{"id":129798,"date":"2018-10-04T09:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-10-04T13:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129798"},"modified":"2018-10-04T10:17:09","modified_gmt":"2018-10-04T14:17:09","slug":"the-silence-of-sexual-assault-in-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/04\/the-silence-of-sexual-assault-in-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"The Silence of Sexual Assault in Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Detail from the cover of the Penguin Classics edition<\/a> of Shirley Jackson\u2019s Hangsaman<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Christine Blasey Ford\u2019s testimony last week opened a desperately needed national conversation about the nature of silence in the aftermath of trauma. Why didn\u2019t Blasey Ford tell her \u201cloving parents,\u201d Donald Trump discharged on Twitter. The hashtag #WhyIDidntReport generated thousands of testimonies about the societal forces that push victims into silence in the aftermath of assault. That silence, unheard by anyone else but shatteringly loud inside one\u2019s head, is an open secret in American life. It is also an open secret in\u00a0American literature, especially in the works of women writers.<\/p>\n

Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s description of his daughter\u2019s prayers at dinner brought to mind the theatrical piety of the Bible salesman in Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s story \u201cGood Country People.\u201d That Bible salesman comes off as earnest\u2014at first\u2014as he scopes out a family\u2019s front parlor and decries the absence of the Bible that \u201cgood Chrustians\u201d would certainly display there.<\/p>\n

Once he gets beyond the front parlor and has Hulga, the adult daughter of the household, to himself, he doesn\u2019t bring up anything more about \u201cChrustian service.\u201d Watching Kavanaugh lose control of his \u201cgood country folk\u201d performance and become increasingly overcome with rage, I thought of O\u2019Connor\u2019s salesman absurdly repeating the word \u201cChrustian,\u201d of the terrible theatrics of our politics.<\/p>\n

It is not until he and Hulga are in the barn, where there are no witnesses, that the salesman reveals the Bible in his valise is nothing more than a box with a flask inside and a condom. The Bible salesman takes what he wants from Hulga, and steals her artificial leg. As he leaves her there, unable to walk, he boasts that he once stole a woman\u2019s glass eye, too.<\/p>\n

Though the story was published over sixty years ago, the sick abuse of power is disturbingly similar to any number of testimonies that have emerged this past year. O\u2019Connor artfully elides what exactly the Bible salesman does, or doesn\u2019t do, to Hulga in the barn. That elision evokes the roaring silence that she will now endure, returning to this horrifying experience within the solitude of her mind.<\/p>\n

Instead, the story gives primacy to the sensorial memory that is the legacy of the assault, the images and words that will haunt Hulga the rest of her life: the salesman\u2019s insistence that she take off her wooden leg in front of him because it\u2019s what \u201cmakes her different,\u201d how he wields this vulnerability against her as he pushes her down and \u201cwith eyes like two steel spikes, would glance behind him where the leg stood.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her testimony, Blasey Ford spoke of the details that have remained seared into her memory, the \u201cindelible\u201d laughter, the placement of the bed and the stairwell, and the certainty in her memory of the eyes and face of the boy who clamped his hands over her mouth. Her story uncomfortably evoked so many other stories that have been held like an open secret in this country and the literature it has produced.<\/p>\n

My own novel, out next month, is about silenced victims of assault and a powerful politician determined to remain beyond the realm of consequences. In working on it, I thought often of that Bible salesman carrying off parts of women\u2019s bodies like hunting trophies. A wooden leg. A glass eye.<\/p>\n

I began the novel four years ago, long before a man who bragged about groping women became president. The image I kept returning to in my mind as I began to write was of a woman heading to work, averting her gaze from the photo on the front page of a newspaper of a senator who had once assaulted her. And now Christine Blasey Ford, on her way to work, was turning her gaze from the photos of Kavanaugh in the paper as that president\u2019s nominee for the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

While writing Those Who Knew<\/em>, I tried to figure out how to capture the clanging anger that resounds in my character\u2019s head as she turns away from yet another picture of that senator who once left her unconscious on the floor. For this, I returned often to Shirley Jackson\u2019s Hangsaman<\/em>. Early in the novel, Jackson\u2019s teenage protagonist drifts through a party taking place in her father\u2019s house. Her own house, Natalie reminds herself. When a man she doesn\u2019t recognize asks her questions, Natalie politely answers, though an increasing feeling of foreboding nags at her. When she has the audacity to admit she missed some of the pronouncements streaming from the man\u2019s mouth, he grabs her by the arm and pulls her away from crowd and across the grass.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat have I done?\u201d Natalie asks silently as this guest of her parents\u2019 pulls her farther into the forest. The \u201cI\u201d in her question, the internalized impulse to assume the fault is hers, compels her to keep following him without resistance. Like O\u2019Connor, Jackson gives primacy to what will be violently seared into Natalie\u2019s sensorial memory, \u201ctraveling past the locked hands of the trees, past the large nodding implacable heads.\u201d<\/p>\n

No explicit mention of the man surfaces in the novel after that. It is a silence that\u2014for the reader attuned to it\u2014becomes a glass-shattering scream. Jackson leaves out whatever unspeakable crime the man commits. What she conjures instead is Natalie\u2019s increasingly agonizing sense of social isolation, the scrutinizing heads turning toward her everywhere she goes.<\/p>\n

When Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher blocked Senator Jeff Flake from closing an elevator door on them, the way Flake just stood there\u2014nodding\u2014brought those bobbing heads in Jackson\u2019s story to mind: the party going on in the yard. Meanwhile, the Kavanaughs of this country are knocking back their cocktails and looking for some new woman to isolate\u2014knowing the unlikelihood of any consequences.<\/p>\n

The next morning, Natalie wakes feeling sick and dizzy. Although these words were written in 1951, Jackson could be writing about a teenager waking after an assault last week:<\/p>\n

She loathed her hands as they came toward her face to cover her eyes. \u201cNothing happened,\u201d she chanted, \u201cnothing happened, nothing happened, nothing that I remember happened.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 1991, the poet June Jordan published an essay about Anita Hill titled \u201cCan I Get a Witness?\u201d Jordan points out that Hill agreed to take a lie-detector test, which determined that her responses were true. Thomas, meanwhile, refused the test, and we all know what happened next.<\/p>\n

In Jordan\u2019s enduring \u201cPoem About My Rights,\u201d she evokes all the predictable ways that allegations of sexual assault get dismissed, especially when the victim is a woman of color. Forty years after the poem\u2019s publication in 1980, it is devastating to consider how little has changed:<\/p>\n

I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
\nthe wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the
\nwrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic
\nthe wrong sartorial I
\nI have been the meaning of rape
\nI have been the problem everyone seeks to
\neliminate by forced
\npenetration with or without the evidence<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With the relentless repetition of \u201cwrong\u201d after \u201cwrong,\u201d Jordan captures the pervasive racism and misogyny that lead victims of assault to become resigned to what\u2014to others\u2014presents as silence. Jordan mixes up the tone of the list, moving from \u201cwrong nose\u201d to the mocking courtroom diction of \u201cwrong sartorial.\u201d She evokes the bottomless well of excuses used to shut down an allegation. \u201cIf this Government,\u201d Jordan wrote in her essay about Hill, \u201cwill not protect and defend her, and all black women, and all women, period \u2026 then we will change the Government. We have the numbers to deliver on this warning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Twenty-seven years later, we still have the numbers to deliver on that warning in the midterm elections. I fervently hope that this time we will. And perhaps, finally, readers will be able to turn to a classmate in a literature class and say, I hear it. I hear what\u2019s roaring in the silence of this line.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Idra Novey is the author of <\/em>Those Who Knew, out next month from Viking Books, and <\/em>Ways to Disappear. She teaches fiction at Princeton University.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writers like Shirley Jackson leave out whatever unspeakable crime the man commits. 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