'More Intimate Than Violence': Sexual Violation in Sarah Dunant's Transgressions

Abstract

Horeck looks at what happens when a feminist author attempts to rewrite one of culture's most powerful narratives: the story of female victimization and male sexual violence. Exploring the controversy surrounding Sarah Dunant's 1997 thriller Transgressions , a novel accused of being 'anti-feminist' for its alleged depiction of female sexual arousal in a rape scene, she asks after feminism's fictional investment in images of rape. What kind of cultural work are images of sexual violence being made to perform for feminist crime writers? Her contention is that Dunant's novel exemplifies the purchase that rape holds for feminism as a scenario for working through questions of female agency and male-female sexual relations. Through her represenation of the female translator's attempt to rewrite a dominant cultural narrative of male brutality and female victimization, Dunant is thematizing the difficult work of the feminist crime writer. But while the novel's fictional representation of sex and violence can be read as an attempt to unsettle governing gender codes, Horeck argues that it also inadvertently shows up the limitations of the female crime writer's attempt to fight 'fantasy with fantasy'.