Rape as Literary Theme
Rape as a literary theme has evolved significantly over time, reflecting societal attitudes and cultural contexts surrounding sexual violence. Historically, literature often depicted rape as a means of establishing male dominance, with works from classical antiquity to the early modern period treating it with a degree of insensitivity or even triviality. Notable examples include portrayals in the Bible and classical texts where the focus is frequently on the consequences for male relatives or the social implications rather than the victim's trauma.
In contrast, late twentieth and twenty-first-century literature increasingly centers on the victim's experience, portraying rape as a crime rooted in power dynamics rather than mere passion. Authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Sebold provide poignant narratives that address the psychological and societal repercussions of sexual assault, emphasizing the importance of women's autonomy and identity. Contemporary works often confront the brutal realities of rape head-on, aiming to dismantle the longstanding cultural narratives that have historically blamed victims. This shift towards a more victim-centered perspective in literature reflects broader societal changes in the understanding and acknowledgment of sexual violence, as well as the growing urgency to address these issues openly.
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Rape as Literary Theme
The Issue
It has taken millennia for rape—sexual assault—to be recognized unreservedly as crime. Earlier ages could look upon rape as a means of establishing male rights to a woman or even as an expression of manhood. Public disgust at sexual violation has grown in recent centuries to the point where the understanding of rape includes marital rape, rape of a prostitute, and rape under implicit as well as explicit threat. In the twenty-first century. toleration for sexual assault reached new lows as women in the United States increasingly came forward to report crimes they had previously kept hidden for fear of being stigmatized or disbelieved; accordingly, treatments of rape in literature become more forthright and victim-centered.
Historically, much literature has taken a naturalistic view of rape, viewing violence, including sexual violence, as inevitable in human relations. Most late twentieth century writing moved in the direction of feminist theorists, who insist that rape is a crime not of passion but of abuse of power. Feminist analysis also indicates that rape is a criminal means of suppression. Rape is invasive, violating the victim’s privacy, threatening the individual’s sense of control, undermining self-worth.
History
Literary perspectives on rape have altered over time. The Bible condemns rape emphatically, but does so from the perspective of the male relatives of the victim. The sons of Jacob in Genesis 34 murder an entire village because the prince of that hamlet “humbled” their sister. Intertribal war is fomented by the rape of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19. When David’s son Amnon rapes his half-sister Tamar in 1 Kings 13, the disaster for him as well as for her is carefully traced in the bitter consequences of her grief and his death.
Classical perspectives on rape are more cavalier. Ovid’s Metamorphoses (before 8 b.c.e.) highlights dozens of rapes, often by gods. The frequency of rape in classical literature may give a reader the impression that male sexual dominance, enforced by assault, is the norm. Classical literature may thus be said to encourage a cultural attitude of aggressiveness in males and compliance in females. In the Metamorphoses, the Thracian king Tereus rapes his sister-in-law Philomela, cutting her tongue off to keep her from disclosing the violation, thus depriving her not only of virginity but of voice—perhaps even of personality, for the rape bestializes Philomela, turning her into a nightingale, incapable of human communication. The nymph Callisto, after being raped, degenerates similarly into a bear, Zeus's lover Io transfigures into a cow, and the nymph Daphne falls so far from humanity as to become a bay tree. Caenis, raped by Neptune, begs to become a man so as never to have to endure rape again. The psychological direction of those transformations is clear: rape desexualizes, even dehumanizes.
Terence’s comedy The Eunuch (161 b.c.e.) features a rape that apparently is resolved happily, suggesting that rape is a transgression that can be resolved as long as love accompanies it or marriage follows it (preserving family honor by the rapist marrying his victim). In Livy’s history, the Roman noblewoman Lucrece is given a choice between being raped and being killed and chooses the former. Consent making her an adulterer in the Roman view, Lucrece then commits suicide. Rape, which some consider a fate worse than death, distressingly often results in death as well. Other examples of the punishments meted out for the crime of being raped: Amphissa is blinded by her father for getting raped; Apemosyne is murdered by her brother for the immorality of being raped by Hermes; Arne is blinded by her stepfather when he discovers her pregnant by rape.
In William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594), Titus stabs his daughter Lavinia to death for getting raped. This projection of the blame for rape upon the victim occurs although the rapist in Greek myth is presented as irresistible: Zeus comes ineluctably as a shower of gold to Danae, invincibly as a bull to Europa, overwhelmingly as a swan to Leda. The tendency to see the victim as both helpless and at fault continued into the literature of the twentieth century.
Classical and biblical attitudes toward rape inform medieval texts, in which rape is a relatively minor breach of chivalry but sufficient reason for the warriors of one family group to battle with the warriors of another.
In the eighteenth century, depictions of the psychological effects of rape on the victim began to appear. Alexander Pope’s mock heroic The Rape of the Lock (1712) smilingly laments the loss not of Belinda’s real but rather her symbolic virginity, a lock of her hair. The story is told by a narrator who keeps ironic distance from Belinda, but the focus is on her. Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady (1747–48) is a psychologically probing if emotionally titillating examination of the rape of its drugged heroine. At the end of the century Charles Lamb’s A Tale of Rosamund Gray (1798) punishes a rapist with a miserable death. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literature continued to portray rape according to biblical and classical models but also developed the sense of rape being a crime in which the rapist, not the victim, is to blame, and in which the victim deserves sympathy.
Rape as Power
Rape has come to be understood as a crime not of passion but of power, the assertion of the will of one human being over another. The sexual aspect is viewed only as a particularly humiliating assertion of dominance. Such a psychological dynamic explains the recurring pattern in literature of the victim’s loss of identity and willingness to embrace subjection. Victims often blame themselves for somehow inviting violence.
The difference between rape and seduction, which hinges on consent, is not always clear when the consenting person has less physical and social power than the person making advances. Ambiguity and ambivalence about rape is common in literature, which often uses ambiguity to stimulate the reader’s own thinking about a theme. Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), is ambiguous about Tess’s first sexual encounter with Alec D’Urberville. The encounter may be more seduction than rape, yet it is clearly a violation. Alec takes sexual advantage of his masculine power and social privilege. Hardy places the blame squarely on Alec; much to the shock of his Victorian audience he proclaims Tess “a pure woman” after her violation. Toward the end of the novel, after Tess kills Alec, she continues to be portrayed sympathetically. The argument in Tess of the D’Urbervilles is that social vices and inequalities make whether Tess was raped or not a moot point.
In the twentieth century, rape in literature came closer to actual experience. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) recounts the widespread rape of slave women, setting rape unavoidably in the shared historical past of the people of the United States. Richard Peck’s Are You in the House Alone? (1976) provides an almost clinical assessment of the possibility of rape in modern life. William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931) depicts what is now called date rape—rape by someone familiar to the victim. Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) portrays rape by someone known to the victim with great dramatic power. Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) places gang rape where it happens: in one’s neighborhood. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) portrays rape within families. In all these twentieth-century portrayals of rape, rape is presented baldly, in its shocking brutality. Disapproval of these rapes can be seen in the gruesome realism of their presentation.
Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) similarly goes out of its way to show how disgusting rape is; the homosexual assault on the protagonist as a youth harms his sense of male identity. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) features a father-daughter rape that leaves the girl pregnant, mentally unstable, and socially isolated.
For all the modern disapproval of rape in literature, literary voices have still echoed the ancient toleration. D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Princess” revels in fantasies of the rape of an American woman by natives. His novels such as Women in Love (1920) play frankly upon male sexual dominance. Women have also written ambivalently about rape. Ayn Rand’s heroine in The Fountainhead (1943) seems to feel from being raped as much satisfaction as dismay. Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking nonfiction My Secret Garden (1973), based on interviews with women about their sexual fantasies, revealed that some women fantasize about rape.
There is even, in such Flannery O’Connor stories as “Greenleaf” (1988), the implication of rape as a kind of saving grace that shakes Mrs. May out of her complacency into a new openness that could lead to salvation. Those unsettling religious possibilities of rape may be best focused by William Butler Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” (1923), a poem recounting Zeus, in the form of a swan, raping the Spartan queen Leda. Yeats raises the question as to whether the rape is simultaneously a kind of annunciation, the attack a stimulus to wider awareness, the violation a means of inspiration. Thus rape is sometimes depicted metaphorically, as a kind of religious transport.
As a review of various depictions of rape makes clear, literature of the twentieth century contains contradictory messages about rape. This ambivalence probably contributes to the condition that few experiences are as threatening to identity as rape. Victims describe the feeling of being raped as like being robbed without knowing what has been stolen. There is in the aftermath of rape a sense of never again being able to be what one has been, of disillusionment and despair. This anguish is traced powerfully in Adrienne Rich’s poem “Rape” (1984): When “you are guilty of the crime / of having been forced” there is a feeling of loss of control of what is most intimate, of being invaded where it is most private, of having the most personal secrets made public.
In the twenty-first century, heightened sensitivity to the historical prevalence of rape and the need to address it openly led to a larger number of women writers addressing the topic in their fiction in a way that centers the experience of the victim. The Lovely Bones (2002) by Alice Sebold is told from the perspective of a teenage girl who is raped and murdered, and then watches from heaven as her family and friends continue with their lives. Luckiest Girl Alive (2015) by Jessica Knoll explores what happens to a successful young women when she decides to disclose her past abuse. Wrecked (2016) by Maria Padian tells the story of one college student's sexual assault from the perspectives of each of the people present. His Favorites (2018) by Kate Walbert is about a girl at a boarding school who falls prey to her English teacher. In all of these works, rape and sexual assault are not merely literary devices or adjuncts to a larger theme, but address head on the issues of women's autonomy and identity in a society that has struggled to fulfill its promises of equal rights and justice for all.
Bibliography
Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975.
Buchwald, Emilie, Pamela R. Fletcher, and Martha Roth, eds. Transforming a Rape Culture. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1993.
De León, Concepción. "Novels That Tackle Sexual Assault." The New York Times, 27 Sept. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/books/novels-that-tackle-sexual-assault.html. Accessed 24 Sept. 2019.
Higgins, Lynn A., and Brenda R. Silver, eds. Rape and Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Novey, Ida. "The Silence of Sexual Assault in Literature." The Paris Review, 4 Oct. 2018, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/04/the-silence-of-sexual-assault-in-literature/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2019.
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Young, Tiffany Ann. "Rape in Contemporary American Literature: Writing Women as Rapeable." Thesis. Florida State U, 2007, fsu.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fsu:169046/datastream/PDF/view. Accessed 24 Sept. 2019.