold’s mind in her corporeal body, particularly through the gaze of others.
Wilson also underlines the fallacy of the spectacle of rape that ends with a triumphal rescue. Sisters of the Road does not conclude on this point, but continues with Pam’s struggle to recover from her trauma. She has no outlet for vengeance and instead explains, ‘Being a victim doesn’t make you self-righteous; it makes you defensive, suspicious, ashamed’ (Wilson 2013, 199). Furthermore, when Pam attempts to direct her anger into self-defense manoeuvers, she realises that her body is still healing and that her anger has no physical outlet, as she is too weak to throw a punch (200). While the rapist has hurt her physically, the police institution has left her metaphorically enervated. In her helplessness within a chauvinistic and reactionary institution, Pam Nilsen has many similarities to Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, but her physical helplessness represents a more realistic struggle against the trauma of violence. Thus, Barbara Wilson adapts the visual aesthetic of rape–revenge using corporeal embodiment of social expectations, which are presented to readers through first person narration rather than violent spectacle.
The trope of rape victims who feel further victimised by police is replicated in The Betrayal (2012a), a police procedural by Australian author and ex-police officer Y. A. Erskine. In it, police officer Lucy Howard is date raped by a colleague. There is no murder or kidnap narrative, only that of Lucy’s rape complaint and its effects on the insular community of the Tasmanian police force. Sonya, the investigator in charge of Lucy’s case, thinks of her male cohort that he ‘was one of the boys, the maaaate, the back-slapper extraordinaire’ (127). The Australian ‘mate’ culture she refers to entrenches Lucy’s victimisation and makes it impossible for her to press charges against her rapist. As John Scaggs writes in his book on the crime fiction genre, while the realism of the police procedural ‘becomes a powerful weapon of reassurance in the dominant social order’ (2005, 98), there are ‘certain gender issues associated with placing women within the hierarchical and traditionally masculine world of the police’ (102). This is particularly evident in Erskine’s harrowing novel, as even Lucy, an ‘insider’ in the system, is cast as an outsider to the ‘mate’ culture of the police institution. Her position allows the novel to draw parallels between crimes against women—such as rape—and sexism within the institution investigating the crimes.
The ‘mateship’ culture is also examined in Australian films depicting gang rape such as Blackrock (Steven Vidler 1997) and The Boys (Rowan Woods 1998). As Australian film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas argues:
[T]here is often an ugly and terrifyingly thin line between nationally celebrated notions of ‘mateship’ and the grim reality of gang rape. The historical presence of gang rape in post-invasion Australia has been critically acknowledged, and the intersection of masculine ‘mateship’ with groups of men sexually assaulting women is mirrored on screen in a number of memorable and often harrowing instances. (2011, 87)
As an epithet most often used by men and to describe men (Rendle-Short 2009, 252–253), ‘mate’ has cultural significance in Australia and can express friendship, camaraderie, and nationalism (245). On the other hand, it can also denote a certain white, heteronormative Australian culture from which minorities and women are excluded, purposely or not (Alimoradian 2014). Both films discussed by Heller-Nicholas are based upon real rape and murder cases and, as discussed further in this article, so is Erskine’s novel. The Betrayal ultimately culminates in disappointment when the police tell Lucy that there is not enough evidence to take her rapist to trial, and she finds her colleagues supporting her rapist and turning their backs on her. This conclusion highlights the way rape complaints are treated in Australia, and leads to questions about ‘mateship’ culture in institutions and the ‘reality’ of rape. Victims do not get violent revenge, or rarely even a conviction. It is estimated that eleven percent (and even as low as four percent in New South Wales) of reported rapes lead to a criminal conviction (Anderson 2015).
Erksine’s novel has further differences to many visual narratives of stranger rape through its portrayal of date rape. In her book on female detectives in popular culture, Linda Mizejewski describes the crime genre convention of replacing femme fatales with ‘fatal men’, who are ‘capable of rape … For the fictional woman investigator, whose body is already a high-stakes element in the game, rape represents her ultimate vulnerability as a heroine’ (2004, 153). When that investigator is a member of the police, readers can see how rape complaints are handled from the perspective of law enforcement as well as the complainant. Date rape is rare in fiction, despite its prevalence in reality. In Australia, it is estimated that only one percent of rapes are committed by a complete stranger (NSW Rape Crisis). In fiction, however, rapists are often strangers and in rape–revenge films they are often further alienated by physical deformity or difference. According to scholar Peter Lehman, the spectacle of the rapist’s physical difference allows male spectators to sympathise with the victim but also view the rape scene erotically (1993, 112). However, in The New Avengers (2000), Jacinda Read argues that ‘the female character is frequently not eroticized until after the rape and the rape, in fact, is a process through which she is transformed’ (40). As Read suggests, the female protagonist of rape–revenge films is often an ‘average’ woman until the rape, which acts as a transformative experience. She then becomes a kind of erotic, fierce avenger. In contrast, rape–revenge victims in literature often become weak and unhealthy following the rape. Erskine, for example, describes Lucy as thin and sickly and Wilson’s Pam Nilsen is too weak to throw a punch. Rapists in literary rape–revenge narratives are also, as in Erskine’s novel, more likely to be known to victims and not physically deformed. In the date rape scenario, tension instead arises from Lucy’s believability and her role as both victim and police professional.
As discussed above, Read argues that rape is a transformative experience for protagonists. This could be read either as a way of presenting rape as a developmental part of life, or as a therapeutic way of representing rape–revenge as fantasy. In her evaluation of rape in films, Sarah Projansky suggests that victimisation empowers protagonists to become more autonomous and an advocate for others, as rape becomes ‘a fulcrum for a narrative about the transformation of a meek woman into a powerful, independent woman, who protects herself, and sometimes her friends and family’ (2001, 258). In other words, Projansky finds the possibility of not just personal but social healing following trauma of rape. I prefer to view the transformation as symbolic of the victim’s individual internal transformation; from an embodiment of ‘innocence’ and femininity through her socially shamed body, to one that is strong, autonomous from the law, and can produce shame in male bodies through revenge.
Violence as scriptotherapy
The revenge in Australian rape–revenge mirrors disappointment with the justice system’s response to rape. While Erskine highlights this through Lucy’s loss of bodily, mental, and professional autonomy, Australian author Tara Moss allows her protagonist to more fully embody the vengeful rape victim. In Moss’s Makkede Vanderwall series of novels, the eponymous Mak has been raped before the first novel Fetish ([1999] 2011) begins. As she explains to readers, ‘Stanley was in jail now, although not for what he’d done to her’ (Moss 2011, 116). In other words, Mak does not owe her ‘safety’ to the police or courts and the novel opens with unrequited violence. This failure in justice for her rape has left Mak with a distrust of the police which is developed throughout the series. Fetish concludes with her kidnapping and torture at the hands of Ed Brown, the ‘stiletto stalker’, who amputates her toe. Like Wilson and Erskine, Moss continues the narrative beyond the moment of rescue, and the third novel Covet ([2004] 2011) returns to Brown’s trial. When he manages to negotiate a shorter sentence, despite his torture and serial murders of women, Mak’s distrust of the policing institution is confirmed. In Siren ([2009] 2011), the fifth novel, Mak (a well-established magnet for serial killers by now) is kidnapped by the assassin Luther, and held prisoner at a French farmhouse. She comes to the realisation that no police or male saviours are coming to her rescue:
There are no white knights. This reality penetrated to her core. Some primal belief, some childish ideal had not fully been extinguished until now, despite her harsh years of experience … [There was no] Prince Charming. Or the more rational but no less naïve idea of the far-reaching, infallible long arm of the law. (Moss 2011, 1519, emphasis in original)
Mak seduces her kidnapper as a distraction in order to steal keys from his pocket and free herself from handcuffs. Although sexual consent is unable to be given in this case, the sex is described very differently to the rapes in the novels of Wilson and Erksine. Mak literally switches places with her kidnapper, physically trapping him in the handcuffs and symbolically disrupting their power relationship. She then sets him on fire: ‘He was trying to put his clothes out. His hair was still burning. She felt strangely disconnected from the scene, disconnected from everything but her bright clarity, her survival’ (1528). Through her lack of shame, Mak reveals her place within the chauvinistic institutions of the world. Moss writes that Mak is disappointed in ‘the police and their justice. She’d had enough of playing by the rules while others flaunted their immunity’ (1530, emphasis in original). Mak’s freedom is solidified through a cleansing fire. Her physical transformation signifies the internal one. As Grosz explains, ‘the metaphor of the body as a writing surface explains the ways in which the body’s interiority is produced through its exterior inscription’ (1987, 10). Mak realises that fairytales are not real; that if there are ‘no white knights’ then by proxy there are no innocent princesses. Furthermore, this realisation ‘penetrated to her core’, which implies that her internal realisation becomes an embodied reality. She then equates the fairytale ideal of chivalry with the more realistic ideal of being saved by ‘the law’, and turns her back on that as well. It is no surprise that at this moment she takes justice into her own hands. The physical transformation of Mak follows logically from the internal transformation.
In the last novel of the series, Assassin ([2012] 2011), this transformed Mak seeks further vengeance from outside the system. Like filmic rape–revenge scenes, readers are privy to a spectacle. This spectacle is the corporeality of her internal suffering and rage, as well as a wider social rage against the failure of the justice system. As Australian academic Alison Young clarifies, ‘the violence of wrong-doing is wrong, whereas the violence which responds to wrong-doing is righteous’ (2010, 24). But what makes it ‘righteous’? As a reader, it is difficult not to empathise with Mak and then rejoice in her newfound freedom, despite the violence she enacts. It might seem hypocritical to feel disgusted by rape and then enjoy retaliatory violence, however, the split between Mak’s body before and after her rape by Luther is an important moment in this reader reaction. To add further depth to a reading of the series, the author is herself a survivor of rape.
As a former fashion model, Moss draws interesting comparisons between the ownership men assume over women’s printed images and their physical bodies. Throughout her autobiographical, The Fictional Woman (Moss 2014), Moss explains how she entered modelling in her tender teenage years. At age 15 she appeared in her first printed advertisement for Woodward’s department store. Her family’s mechanic, not realising her age, had the image taped to his wall (11). From this beginning point, Moss describes the continuous harassment she experienced as a young woman, culminating in her rape by an acquaintance. She writes:
I am no longer worried about being defined as a ‘victim’. I have defined myself beyond that experience. I have become a survivor—one of many survivors of crime. With my scars now faded, I no longer need to protect my wounds as I once did. Perhaps sharing these stories will help someone else with theirs. (53)
This underlines how authoring a rape–revenge narrative can work as scriptotherapy. Scriptotherapy is the writing of a traumatic event, so that the structure and forms of narrative allow the author to make sense of their trauma in order to heal. These narratives are usually in the form of memoir, because, as Anne Hunsaker Hawkins—an academic in humanistic medicine—explains:
Though allowing that they are constructed and not remembered narratives, trauma theorists would stress the factual over the fictive dimension. The emphasis on the factual nature of testimony reflects our cultural preoccupation with the authority of personal experience. Perhaps, then, autobiographies about illness or trauma have achieved a validity and an authenticity that is in part a reflection of the way we in our culture privilege personal narrative. (2007, 124)
There are a multitude of ways to read rape–revenge, other than through the prism of scriptotherapy, particularly as this reading could use therapy as an ‘excuse’ for the violence in the narrative. However, reading rape–revenge as scriptotherapy also allows one to draw meaningful comparisons between the treatment of victims before the law, in literature, and in the media. As Sarah Liss argues about rape memoirs, ‘The legal system may reject anything outside of black-and-white certitudes, but personal narrative allows a writer to revel in these grey areas, to explore the things that do not make sense’ (2016). While she refers to memoir, these rape survivor narratives appear in fiction as well. Indeed, literature allows authors to create their own narrative and tell it without adhering to the regulations of the courtroom. This ‘telling’ implies that therapeutic elements of scriptotherapy come from the knowledge of an audience. As psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman argues, ‘The survivor needs the help of others who are willing to recognize that a traumatic event has occurred, to suspend their preconceived judgments, and simply bear witness to her tale’ (1997, 68). It is not necessarily true that readers suspend judgments or ‘simply’ witness tales, as reading is not always such a passive act. For example, in an academic comparison of 252 Amazon reviews of Lucky, Sarah E. Stone Watt found that readers were often disappointed with Sebold’s lack of a ‘solution’ to rape, and that their reviews ‘reflect a therapeutic interpretation of the narrative that perpetuates the depoliticization of rape by imagining it as a personal problem that can be dealt with by an individual rape victim’ (2014, 65). As with any creative work, reader interpretation is out of the hands of authors, and Watt found that readers interpreted Sebold’s memoir as personal trauma.
While Moss hopes her memoir will ‘help others’, could her fiction also be considered therapeutic? Examining the transformation of her protagonist yields some possible responses. Moss explains that Mak is ‘a reluctant saviour and criminal with an impressive skillset earned through years of trouble. A woman pushed to her limits. A vigilante. An anti-hero’ (2014, 57). It cannot be denied that this vigilante heroine is appealing to audiences. Like Lisbeth and those who came before her, Mak harnesses the masculine violence that was turned against her. She literally takes the place of Luther after the rape, using his remaining money and contacts to track down her enemies. Her use of violence thus allows her access to more physical and fiscal power, without the help of the justice system. The physicality of a female heroine in such a narrative is captivating. Canadian academic Julianne Pidduck writes that, ‘Against a remarkably constant current cultural convention which positions women across the board as victims of violence, as lifeless corpses or quivering, endangered waifs ripe for the saving, the fatal femme cuts a potent, exceptional figure’ (1995, 12). Mak is certainly an exceptional figure like those Pidduck describes, but Erskine and Wilson present different non-violent retaliations. This variety of reactions is part of the nuance found in literary rape–revenge, where victims have the opportunity to choose their responses and narrate the consequences. Both Moss’s conventional rape–revenge and Erskine’s disappointed rape–revenge highlight the concerns of victims of rape; the former through resorting to retaliatory violence, the latter with the negative outlook provided through legal avenues. These literary rape–revenge narratives could also be considered therapeutic because of the way rape ‘silences’ victims. In the narratives rape survivors choose avenues—legal, political, violent—to affect their rapists, and in doing so they are active participants in their post-rape lives, and their voices are ‘heard’ by readers.
Distrust of the legal system is evident in the vigilantism of rape–revenge heroines. In fiction and memoir, rape victims can tell their stories without being silenced or cross-examined. For example, Erskine has revealed that The Betrayal is based on her own experience of rape by another police officer, but she writes, ‘I decided against making a formal complaint. I knew how the system worked and felt that my case wouldn’t stand a chance’ (2012b). The novel was written as a kind of ‘what if?’ scenario, playing out the implications of a complaint. The novel uses Lucy’s rape to depict social and institutional sexism but is also a personal therapeutic text. As fiction, Erksine’s rape narrative could have taken on fantasy revenge, but terminated with a more realistic scenario of police dropping the investigation without charging Lucy’s rapist. Reading it as personal scriptotherapy allows the conclusion to take on another meaning: acceptance that if Erskine had pursued a rape charge, it would have been difficult, time-consuming, and ultimately could have had the same outcome. Literature allows Erksine to absolve herself for not reporting the rape.
Sometimes in memoirs, authors imagine a violent revenge. In Lucky (2011), Sebold recounts how she penned a revenge poem against her rapist, which was received badly in her university class. Other students seemed confronted when she did not meet their expectations of a female victim. It was the first time of many that Sebold would find people arguing that ‘You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful’ (109). Thus, even in memoir, readers encounter the prevalent idea that the female body transforms following rape. In other memoirs there are also fantasies of violent revenge against rapists. As Henry suggests:
First-person literary accounts of rape trauma, such as those by Cathy Winkler (2002) and Nancy Venable Raine (1999), suggest the usefulness of violent revenge as a post-rape fantasy in the process of healing. Winkler describes her own approach to therapy, in which she nightly fantasized about torturing and killing her rapist … Winkler’s account highlights the potentially therapeutic function of revenge fantasies for survivors; however, more recent films in the genre suggest the cultural, political and ethical limitations of this response. (2013, 134)
As highlighted by Henry’s discussion of limitations to violent responses, there are differences between memoir, rape–revenge in novels, and filmic rape–revenge. However, these differences appear to be lessening more recently, particularly in the therapeutic fiction and memoirs composed by rape survivors, which have marked a turn towards questioning the ethics of retaliatory violence and a search for healing beyond institutional systems. Although the fictional narrative of rape may not appear as authoritative as the autobiographical form, it is also freed from restrictions of readers conflating the author with the protagonist, and therefore expectations that a magical solution to rape will be revealed. Fiction also allows authors to overcome shame by distancing themselves (at least more than in memoir) from the rape and the violence of revenge. They will not be questioned like Sebold following her revenge poem, or expected to react in socially acceptable ways.
The politics of rape
In the examples given throughout this article, there are two options for fantasy therapy: violence or legal retaliation. Both of these options attempt to turn shame back onto the rapist through their body and/or their professional reputation. Neither are the ‘solutions’ searched for by Sebold’s reviewers but they present the female corporeal body split before and after the rape, using shame to question social and legal understandings of rape. Indeed, Henry writes
there is a cultural need to try to understand what rape is, what impact it has, and how to respond. The contemporary genre provides insight into these issues and a cultural forum for the complexities of rape politics to be worked through. (2014, 3)
There is a third possible response to the shaming of the female body that does not involve retaliatory violence. That response is one of political power to ‘name and shame’ rapists. It is only in rare instances that survivors use newfound political power. For example, in season two of Netflix series House of Cards (2014), Claire Underwood (performed by Robin Wright) uses her political position to publicly denounce her rapist, justify her abortion to conservative voters, and push for the rights of rape victims. Sebold also has political power over her rapist once the trial is over. The parole board sends her a letter asking for recommendations before the sentencing of her rapist. She asks for maximum penalty and uses social reasons rather than personal ones, because she reasons, ‘they wouldn’t be doing it for me, but for the people who elected them and paid their salaries’ (Sebold 2011, 209). There are a number of interesting points in Sebold’s account. Firstly, she only holds political power after the conviction of her rapist as she is then legally considered ‘believable’. Once he is found guilty by the legal institution, she has the ability to put forth suggestions on his punishment. Her suggestions are followed through and she believes it is because she made her rape a political and social problem rather than a crime on her, individually. She implies that the social ramifications of rape—to crime statistics, political elections, tourism, and business—is more legally compelling than the physical attack on her body.
The lack of narratives with political revenge to rape is mirrored in media accounts and responses to real rapes. Two recent rape and murder cases that captured the attention of the Australian public were those of Melbourne ABC journalist Jill Meagher, who was captured on CCTV footage from a bridal store moments before her rape and murder in September 2012; and the murder of Stephanie Scott in a small rural town in April 2015, one week before her wedding. Media depictions of both women aimed to prove their ‘innocence’ through their corporeal feminine forms. The white wedding dress symbolises the virginity of the bride and the mitigating circumstances in both cases had similarities; Scott was sober and murdered at her place of work, Meagher was attacked by a stranger at night, and both women were white and held ‘respectable’ jobs. There are also similarities in how media depicted the women as young, innocent brides. In her academic article on the CCTV footage of Meagher, Little (2015) argues that crime reportage has links to the gothic narrative through the ways it depicts women. Media reports surrounding Scott’s death often accentuated that it was a week before her wedding; Penny Debelle’s article (2015) is titled ‘The Bride Who Never Made it to Her Big Day’ and Ean Higgins’s article (2016) also names her a ‘bride-to-be. ’ The most commonly used photograph was of her wearing a bachelorette sash and veil (see Partridge 2016). The media reported that police found that her murderer conducted Google searches on ‘bride rape’ and ‘bride kidnapping’ prior to his attack (Partridge 2016). Wedding photos of Meagher were also used in journalism about her murder (see Mitchell 2016). The idea of a bride dying appeals to social expectations about feminine vulnerability and has links to how women’s bodies are presented in rape cases in media, literature, and court trials. Media reports on the two women emphasise their innocence but at the same time use their murders to espouse social safety, appealing to the pathos of their audiences with a mixture of empathy and fear. In a new report on Meagher, a quotation from the former Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria warns that she was
a young woman, simply going about, engaging in ordinary activity and [she] died in that process. They were the reasons that [her murder] powerfully resonated … and [highlighted] the importance of ensuring that as far as possible, people can move around this community in safety’. (Mitchell 2016)
Unpacking this statement is revealing; he infers that Meagher was ‘innocent’ because she was ‘young’, engaged in ‘ordinary activity’ (rather than ‘risky’ activities like heavy drinking, crime, or sex), and—to be understood from references to community safety—she was attacked by a stranger. This, it is to be gathered, is evidence that Meagher was a guiltless victim and therefore worthy of readers’ empathy. This representation of Meagher has similarities to how rape–revenge narratives depict victims.
Meagher’s husband admitted to harbouring revenge fantasies, but he instead used his anger to begin a White Ribbon campaign aiming to raise awareness about violence against women (Gough 2014). One has to question whether ‘awareness raising’ is helpful to victims of sexual violence. In Australia, it is difficult to estimate the true scope of sexual assault because of low rates of reportage to police and because the Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys omit ‘the experiences of the most vulnerable members of our community; for example, children and young people, very remotely situated Australians, prisoners, people in residential care and other institutional settings’ (Quadara and Tarczon 2012). Once the court lifted the suppression order on Adrian Bayley, the rapist and murderer of Meagher, it was revealed that he was on parole for sixteen counts of rape against five women (Gough 2014). This revelation led to public protests to make city streets safer for Australian women, including a march on the first anniversary of Meagher’s death. This ‘Reclaim the Night’ march attracted around thirty thousand participants, who blocked a busy street in Brunswick, Melbourne. However, as Little points out
‘there is a significant contradiction involved in this public reaction to a crime committed by a stranger against a woman on a public street, compared with a relative lack of activism around the high rate of intimate partner violence in Australia. (2015, 401)
Additionally, rape victims are often silenced through the legal system. The treatment of rape victims by institutions in Australia is inconsistent. The New South Wales rape crisis website states, ‘Sexual assault is never the fault of the victim. The victim’s actions, clothing, or lifestyle is never an acceptable excuse for the assault’ (NSW Rape Crisis). However, courtroom questioning of victims contradicts this statement. For example, Mitchell Peggie was charged with sexual assault in 2014 and acquitted the following year. A week later he raped another woman and was convicted. Writing about his first trial, journalist Jane Gilmore tells how:
[His teenage] victim was subjected to a grueling cross-examination by the defense barrister. He asked if she had been ‘moaning and gasping with pleasure’ during the rape, grilled her about why she was wearing ‘sexy lingerie’, showed photos of her bra and underpants to the jury, insisted she was lying about the rape as revenge because she didn’t like the way Peggie treated her, and asked ‘What did you think was going to happen?’ when she testified about agreeing to go for a walk with Peggie. (2017)
Descriptions of trials like Peggie’s illustrate why reportage of rape is so low, and why so-called rape culture is prevalent and harmful. Laws work against women in other insidious ways by making abortions difficult to obtain and taxing essential sanitary products. As Casey Ryan Kelly writes in her article on gender politics in horror films, ‘Despite the latent ideologies that accompany legislative efforts to restrict women’s reproductive freedom, there is no corresponding panic over the state of men’s genitalia—no sustained political effort to restrict access to impotency prescriptions and vasectomies’ (2016, 101). The legal system, therefore, links women’s corporeal bodies with their lack of political power.
The literary rape–revenge narratives, while not bringing about social change, at least present readers with women who have retaliated to violence and disrupted the idea of the silent rape victim. They are protagonists who have gone beyond ‘awareness raising’ and enacted justice. In her writings on corporeal feminism Grosz offers several alternatives to the status quo, one of which is a redefinition of female corporeality in which
the body can be regarded as the object of dual power relations which inscribe it both socially and idiosyncratically, both “externally” and “internally”. The body is both the means by which power is disseminated and a potential object of resistance to power. (1987, 11)
While it may seem that the conventional rape–revenge narrative fails to realistically represent women’s experiences of rape and justice, it does prescribe to Grosz’s redefinition of the corporeal body. The victim transforms both socially and physically to become her own saviour. At the same time, the contradiction between this fantasy avenger and the reality faced by rape survivors is troublesome. While audiences rejoice at fictional vigilantes like Lisbeth Salander and Mak Vanderwall, and protested in large numbers following Jill Meagher’s murder, the high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault in Australia is often overlooked. Vigilante rape–revenge narratives also communicate potentially hurtful fabrications about the reality of rape to the wider public. A particularly troublesome convention of rape–revenge is the necessity of proving the victim’s ‘innocence’ through the representation of her body.
Some critics find newer rape–revenge narratives are less brutal in their depictions of rape and therefore less feminist than films of the 1970s. Kelly argues, ‘Their predecessors … more effectively conveyed the brutality of rape, visually lingering to the point of disgust and indicating the objectifying gaze of the spectator’ (2016, 90). This change is a relevant one when considering the impact of rape scenes on audience members who may be rape survivors. On the one hand, Kelly implies that the brutality of the rape scene shames viewers. In turn, this could justify the corresponding brutality of the revenge. On the other hand, insistence that viewers witness the rape risks replicating the doubt women can face when they do report rape. Henry finds that newer rape–revenge makes audiences question the ethics of revenge and whether it truly provides catharsis. She argues,
a weakening of the belief that revenge can achieve restoration may account for the sense of pessimism permeating the contemporary genre. This trajectory suggests that alternatives are needed—both as a viable response to sexual violence, and in order to sustain a genre that has become disillusioned with revenge. (Henry 2013, 136)
As seen in the widespread condemnation of parole leniency for rapists such as Bayley, or outrage over short to non-existent prison terms for rapists such as Peggie, questions about rape and justice have entered public consciousness in recent years. The rape–revenge narrative reflects its audiences. As Heller-Nicholas argues, ‘The oft-derided rape–revenge film must be seen as part of a long representational history that still continues to reconfigure the meanings of sexual violence in the broader public imagination’ (2011, 89). These meanings were not duplicated in media reports about Jill Meagher or Stephanie Scott, in which the women are presented as corporeally innocent. However, representations of rape have taken on varied forms in literary examples such as novels and memoirs by Tara Moss, Y. A. Erskine, and Alice Sebold.
Conclusion
Rape–revenge narratives adapt to literature—whether fiction or memoir—as more nuanced and less reliant on the corporeal female body, as readers can empathise with the victim through narration that offers her perspective, rather than spectacle. Ideas are still presented through the body of the victim; specifically through the split between the innocent body that is ‘shamed’ through rape, and the vengeful body post-rape. The body becomes the crime scene and the rapist can often be read as symbolic for the toxic masculinity in society and the justice system. When the rapist is a police officer protected by ‘mateship’ this symbolism is clearly pronounced.
Rape–revenge does not have to function as therapy or offer ‘solutions’ to rape. To suggest that women’s writing has to have some social function risks downplaying its importance as an art form. Moss and Erskine have described writing about trauma in fiction as therapeutic, but even in these cases, the narratives are fantasies that offer no real ‘solutions’ to rape. Even the ‘solution’ of naming-and-shaming rapists is a fantasy that assumes the victim has political power over her rapist and, as Erskine demonstrates, it does not work without the cooperation of patriarchal institutions. Instead of suggesting solutions, rape–revenge can function as a narrative mode that unapologetically confronts audiences with violent fantasy women. There is something enjoyable in female characters who break out of their corporeality in unexpected ways and who turn their backs on justice systems that enable their victimisation. These vigilantes then turn social expectations on their head by shaming their male attackers and reducing them to their corporeal body parts.
Even in narratives with no violent retaliation, rape survivors can be ‘heard’, particularly in memoir. Roeder believes it allows authors to tell their version of events in a space free of authoritarian rules, writing,
Memoirs of sexual assault become a different kind of evidence than courtroom testimony. They allow victims to regain control of their experience and explore the complex truths of rape without altering their narratives to fit seamlessly into culturally sanctioned scripts. (2015, 22)
On the other hand, this personal therapeutic ‘solution’ to rape does not address the wider problems with the institutional handling of rape complaints. As Liss argues,
If memoir is therapeutic, allowing individual writers to grapple with their own trauma, it is not an effective universal solution, or an enduring one … The form of justice accessible to most is the deeply flawed one offered by the court system. (2016).
Fictional forms of rape–revenge are similarly flawed, particularly as they are so clearly fantasy.
Concrete action beyond creative works is the only way to change the investigative and judicial processes and actively support victims, which could see higher reportage and conviction rates following rape. And while the ‘Reclaim the Night’ march following Meagher’s death was very powerful, it was soon forgotten by the wider public. Nevertheless, rape–revenge narratives capture the public’s empathy and begin conversations on justice. As Probyn suggests, writing is an act in itself. Rape–revenge has the power to shame readers and by providing the protagonist’s reaction—whether violent, imaginary, or political—the mode allows audiences to question their own assumptions about rape. It also allows survivors of rape, both real and fictional, to tell their stories in their own words; an opportunity they rarely have in the courtroom.