THE RAPE SCENE IN LITERATURE

And when he said to me
"Honey, you will be my only one"
I thought of God, country and
apple pie
All the things I'd been taught
to believe in
so I believed
He would take me in his arms
holding me too tight
"There's a lot of bad out there,
Baby"
a protector of my frail
little body frail
brittle fawn
all doe eyed and
gushing affection we'd
gurgle and coo and promise
each other
"If we do it, it will be
a bond of our LOVE"
"It'll be forever, like
world class lovers"

--Samantha Coerbell, from "The Romanticization"

Moving from the study of the figure to an examination of representations of the act, this section investigates the coding of the rape scene in literature. The analysis is framed by feminist polemics regarding the significance of submission in the lives of women: recurrent imagery of eventual surrender in the rape scenes of the "romance" genre are studied in relation to the cultural and political mandate of essential, or innate, male aggression, and necessary, or compensatory, female passivity. Here, too, the dichotomy of submission and betrayal is resurrected to centralize the battle over sexual domination: the racialized images of rape and dominion are examined in the characterizations of victims, perpetrators and survivors, in the literature women writers of color.

The relationship between "seduction" and "romance" is coded in the romance genre in very specific terms, according to literary scholar Janice A. Radway. In her cornerstone study Reading the Romance (1984), Radway examined these commercial texts, as well as the publishing houses that produce them. She reports that "what one reader called 'a little forceful persuasion'" would not necessarily be objectionable in this genre, if the readers give credence to the author's "attempt to show that the hero's sexual sway over the heroine is always the product of his passion and her irresistibility" (75). In fact, Radway found that:

one publishing house understands this quite well, for in its directions to potential writers it states that rape is not recommended but that one will be allowed under specific conditions, if the author feels it is necessary to make a point.(14) Should a rape occur "between the heroine and the hero," the directions specify, it must "never be initiated with the violent motivation that exists in reality" because "a woman's fantasy is to lose control" with someone who really cares for her. "A true rape" can be included only if "it moves the story forward" and if it happens to someone other than the heroine. (75)

Such directives underpin the model of romantic seduction described in Coerbell's poem,(15) above. Like Stepan and Gilman's (15a) third model of resistance, however, Coerbell employs a strategy of recontextualization to disrupt the meaning of the "romantic" discourse that opens her poem. "It's always like that when I remember," the speaker admits, while other, more tangible (but occluded) recollections are "blocked" and "shoved back" (54). In the end, though, engaged in the process of "telling" described by Judith Lewis Herman, the speaker discloses how:

"Things got a little out of hand"
a kiss hard and wet
(all my chin was wet)
a tongue made its way down my throat
without first meeting mine
wherever my top was
as you sucked my nipples raw
telling me I "loved it like this"
I'd lost track of your other hand
the one I could see
muffled my screams with your
flesh between my teeth
. . .
then your dick
ugly gangly looking
not invisible and
spiritually fulfilling
the glow
the movies promised
not slick long hard
like in the porno movies
ugly mean poking in
missing the hole you dug
instead you pushed harder
like to make a new
fucking hole
. . .
you kept on
because you were
"almost there, yeah baby, I'm
almost there, you're gonna
fucking take me there with
this tight pussy of yours,
only a tighttight pussy does it
for me"
such high praise
. . .
the only ringing
was in my ears
When he said
"Whore, I should kill you"
I believed (55)

So much for romance. That girls grow up to "believe in" male protectiveness and their own compensatory helplessness is indicted by Coerbell's work, while still the speaker discloses only with difficulty those passages of her remembrance that do not conform to the classic yearnings for the "invisible/ and spiritually fulfilling" penis that has its own potent "glow."

The same difficulty of disclosure is core to P. Gan's 1991 poem, "Taking,"(16) where the speaker opens not with a scene of romanticization and belief, but a nerve-wracking milieu of post-traumatic stress:

I take my coffee every morning and my wine
every night/ every few days I
need a valium.
Coffee because I am tired,
wine because I am nerve-anxious,
valium to cure both.
I am old. There is no child left in me. (26)

The speaker here is a Chinese-American woman who has been raped by a "friend," a Chinese-American man. "I give every Asian person a chance," she relates, "I don't give every white person a chance/ But if you're Asian/ I'll let you in/ because I consider you/ part of me/ except lately/ I am feeling old/ and tired" (28). An aspect of the trauma experienced here is in the speaker's broken allegiance with members of her own culture.

I am having lunch with a friend/ an ex-boyfriend
and his father, who is rich.
The father has on khakis and a tennis sweater
which is very unusual, for an Asian parent.
But he thinks living in Rancho Rojo Estates
(or wherever) and making big money/ let him
dress white.
I know better. I am old.
. . .
Andrea Dworkin says, "I have no patience
with the untorn," and my friend once said,
"Why don't the people in Chinatown pick themselves up
and get with it/ They make me embarrassed to be Asian."
You make me embarrassed, I should have said/ But I didn't
I said nothing, and wondered what it would be like to go
through life oblivious/ to never feel the power
beating on your back/ to never have to put yourself
back together again.
. . .
My friend's father in the tennis sweater says,
I hear you're going to law school/ Yes, I think, I'm going
to make people like you against the law/ Nobody
will be allowed to be oblivious/ Nobody
will be allowed to steal a child. (26-27)

Struggles with betrayals by her community are compounded, in this work, by the speaker's guilt over having been drunk, when she was raped -- "The man who raped me (when I am calling it a rape)" is how the speaker first characterizes the assault. She turns this anger on the smug safety and self-assuredness of her lunch companions:

Rape is not against the law/ Don't believe what it says
in the books/ But drugs are against the law/ Drinking is
against the law/ especially if you get drunk/ then
get raped/ Would wearing a tennis sweater make it OK
OK to rape/ OK to be drunk? What does this man
think/ that dressing white will buy him/ a life without
pain?/ Will it buy away his color/ or his slanty eyes?

There is anti-Japanese sentiment everywhere/ The American
public blames the Japanese for their own/ fallen economy
In Baltimore, they're beating up Korean grocers/ All
Asians look the same to them, anyway/ Can this man fail
to notice the ways of this world/ when he has raised his son
in it?

Why am I so angry at this man/ whom I have just met? (27)

"Doubt," suggests Judith Herman, "reflects the inability to maintain one's own separate point of view while remaining in connection with others. In the aftermath of traumatic events, survivors doubt both themselves and others. Things are no longer what they seem" (53). For the author of this autobiographical poem, the severance of trust and community conflate with the loss of childhood innocence. "Being raped has made me tired," she says:

weakened from the struggle
that lasted only twenty minutes/ for the man
but has ruined my next twenty years/ And every few days
I reach into the top drawer/ for the bottle I stole
from my mother/ who is tired/ The bottle clearly marked
Valium/ So when they find me/ if I ever get too tired
They'll know what to do/ How do we come to have
just those twenty minutes/ of power?

What would it be like if there were just women/ Just women
who were all one color/ and one size/ and one wealth/ Would we
understand/ And if the world were all men/ one color/ one size
one wealth/ would they still rape each other?/ When you've
always been the one in power/ You cannot understand what
it's like not to have it./ Is that their excuse?
. . .
Back at the table, smiling at the tennis sweater/ and his son
They are talking business/ man's talk/ about taking over
and doubling profits/ and making them pay/ for messing with us
Has anyone ever made them pay?/ Consume, indulge, devour
They are good at that/ and don't always need coffee with
their meals/ because when they are finally tired/ they can take
whatever/ whomever/ they like/ and go to bed. (28)

Rape signals a final rupture in allegiance; this is explained by Judith Herman in terms of traumatic severance: "In rape," she writes, "the purpose of the attack is to demonstrate contempt for the victim's autonomy and dignity. The traumatic event thus destroys the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others" (53).

Such a disconnection characterizes also the rape scene in Lucha Corpi's "Dark Romance" (1978).(17) Here, the persona of Guadalupe is found bathing in a river, "a promise of milk in her breasts/ vanilla scent in her hair/ cinnamon flavor in her eyes,/ cocoa-flower between her legs" (62). It is here the man finds her, and once again there is the suggestion that communal familiarity and "romance" will appease the violence of attack, for the victim:

Her mother found her there, and at the sight
took a handful of salt from her pouch
to throw over her shoulder.

A few days later, her father
accepted the gift of a fine mare.

And Guadalupe. . .Guadalupe hung her life
from the orange tree in the garden,
and stayed there quietly,
her eyes open to the river. (62-63)

The father's acceptance of the "fine mare" as wedding gift here indicates his consonant acceptance of the transferred ownership of his daughter's "virtue" to the conquering husband, much as the "ownership" of females were legally transferred from father to husband in the U.S., until the mid-nineteenth century.

The mother, on the other hand, throws the neutralizing agent salt, indicating her awareness that negative forces have been set into effect. In this characterization, not only the rape is demystified, but also the common culturally-specific complicity of the mother in betrayals, as interrogated by so many of the works in this canon.

In a like mode, the protagonist of Barbara Neely's short fiction "Spilled Salt"(18) is a mother who is unique to contemporary fiction: Myrna is the African American mother of a convicted rapist, who is set for her son to return "home" after his imprisonment. Myrna, however, cannot make peace with either his violence or his return. During the early prison visits, she was persistent in her need to know why:

"But why?" she'd kept asking him, just as she'd asked him practically every day since he'd confessed.
He would only say that he knew he'd done wrong. As the weeks passed, silence became his only response-a silence that had remained intact, despite questions like: "Would you have left that girl alone if I'd bought a shotgun and blown your daddy's brains out after the first time he hit me in front of you?" and, "Is there a special thrill you feel when you make a woman ashamed of her sex?" and, "Was this the first time? The second? The last?"
Perhaps silence was best now, after so long. Anything could happen if she let those five-year-old questions come rolling out of her mouth. Kenny might begin to question her, might ask her what there was about her mothering that made him want to treat a woman like a piece of toilet paper. And what would she say to that? (58)

Present again in the house, Kenny is a constant enigma to his mother, even "The crisp everydayness of clothes flapping on the line surprised her" (ibid.). So much should have changed, and yet, here was Kenny, eating his breakfast like everything was the same. "'I can't go through this again,' she mouthed silently to the breeze" (59). And the questions keep nagging: was it because of the abusive marriage to Kenny's father, Buddy? "Myrna remembered the crippling shock of Buddy's fist in her groin, and scoured Kenny's plate and cup with a piece of steel wool, before rinsing them in scalding water" (60).

Here, the neutralization of salt is self-protective, in the shedding of tears:

Tears slid down her face and salted her drink. Tears for the young Myrna who hadn't understood that she was raising a boy who needed special handling to keep him from becoming a man she didn't care to know. Tears for Kenny who was so twisted around inside that he could rape a woman. Myrna drained her gin, left Kenny a note reminding him to leave her door key on the kitchen table, and went to bed. (60)

Kenny's attentiveness and cordiality upon his return do not sit well with Myrna: how could this fit with the profile of a rapist, or the boy he had once been? Again, the motif of salt is called upon to signal the need for neutralization, in the face of negative circumstance:

In the kitchen Kenny had moved to take her place by the window. His dishes littered the table. He'd spilled the salt, and there were crumbs on the floor.
. . .
Her baby. He'd tricked a young woman into getting into his car, where he proceeded to ruin a great portion of her life. Now he'd come back to spill salt in her kitchen.
I'm home, Ma, homema, homema. His words echoed in her inner ear and made her flutter. He neighbors would want to know where he'd been all this time and why. Fear and disgust would creep into their faces and voices. Her nights would be full of listening, waiting.
And she would live with the unblanketed reality that whatever anger and meanness her son held toward the world, he had chosen a woman to take it out on.
A woman.
Someone like me, she thought. . .
And he might do it again. . . (62)

In the end, Myrna determines that she cannot bear the unanswered questions and uncertainties:

she wrote him a note, and propped it against the sugarbowl:
Dear Kenny,
I'm sorry. I just can't be your mother right now. I will be back in one week. Please be gone. Much love, Myrna.

Kenny flinched and frowned in his sleep as the front door clicked shut. (63-64)