Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790-1990 (review)

Abstract

Sielke, Sabine. 2002. Heading Rape: The Hhetoric of Sexual Violence in Literature Culture, 1790-1990. Princeton: Princeton University Press. $55.00 he. $19.95sc. 241 pp.In Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in Literature Culture, 1790-1990, Sabine Sielke traces rhetoric of rape in United States through four distinct periods of literary history, stretching from antebellum seduction to postbellum realism to modernist texts and their post modern refigurations(2002, 7). Sielke establishes that talk about rape, like talk about love,hardly ever hits its target(2). Instead, when act of rape gets turned into discourse, it acquires rhetorical powers, becoming an insistent figure for other social, political, economic concerns conflicts,.'.. talk about rape has its history, its ideology, its dominant narratives which are nationally specific(2). It is here that Sielke's volume's greatest contribution lies: her project continuously shows how American .rape are over determined by a distinct history of racial conflict a discourse on race that itself tends to overdetermine issues of class(2).That talk about rape is always talk about power relations is not so surprising. But ways that in United States legacy of slavery has informed rhetoric about rape is rather stunning, particularly way it haunts rape rhetoric today. Sielke contends that rhetoric of rape in United States is always already informed by America's primal incest scene, with its enforced relations within extended plantation family (184) lynching of African men.Sielke's first chapter yokes together sexual violence in antebellum literature contemporary feminist discourse, tracking how dominant feminist rhetoric of rape relies on century perspectives on gender race relations(2002, 15). Here Sielke charges that contemporary feminist thinking about rape dangerously echoes earlier rhetoric, infanticizing women in much same way that nineteenth century rhetoric about rape did-by making all heterosexual consent for women impossible by defining all sexuality as the violation of women by (29). Through a comparison of novels of seduction slave such as Susana Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791) Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in Life of a Slave Girl (1861) dominant rape-crisis discourse, Sielke illustrates how both examples of rape rhetoric succeed in lumping together a range of non acts such as consensual heterosexual intercourse . . . [and] acquaintance stranger rape, as well as verbal coercion(31).In chapter two, Sielke shifts her focus to turn-of-the-century obsession with masculinity, in particular wild images of black men represented as bestial full of perverse, untamed desire. Texts like Frank Norris's McTeague Nelson Pages' Red Rock reflect a national identity crisis image of African man as beast ferociously invading sacred rights of woman endangering home of whites (Genovese in Sielke 2002, 34). Such a reduction of blackness to extreme corporeality, to literal, helps recast white womanhood in spiritual figurai terms(37). Sielke examines way realist rhetoric on sexual violence further sexualizes interracial encounters suppresses /silences black on black white on white sexual violence, ultimately upholding fictions of white supremacy. …