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Chapter 2
‌

Sexual violence in literature: a cultural heritage?

Liam Murray Bell, Amanda Finelli and Marion Wynne-Davies

Meet Liam Murray Bell

Liam currently combines research towards a PhD in Creative Writing with a position as Graduate Teaching Assistant within the English Department of the University of Surrey. His writing, both critical and creative, concerns discourses of violence and the role of women in the Northern Irish Troubles (1969 to the present) and he has published creative work in
Wordriver
, the literary journal of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, as well as in
New Writing Scotland
, issues 21 and 26. Critical work will appear shortly in
Writing Urban Space
, from Zero Books, and the journal
New Writing
:
The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing
(Routledge).

Meet Amanda Finelli

Amanda Finelli received her undergraduate degree from the Ohio State University in the United States, before undertaking Masters Studies at Royal Holloway University of London in modernist and postmodern literature. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Surrey where she is working on her first novel, which explores modern-day mental health culture in the United States through the lens of psychoanalytic theory on hysteria, in conjunction with French anti-essentialist feminist theory of language and narrative.

Meet Marion Wynne-Davies

Marion Wynne-Davies holds the Chair of English Literature in the Department of English at the University of Surrey. Her main areas of interest are Early Modern literature and women’s writing and she has published two editions of primary material,
Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents
(with S.P. Cerasano) and
Women Poets of the Renaissance
, as well as several collections of

essays in the same field. Her interest in women’s writing has also led her to publish five monographs:
Women and Arthurian Literature
;
Sidney to Milton
;
Women Writers of the English Renaissance
;
Familial Discourse
; and
Margaret Atwood
. The interest in sexual violence began when Marion was a witness in a rape trial on behalf of a woman she counselled. This led indirectly to her work on Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus
which she uses in the essay for this book.

Introduction

There is an urban legend that circulates in Belfast – one among many explicit tales to emerge from Northern Ireland during the Troubles – of a female prostitute who, tired of performing sexual acts and passively accepting the violence that often accompanied them, turned the tables by secreting shards of broken glass within her vagina in order to inflict serious injury on her male customers as they penetrated her. This woman set out to blindly maim and mutilate, without compunction, using the only tool she had – her sexuality – thereby perpetuating a discourse of sexual violence within Northern Ireland that includes the IRA’s use of a ‘honeytrap’, a practice whereby paramilitaries recruited women to lure unsuspecting soldiers not to bed but to the tomb (Coogan 1996: 302). Through use of her body, so the story goes, the prostitute sought to remove herself from the role of victim and, in so doing, became perpetrator. It is this interface – this dialectic – that the chapter will examine, seeking to chart representations of sexual violence in literature and examine whether the female, in laying claim to subjectivity, can challenge patriarchal discourses. It is perhaps fitting that in discussing sexual violence within literature we begin with an urban legend – a story that may be a fictional or at least an embellished cautionary tale but that, like many of the fictional representations discussed, may well hold a grain of truth with regard to the social circumstance of women within the narrative. The subsequent sections of this
chapter focus upon: theoretical perspectives; literary history; textual analysis (Angela Carter’s
The Passion of New Eve
); and textual creativity (Liam Murray Bell’s
rubber bullet, broken glass
).

Theoretical perspectives

American feminist Susan Brownmiller’s seminal work
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape
(1975) shattered earlier conceptions of rape and sexual violence, embarking upon a dialogue that would dispel the fallacies of how women were located in and trapped by discourses of assault. Images and accounts of rape and violence have existed for centuries, whether in ancient mythology, literature, or multiple varieties of popular culture. However, the proliferation of these representations did not serve to challenge rape, but rather to normalise it, and it was precisely this tacit acceptance that Brownmiller found problematic. She identified the fascination with rape as a quest for achieving victory; when a man ‘conquers the world, so too he conquers the woman’ (Brownmiller 1975: 289). Moreover, this rendering of an

idealised and omnipotent masculinity ultimately allowed for the ‘myth of the heroic rapist’ (Brownmiller 1975: 289) to flourish, a view that for Brownmiller was made worse by the fact that popular culture as well as scholarly discourse refused to dismantle the myth.