The limits of plot: Accounting for how women interpret stories of sexual assault

Abstract

Although scholars have argued that plot is key to narrative’s effects, no one has studied empirically how people interpret stories told along different plotlines. This has left unexamined an important puzzle: how do time- and place-specific beliefs intrude on the operation of plot genres in shaping narrative’s meaning? On the basis of a survey and focus-group study of how women interpreted first-person stories of an acquaintance rape told along different plotlines, we argue that what stands in the way of adapting old stories to new purposes is less plot than character. The same events can be inserted into different genres of plot to yield quite different moral messages. But audiences’ expectations of characters are more rigid. Time- and place-specific ideas about how people properly behave – about how ambitious women should be, for example, or how emotional men should be – limit audiences’ ability to imagine them playing the roles associated with different plots. Plots are transposable; characters are less so.