The Fiction of Sexual Violence, pt. 1: Morrison

This summer I (re)read a number of novels.  And I had some separate conversations about the nature and forms of sexual violence, particularly its less perspicuous manifestations in common settings.  I would like to draft some soundings -- initial probings, investigations, short essays -- on the connections between these two matters. And I hope to do so by drawing upon three novels in particular:  Toni Morrison's Beloved, William Faulkner's Light in August, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace.

In a series of posts, then, I plan to explore the fiction of sexual violence.  I consciously borrow the phrase from Arnold Weinstein's critical study The Fiction of Relationship.  For him, there are "two fundamental notions" that the wording of his title expresses:  "(1) the narrative literature of relationship, and (2) the view that relationship may be a fiction, something made rather than given, built out of belief, not fact" (Weinstein, 3).  What interests me here is the intersection between stories about relationships, the ways in which those relationships are constructed, and the effects of varieties of unwanted sexual aggression.

Each post may stand on its own, but I anticipate that the each piece will contribute to a larger mosaic that both deepens and broadens our (or at least my) understanding of what is or is perceived as sexual violence, its effect on individuals discretely and collectively, and what all of this suggests about the narratives in which they occur and about the relational fictions of which they are constitutive.  I begin with Morrison's Beloved. 

Framing the Discussion

Before examining a passage from Morrison's 1987 masterpiece about the devastating depths of American slavery, let me ask and initially answer a question that will orient the material in the posts the follow.  The question is:  What do we learn about human relationships, indeed humanity, through the sexual violence that all too often attends them?  I will suggest that, in these three novels by Morrison, Faulkner, and Coetzee, sexual intercourse that is not clearly wanted or reciprocated disables the proper function of human relationships. 

Sometimes outright rape is in view (as in Beloved); sometimes the character of the coital relationship between the parties is unclear (as in Light in August and in Disgrace).  Coetzee's Disgrace, of course, is remarkable for the presence and narrative tethering of both kinds:  unmistakable rape and passive sex that is not clearly rape.  If it is permissible for us to group these varieties of sexual engagement under the single descriptive label of violence (simply because there is some transgression of the will or ambiguity about respect for its positive consent), then we can say something about the consequences of sexual violence more generally.  This violence dehumanizes, deforms, and displaces relationships inasmuch as selfishness replaces reciprocity.  Deathly isolation results instead of vital union.

This is not surprising, or should not be.  Readers know, or should know, that sexual violence is bad.  What is worth scrutinizing is how, in what particular ways, these novels depict sexual violence as either questionable or evil.  What images of sexual violence does the prism of narrative reflect?

Disabling Dehumanization in Beloved 

Sexuality and violations of its salutary life-uniting (and life-creating) expressions pepper Morrison’s Beloved.  Ella’s own prolonged confinement and sexual abuse, and her response to it, illustrate tangibly the ways in which slavery, specifically sex slavery, corrupts the human capacity to love others:

Nobody loved her [Ella] and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, for she considered love a serious disability. Her puberty was spent in a house where she was shared by father and son, whom she called “the lowest yet.” It was “the lowest yet” who gave her a disgust for sex and against whom she measured all atrocities. A killing, a kidnap, a rape -- whatever, she listened and nodded.  Nothing compared to “the lowest yet.”  (256) 

Ella now views love as “a serious disability.”  The natural reading of this phrase is that love is a handicap, an impediment to getting on in the world. Ella’s view is categorical.  It is not that one should be measured in one's loving so as to guard against the disappointment that stems from white violence against blacks.  This is Paul D’s approach when he tells Sethe that her love is “too thick” (164, 183) and that “to love anything that much was dangerous ... The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it into a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one” (45).  It is not that one's supply of love is finite and constantly subject to heart-breaking disappointments.  Instead, for Ella, the act of loving itself is a disadvantage, a sign of weakness or incapacity.  Loving restricts living. 

Readers may observe an irony.  Ella, who believes that loving is a serious disability is herself seriously disabled.  Because she lives in the long shadow of her past trauma, Ella herself avoids loving others.

We see evidence of this in her longstanding coldness to Sethe.   

When she [Sethe] got out of jail and made no gesture toward anybody, and lives as though she were alone, Ella junked her and would give her the time of day.  (256)

If Ella believes that nobody loves her, “and wouldn’t have liked it if they had,” then she suffers from more than low self-esteem or persistent grade of depression.  More fundamentally, Ella then does not (easily) give, receive, or reciprocate everyday love.  Ella fails to see the various, quiet but consistent ways in which her husband John and her friend Stamp Paid, for instance, love her daily.  Her years in sex slavery have disabled her not only from recognizing herself as lovable.  What is more, although freed from sex slavery, it has “given birth” to another form of slavery:  restriction to her full and free loving of other humans as herself a human.

Toni Morrison, 1986 (1 year before Beloved appeared)

Ella is fettered in her pursuit of life by frowning upon love.  “The lowest yet” dragged her down, too.  They handicapped her, carved away part of her humanity.

Toward the end of the novel, there appears a wonderful recapitulation of this point, or this picture which the narrative has been painting.  It comes as a description of the insight that Denver has gained into the past horrors of slavery that still affect her mother Sethe and those in their community who also experienced slavery first-hand:

That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up. (251)

Slavery in general, yes, but the violence of sexual slavery in particular (thinking here of what was done to Ella) dirties.  It dirties not things but people:  "Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you.  Dirty you so bad..." (my emphasis).  And it does not only dirty; it also dehumanizes because it disables.  (Or it disables because it dehumanizes -- it amounts to the same thing.)  You cannot like yourself anymore.  In fact, you do not even recognize that you exist anymore.  Sexual violence dirties and blots out, the ultimate in disabling dehumanization.