In Defense of Rape
Clark, Helen S.
Helen S. Clark hi Defense of Rape • • Rape is getting a bad name these days. It is assailed in best sellers, lectures and conferences, newspaper features, and on TV specials. The...
...Rape as a ritual of love exists in the fantasy world of every woman...
...Men escape outward—across oceans, over mountains, to the prairie, out west...
...Its own subtitle is A Vforal Tale, but the moral seems to be that even a sane modern writer can't approach the essentially balanced worldriew of even the most aberrant of eightenth-century neurotics...
...I will be dreadfully frightened and in my fear will only cling to him more tightly since his strength is the only antidote to that fear...
...I would find little else to say about these foolish books except for three curious things, all connected, even though they may not seem so at a cursory reading...
...I will be asleep...
...He knows hunting, horses, and boxing...
...Barbara Cartland, Joan Aiken, Sergeanne Golon, Jane Aiken Hodge, Dorothy Eden, Georgette Heyer—romance writers —the list of them goes on and on, and I thank them all for their struggles...
...They do things...
...We—my mother, sisters, father, and I—pulled stumps every year...
...Edward, Edward (Macmillan, 1973) is a strangetale of homosexuality, love, subjection, and torture between a young boy and an older man...
...her parents die and she inexplicably finds herself the ward of a gray-eyed duke whom she hates, but who curiously makes her legs go weak...
...I am waiting for it...
...I am a woman executive—I hire and fire...
...And so these books go on, each pulling the reader into the excitement of the seduction...
...But let me tell you a secret—chances are she really did...
...It was reported that she has become the darling of the San Francisco homosexuals, something which I'm not prepared to fit into my earlier statement about how no men read romances...
...Men do not particularly like or understand Vice Avenged...
...A glance at any paperback bookstand proves that the publishing industry relies heavily on novels of romance...
...Burford chooses the most elegantly stylized of all forms of romance—Heyer's Regency romance—and merely extends it into violence...
...What I wish to say is that the rituals of lovemaking are a stylized game, regardless of the setting...
...According to the author's note, it is "an 18th century fairy tale, frankly unserious, frankly unrealistic, for a realistic, serious age...
...Females have things done to their own...
...That's a different problem, and I do not deny that it needs handling...
...gathered her onto the fold of his arms, and lay there breathing quietly, holding her lightly...
...Some of Miss Heyer's imitators, Barbara Cartland especially, can get down to a kiss or two before the end...
...These women should take it easy and read Georgette Heyer...
...Miss Heyer is the best at it because she writes gracefully, can sustain tension interminably with perfect taste, and provides plenty of humor and detail...
...He accomplishes the act, is found out by themaiden's father and brothers who subsequently beat and torture him until he agrees to marriage...
...This man is jaded from years of high living and too many women...
...Novels of romance are not a flirtation with pornography and in fact are just the opposite since the purpose of pornographic literature is to describe reality for those who aren't fully enjoying it...
...Their novels are compelling because they relax the defenses and satisfy that same yearning for melodrama that Zane Grey satisfies for men...
...The titillating mush of Cartland and her ilk is supplying an imaginative need but their hypocrisy limits the gratification to that which can be gained from innuendo: bypass the innuendo and you short-circuit the whole process...
...Miss Cartland can rip up a few dresses too—the bad earl again—and can even hint that the lace covering the breasts has been forcibly removed...
...The programming is there, nagging and insistent, and I wouldn't dare, for the sake of my sanity, attempt to defy all my little cells when they tell me to cast a commensurate sidelong glance...
...The house should be a country mansion...
...It is a Regency romance, and a very strange little book...
...The recently-published Women's Organizations and Leaders Directory lists 298 organizations and people under the subject "rape" as well as 177 rape crisis centers, in which, I suspect, few words are said in favor of it...
...Burford has written three other books...
...And they do it better than real life or tranquilizers...
...They are playing to a common human quirk that is a little more than the yen for excitement...
...He will put on a mask and stuff a handkerchief in my mouth...
...It is not supposed to be real, since its honesty lies in triggering and exploiting illusion...
...She states: "The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography...
...In reality, they were a kind of bird of prey, the lines of the downcast nose severe and beaked, the glint in the eye hooded under an effect of ease...
...A rather independent and flamboyant friend of mine in her early forties was once reading a Georgette Heyer novel in a doctor's office while waiting for her yearly female check-up...
...She devotes an entire chapter in her Female Eunuch to these romances, and declares: "If women's liberation movements are to accomplish anything at all, they will have to cope with phenomena like the million-dollar Cartland industry...
...She's wrong, of course...
...Burford is not attempting reality...
...The tension of the love affair can be The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 19 built around any number of pesky disturbances: our heroine falls in love with a highwayman (gray eyes) who has saved her from abduction by an evil earl...
...The honesty in both authors is the same honesty on which all romantic literature is based: that there exists an element of regressive fantasy which can be released through certain associations...
...The second curious fact is that Germaine Greer, a woman who ought to know better, isn't smart enough to understand what's going on here...
...There is generally no real kissing till the very end, but he might touch her arm and often rakes her face with smoulder-eyes, which brings blood rushing to her cheeks...
...If you leave the Housewives' Handbook [on Selective Promiscuity] lying about, your daughter may never read Cartland or Heyer with any credulity...
...The two types of fiction can achieve the same ends, as my friend on the doctor's table so correctly observed, but pornography can wear thin, since it is, after all, only physical...
...At first glance it would appear that the plot departs drastically from the standard convention, but it does not...
...The veteran reader knows instantly when the hero comes on stage because he sneers a bit and has gray eyes...
...But that would be a big job: it might be possible eventually to breed a female who will blush when entering a sperm bank, but the excessive scientific energy hardly seems worth the effort...
...He has met no one whom he has loved—ardent affairs may splotch his past, but not real love...
...gray eyes watching me across the ballroom floor...
...it translates these illusions into actual, if not particularly real, events...
...He may have cruel eyes, but we'll take care of that...
...To discredit the ritual is to deny the truth, and if Miss Greer wishes to do that she should work on inventing other truths...
...Flowers with a fond note from an anonymous admirer...
...But only women read romances—an interesting observation since it hints that the rituals of love which are reaffirmed in both every romance and every reader's heart are peculiar only to women, that the mystery of the female (which is really quite simple) is, all protestations aside, really not too fascinating to men...
...My salary hovers in the top five percent of female workers in the country...
...But this lust and mush is the only genre which does not attract both sexes...
...Miss Heyer does none of this, but the bad earl can force a kiss and always get slapped for it, which, drat it anyway, enflames him even more...
...The fellow is just another poor guy ill befuddled by the mystery of the female...
...He showed her the patterns on the moon, and what stars could be seen, still in its haze, and which planets had been out—described the little animals that were about them in the woods—chatted lazily about this and that...
...He will carry me down the ladder and onto his horse...
...I still receive enough proposals of marriage not to worry about it, and I am very pretty...
...Romanticism is wish-fulfillment literature...
...She knows women and women's romantic notions and she writes romances directly to these notions...
...It is the attempt to exploit emotion through physical action, and since the most physical thing that can happen to a body is, with the exception of lovemaking, pain, it is inevitable that violence finds its way into all sorts of fiction...
...I go to business lunches, and even on occasion (now getthis) pick up the tab...
...I'd also wager that not one policeman in the country would dare think, much less say, that any rape victim really wanted it to happen...
...The story is perfect...
...The gray-eyed Marquis, in his boredom, accepts a wager from his friends to rape a virgin...
...It is the indulgence of childhood illusions...
...Then after a while he put a folded rug under his head, and reaching out...
...I and my little friends swapped True Confessions back and forth because we were randy and curious...
...The first is a true story which I hesitate to tell, but which underlines so succinctly what I am stumblingly trying to say, that its indelicacy is justified...
...a light touch on my silken-covered arm...
...Of course it is all impossible, but it will happen to me, and when it happens, I will be a virgin...
...She reported to me that the exam began with the doctor exclaiming that she must be the one with the fungal infection...
...And I read these books...
...I handle grievance procedures...
...She always has a mind of her own and is more intelligent than all men, save one...
...Women escape inward to that curious core of irrationality that confuses and bewilders not only all men, butalso a few twentieth-century women...
...Now if your pride, your virtue, honour, whatever you want to call the thing, demands a forcible rape, I can oblige you...
...We shot moose and packed in the carcasses...
...He will make me understand what he means to do and will tell me: " 'But how I go about it can be in large part your decision...
...Vice Avenged is dedicated to GeorgetteHeyer...
...Because of the risk of ounding a bit foolish, I shall not even Liscuss childbearing...
...Without romantic urges I would be a mere animal and I cannot feel that this it demeaning or that it will force me to do more than my share of the dishwashing...
...She can on occasion be a hellion, but if so, has a basic sensitivity which pulls her through...
...she is an orphan with no title and no inheritance and thus seemingly unapproachable to a duke into whose path she somehow stumbles...
...Upon a moment's reflection she understood and protested that she had merely been reading a romance...
...It will be quick, and that would rather suit me, but I warn you frankly you will find it rather shattering and it will frankly hurt.' " Cressida chooses to cooperate, but asks him to wait because she is frightened...
...She does not have to be beautiful—a significant point, considering the vulnerabilities of the audience...
...I positively cannot put them down and I must even ration them out to my seething soul, lest my mind turn to gray slush and my sensitivity to throbbing tastelessness...
...They stretched so calmly, in that still cool light of May as if they had no beginning and would have no ending...
...These books are all lavishly set in different centuries and are totally improbable...
...There's just you and 1, and if there's no one here to help, there's also no one here to watch or know how it is done.' He paused...
...Freeman simply has not recognized this violence for what it is and has even slipped into the trap of getting a little nervous because of it...
...well, sadistic than the Divine Marquis...
...Shelley, and Byron, among others...
...The feminine psyche has a peculiar Twist which translates strong emotions nto physical pain and relishes the drama .f that pain...
...That there is a strong yen to reaffirm those rituals through romantic literature only points to a commonality in women that Miss Greer should be emphasizing rather than rejecting...
...A naughty historical novel, by Harry, of the school that used to flood the flaccid fifties...
...We cut down trees and dragged them from the woods to our home...
...and rape, ah rape...
...On the other hand, the hero is always handsome...
...They all understand the female ritual of love, and they play it to its fullest...
...an invitation to the dance penned hastily on cream-colored parchment...
...As any librarian will attest, cowboy novels and tough-guy adventures are read by women as well as men...
...Martin Levin of the New York Times said, "Gad, sir, what have we here...
...I pass and receive the word from my equally tasteful and intelligent colleagues and friends, and I know from firsthand experience that scratch any female and you will find the flutter: we all wear French cambric and scalloped lace with much more grace than we wear sweatshirts and blue jeans, and we waltz ever so much better than we march in street demonstrations...
...With apologies for the obvious, I must say that it is the primary purpose of all animals to perpetuate themselves and that furthermore it is the responsibility of the female to see to it that the job gets done...
...Now I do not want to take on Miss Greer as to whether or not women are treated fairly...
...Burford is not necessarily more honest than Heyer...
...I suspect she thinks she's getting old...
...She is a scholar, and though her real love is fifteenth-century England, about which she has also written, she is at her best with the Regency romance...
...I wish another Burford novel to be dedicated to Germaine Greer, who I am sure is slightly puzzled that the Housewives' Handbook on Selective Promiscuity just doesn't do the same thing for her that Heyer novels used to do...
...ision of Stephen (Macmillan, 1972) is a antasy of a young boy being tortured by is father and slipping back and forth into ifferent centuries during the torture...
...The author even does funny things with sentences every now and then: "But the house was dark, the moon not yet up above the trees, and casting patterned shadows in which he could walk, hardly visible even to a watcher, had there been one...
...He calls the punishment "disproportionately lip-smacking and arduPus" and hints that Burford is a man-Rarer...
...They sat like beautiful birds, in their bright shining colours, their hair elaborately dressed, their long graceful fingers lying careless on the table among the equipment of the game, seeming frail, their hard and very real power masked under the lace...
...There is no "short-circuiting" at all...
...So you must realize, all you skeptics with suspicions of social indoctrination, I was the Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 21 not conditioned to be a female—I was simply born one, and it would be as foolish for me to deny this as it would be for a man to deny that he would really rather be a cowboy...
...The more effective it is in doing so, or in other words, the less it approaches reality and the more it plays to individual illusion, then the better it is...
...Female violence is inward—torture, beatings, rape...
...Through enticement he must be shown that he desperately needs to marry, or in other words, make love to her...
...It is not a piece of frumpery, but gracefully executed fiction, as evident in its elegant opening: "They were sitting in a hell, one night, the Marquis and his special friends...
...A Richard Freeman in the Chicago Tribune "Book World" said: "On the face of it, Vice Avenged would seem to be a unique cross between the subtitles of Samuel Richardson's 1740 tear-jerker, Pamela (or Virtue Rewarded) and the Marquis de Sade's 1791 rib-smasher, Justine (or Virtue Punished...
...They were tired of cards, the hour was close to four, and they had tried a touch of the new weed that certain of the more unconventional bucks were using, in place of snuff...
...viacLyon (Macmillan, 1974) is a wild ronance about a young virgin who is viorntly raped and who follows the rapist ground the world, selling her body countess times in order to save him...
...Heyer novels end with the hero enveloping the heroine in his strong arms and confessing all-consuming desire...
...At first he stayed some inches from her, 20 The Alternative American Spectator June/July 1976 making no move to touch her, talking gently to her, mainly nonsense...
...Women use violence in fiction for the same reasons men do...
...Years later, she thought to her surprise, she might name these moments as among the most peaceful and most pleasant she would spend...
...My father called us "you guys...
...He wanders around France until he discovers that he loves his wife and comes home to her...
...We will travel across the moors to the hollow he has marked out...
...But lest you misunderstand, let me tell you briefly about myself...
...She is the queen of Regency romance, a subgenre which needs only Regency England, a few titled lords and ladies, and lots of manners...
...22 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976...
...She frequently has eyes too far apart and a mouth a bit too wide...
...They cast about for further amusement, idly...
...Her treatment of sex is slightly removed and very delicate, pure emotion, all interwoven with physical pain...
...Lolah Burford has merely translated the respectable flirtations into rape and the final physical act into spiritual conquest...
...he discovers a plot against his life and suspects that she is part of it...
...Miss Greer should realize that one just cannot get around the truth that romance is more important to women than to men, and since women are so strikingly unique in maintaining this interest, she should begin to wonder why...
...He will carry me to the bed of bearskin rugs and furs which he has laid out...
...But before I explain this difference, I will tell you the third curious fact...
...At that moment, since he felt not the slightest desire for her, his presence was infinitely restful in the quiet night...
...He performs so poorly as a husband that the father packs him off to a French pre-Revolutionary Bastille cell where he almost dies and is finally released...
...But once again, lest you misunderstand: I was raised by two homesteading parents in the Alaskan woods...
...She is generally misunderstood, or at least underestimated, by her family and associates and is always a virgin...
...He gambles, but not to abandon, and is not above a duel now and then...
...Perhaps they recognize some kind of kinship...
...My mother lamented when we discovered lipstick...
...He is wealthy and titled, preferably a duke...
...In light romance the heroine actually gives herself up to the hero at the first encounter...
...He is bothered )y the whippings and torture inflicted on he Marquis and states rather shrewishly hat "you can see the book is by a lady author...
...It conveniently happens that every little cell in her body is attuned to this charge, and, as with all the really big things in life—God, growing up, death, etc.—intelligent beings have a tendency to ritualize the things their cells, nerve endings, and hormones so disturbingly tell them to do...
...The point is totally superfluous...
...Males do things to other bodies...
...Male violence is outward-directedposses go after bandits, people get shot, battles roar...
...She is merely more direct...
...One Heyer heroine was a read dowd and got away with it...
...I would like to be raped...
...The novels are usually written in the third person, since things have to happen to the heroine which she does not understand, and the restrictions of the first person strain the necessary naivete...
...A book was published in 1971 called Vice Avenged by Lolah Burford (Macmillan, now available in Fawcett paperback...
...She and Burford aren't all that scary...
...I have looked some time now for a gray-eyed man and have concluded that it is a genetic characteristic peculiar only to romance novels...
...We built cabins...
...the final kiss as he bends my small body to his own and the flush of my face at the magic of the embrace...
...She claims that Heyer and Cartland strain the credulity, which of course they do, as do Hardy, the Brontes, Poe, Mrs...
...It is a man saying to a woman that she is so desirable that he will defy all rules of honor and decency in order to have her...
...There is a stock plot which no reader would ever want altered...
...I cannot recall one female novelist who described a beating, for instance, that happened outside of her own character...
...In Fact, though, this eighteenth-century pastiche is more sentimental than Richard6on and more...
...But it is such a relief in this world of men and women where one must act with taste and discretion to allow these rather honest feelings their just, if not real due, and so nice to offer these shabby cells and foolish sets of nerve synapses a bit of indulgence every now and then...
...Burford is not the only woman to throw a lot of physical pain into a love story: Golon's Angelique series, Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Glascow ' s Barren Ground, Bronte's Jane Eyre, Oates' Garden of Earthly Delights, Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, to name a few, use pain in this particular female fashion...
...I will describe a typical Georgette Heyer novel to you...
...Prurient interest and romantic urges are as far apart as are, say, Increase Mather and Jacqueline Susann...
...And now back to rape...
...I want it to happen to me exactly as it happened to Cressida in Vice Avenged...
...I shall be able to read romances forever...
...Although reason would have told her still to be afraid, these things had their way and gentled her, until her heart stilled, and she rested quietly, even drowsily in his arms on his breast...
...I want a Marquis to come to my second-story window at night with a ladder...
...I have not discovered these books by loitering shamefully near the bookstand at K-Mart and watching selections by less intelligent and more dowdy women...
...The ritual merely lends grace to the task and disguises the enormity of its truth...
...They provide a rational understanding of the irrational...
...Or: "She lay so limp, he was surprised at the lack of spirit, forgetting the force of his grim threats, and he wondered if she had fainted...
...Mary Stewart, Agatha Christie, and the like, shoot up a lot of people, but it's all very dry and merely gets the plot moving...
...The syntax is slightly off, the phrasing almost jagged, and the reader somewhat disoriented...
...I shall have to work into the subject...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
