I think this is why I am an Early Modern Scholar

Sorry for the blog silence last week; I was going through major writer’s block.

I’ve just started researching again for a new writing sample, and when I start this kind of project it occupies my mind, leaving little space for other meanderings. For the first few weeks of the blog I have been writing about things on my mind, and what was on my mind last week was research, research about rape. Honestly, I didn’t know how to blog about it. I can write about my personal struggles, feelings, etc., but I struggle with discussing my projects, especially because the subject matter is usually uncomfortable for some people.

Three things happened this week that made me change my mind: 1) I read half of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which has 3 horrific rape scenes; 2) I’ve been reading nothing but articles on rape and gender for the last week; 3) I read an interesting article on the Huffington Post about Women’s Literature and Chick Lit (which are sometimes insultingly conflated as the same) [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-meier/chick-lit-womens-literatu_b_678893.html].

When (non-English majors) people ask me about my research, I first ask do you really want to know or are you just being polite. If they really want to know, I explain that I study representations of rape in early modern English culture and that coerced consent meant consent, so many victims were treated as guilty. Then explain some of the implications of that for the early modern culture and for our own. I am usually met with two responses: the polite “oh, that’s nice” and the argument, “women have it so much better now, why do you keep making a big deal about it?” So oftentimes to avoid arguments that are based on assumptions from Law and Order and about how some women do “ask for it” (don’t even get me started on this horrendous response), I usually avoid discussing my project with people who aren’t in my field. I also get very emotional/ passionate (something I am not necessarily trying to rid myself of because I think it adds to my insight, but at least control in front of people who equate emotion with lack of knowledge--these are usually the same people who think that some women “ask” to be raped); I get emotional because it is a deeply horrific topic, one that our society seems to be desensitized to like every other form of violence.

However, the reason why I research what I do is because I think it is so important to talk about how we represent rape in society and how it speaks to constructing our views on gender and place. This matters because even though women “have come far” (yes, we no longer are bartered and sold as goods and hooray we can own property), as the Huffington Post article reminded me, there are moments when women are told that there is a separated, constructed place for them and their women things (like domestic space), and this place is usually positioned below the male space.

Dragon Tattoo is one of the first modern books I’ve read with a horrific rape scene. I do study rape, but I think it is easier to emotionally remove myself from the older texts. And, in the early modern texts, the audience never witnesses the actual rape--it is always done off stage; the audience sees only the before and after. So I was quickly disgusted by the several rapes scenes in GWDR and had to stop reading for awhile. I know it shouldn’t really matter if a rape is implied or in detail; but for some reason, I found the details more exploitative--and I have yet to figure out why these scenes are there other than for shock value.

What I did find interesting was the response of the victim (importantly she is considered a victim unlike the early modern hero). In the early texts, raped women were shamed and disgusted by themselves because that is how misogynistic societies told them how to feel. However, Lisbeth in GWDR, is not at all ashamed, which in some ways is empowering; too often we still construct sexual purity as more important than human life (I’ve heard women say they would rather be murdered than raped). What I did find disturbing is that Lisbeth was also not ashamed because *it was something normal and that happened*… Yes, she proceeds to torture her rapist and the reader gets some sadistic satisfaction from that. However, I still wonder why the author includes in detail these really horrifying scenes. Why do we need this level of shock value? And, why is it passed off as something normal that just happens to the disenfranchised? Maybe, I should read the end, but these scenes bothered me. This could be why I am an early modern scholar and usually don’t read bestsellers.

And, I think the rapes bothered me more in the context of my research. Too often rape is used as a trope, employed as shock value art and then used to explore other avenues that minimize the importance of the woman’s pain. The literature uses her pain to explore other things besides what it should be exploring: why is rape one of the only crimes that continues to increase? Why are people afraid to discuss the social factors behind this increase? Why would society like to explain away this increase by still blaming the woman? (Something that has not changed since the beginning of civilization)

In a book I read this morning entitled The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama, the introduction discusses our gendered language and how it still constructs much of how our society views place. It emphasized the importance of ridding our language of subtle (or not) gendered terms, such as heroine and actress, as they were first constructed to imply that the female version did not quite live up to the male’s. When Diana Meier published her book The Season of Second Chances , as she explains in her Huffington Post article, she was met with critics arguing whether her book was “Chick Lit” or too smart to be qualified that way. Her book focuses on domestic space, has flowers on the cover, and is written by a woman--all of these things automatically make the value of her book as Literature questionable to critics (someone even told her she would never qualify for a Pulitzer because it has flowers on the cover). There are so many things frustrating about her problems, not the very least is that it points to how we still put gendered spaces in an elitist hierarchy and how our society still constructs value based on gender.

And, I think this hierarchy partly constructs how our society views rape. Many investigators still do not consider it a serious crime and there are many rape kits that go untested or are not taken seriously.

Ultimately, I want to remind myself and others why it is so important to remain vocal about these issues. Representations, images, language and story still do so much to impact our world and (as Shelley mentioned in last week’s blog) to construct our national or social identity. I think we need to at least be aware of how our language impacts how the world (and the rules of this world) is formed.

I feel like my blog brings me to so many discussion avenues. Here are some other questions I was considering as I wrote:
When we use rape in literature, at what point is it an exploitation? At what point is it sensitive?
What do you consider the value of shock value art?
How do you see language as gendered in your own experience?
Where can we go from here? What’s after we have the conversation?

[I have been trying to edit to smaller posts, but it’s so hard!]