Reading rape: the rhetoric of sexual violence in American literature and culture, 1790-1990

Abstract

Acknowledgments vii Introduction:What We Talk about When We Talk about 1 CHAPTER ONE Seduced Enslaved:Sexual Violence in Antebellum American Literature Contemporary Feminist Discourse 12 Rape or Crisis in Sexual Identity? Feminist Rhetoric of 13 Guilty Passions and Foul Words: Powers of Seduction Racialization of Sexual Violence 15 Deployment of Sexual Violence Cult of Secrecy: Historicizing Feminist Rhetoric of 27 CHAPTER TWO Rise of (Black) Rapist Reconstruction of Difference or, Realist 33 Claws into Soft White Throat Other Bestialities: Rapist Rhetoric, Rivalry, Homosocial Desire in Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock, Thomas Dixon's Clansman, Frank Norris's McTeague 35 Tender Lamb Snatched from Jaws of a Hungry Wolf: Inversions of Rapist Rhetoric in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy 50 The One the Real 'One Crime ': Rape, Lynching, Mimicry in Sutton E.Griggs's Hindered Hand 54 Thing to Be Faced: as Robbery in Upton Sinclair's Jungle 59 Unconscious Penetration: Manners, Money, Primitive Man in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth 64 The Kind We Can't Resist: Lesson of William Vaughn Moody's A Sabine Woman 68 CHAPTER THREE Artifice of Representation: Four Modernist Modes 75 Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked!: Styles Hyperboles of Seduction, Rape, Incest in Djuna Barnes's Ryder 77 Little Hot Ball inside You That Screams: Rape's Resistance to Representation, Resistance to Rape, Transgression of Boundaries in William Faulkner's Sanctuary 86 Not What One Did to Women: Enacting Projections Constructing Racial Border in Richard Wright's Native Son 103 Fighting Forced Relationship: Manslaughter in Ann Petry's Street 116 CHAPTER FOUR Voicing Sexual Violence, Repoliticizing Rape: Post-Modernist Narratives of Sexuality Power 139 Mankind's Greatest Crime, Man's Inhumanity to Man: Chester Himes's A Case ofRape 145 Plain Black (Gender) Trouble: Intraracial Rape, Incest, Other Family Feuds 150 Phantom Men and Zipless Fucks: Fantasies Fictions of Female Desire 159 An Obscene Posture That No One Could Help: Sodomy, Male Anxiety, of Homo/Heterosexual Definition in James Dickey's Deliverance 171 AFTERWORD: Challenging Readings of 179 Notes 191 Work Cited Consulted 211 Primary Texts 211 Secondary Sources 213 Index 233