Spoilers for both. Rape and sadism referenced but not explicitly described.
I've recently read two books in which rape plays a major role in developing characters and plots. Please understand that by submitting this post I am not claiming any special insight, but hoping to spark a discussion about what these mean. I understand that some people might find this banal and 101.
In Half of a Yellow Sun , Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells the story of the Igbo rebellion and the hopeless fight for the independence of the Biafra region of Nigeria. Over the course of the war, as Nigeria slowly chokes and starves the rebels, the poorly-trained and leaderless rebel soldiers turn on their own civilian population. A squad gang-rapes a barmaid, and a major protagonist whom the reader has known since he was a sweet little boy succumbs to peer-pressure and joins in the assault. This is the only time in literature I have ever encountered a sympathetic character who commits rape. When he is killed later on I felt really sad, even though he'd done something that I've always been taught puts you beyond the pale of humanity. Adichie is writing about the losing end of a vicious civil war, and that she's not shirking from the fact that good people can do really really really bad things. Perhaps she knows men whom she admires in other ways who've nonetheless done such terrible things, especially under the influence of PTSD, group mentality and macho posturing (most of the soldiers are young men who were drafted forcibly and who are trying to hide their terror). But it's jarring to have a good character commit such an unamiguously evil act, and then to mourn his death.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson goes the other, more traditional route. Larsson uses the act of rape to mark characters as evil, in fact there's almost a 100% correlation between villains and rapists. The one villain who is not exposed as a rapist impregnated a young woman and forced her to have an abortion or be murdered. And the rapists, some of whom are part of a kidnapping-rape-murder cult and one who is a lone maniac, are extreme sadists who engage in all kinds of torture. The rapists are all rich and powerful men, abusing women who are under their power and supposedly their protection. They are all punished with death or torture, and none's demise evokes any pity. Larsson also punctuates his book with statistics about violence against women in Sweden. The original Swedish title is said to translate as Men Who Hate Women. The opposite of Yellow Sun's painful ambiguity, in Dragon Tattoo rapists are evil men and men who aren't evil don't hurt women. For me this is much more comfortable: I don't want to empathize with a rapist. But it also feels exploitative: It seems like he's lazily using violence against women like a black hat to mark the bad guys.
What do others think about violence against women in these books or other fictional literature?
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I haven't read the first book, so I can't comment on it directly, but I have read Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Given our culture around sexual assault, I found the clear-cut rapist=bad perspective refreshing when so often we hear that a rapist was 'just confused' or his victim was somehow 'asking for it'. It may be more understandable in a situation like the one you describe in Half of a Yellow Sun, but it's never acceptable.
Personally, I don't find Stieg Larsson's use of violence against women lazy - it's a subject he's focusing on in the book, so it's bound to come up often.
it's a subject he's focusing on in the book, so it's bound to come up often.
That's a very good point. I formed my mental question about whether he was exploiting the issue for plot/character reasons before I heard about the original title.
We are all capable of atrocity. That's one thing that became very clear to me years ago when I read Hannah Arendt's famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Personally, I find myself less interested in characters that are unambiguously bad or evil, because it doesn't ring true. I fully believe I am capable of doing horrible things to keep myself alive if I were truly in a desperate place.
I believe we are all under pressures and influences that lead us down certain paths. For some people that includes paths that end in committing murder, rape, or another atrocity. These people are too often men and the violence is too often against women. That's a result of patriarchy, I think. I certainly don't think the individual act should be excused just because we are also interested in understanding potential contributing factors or causes (war, patriarchy, desperation, etc.)
I'm atheist, but as the christians like to say, "there, but for the grace of god, go i..." for me it's "there, but for the turn of circumstance..."
I hope I'm not hurting or offending anyone with these musings. I'm female and i haven't been raped (yet). I hope never to be, but i know that's not my choice...
I would probably like the book where rapists are accurately portrayed as evil but not the one where a protagonist I'm supposed to "root" for joins in the assault. (Unless the author was trying to make some sort of Point about Something Or Other, perhaps, but i certainly wouldn't feel sad when this character got killed.)
In general, I feel that rape and violence against women, sadly, are things that happen in life, so why shouldn't we look at them and their after effects in our art, and maybe use art to point out the atrocity of it?
I would probably like the book where rapists are accurately portrayed as evil
The thing is that they're not accurately portrayed as real-life evil but as cartoonish super evil. Now that's how I was raised to think of rape, and I'm grateful for that because I know I could never do it. On the other hand, I can't imagine anyone else who appears to be a relatively normal person doing it either, and that's obviously not true-to-life. So, is the portrayal of rape as something only the most holistically evil person would do actually harmful to dealing with the issue? I remember watching Star Wars when I was a kid, a movie in which the genocide of a planet is a casual plot device. But while the villains force a woman to watch her homeland be annihilated, interrogate her, and plan to execute her, they never dream of hurting her sexually. I think this murderer-is-one-thing-but-rape-is-beyond-comprehension motif is pretty prevalent in fiction, and I have to wonder what effect that has on 1. people who are asked to acknowledge that someone they don't hate has in fact committed rape and 2. rape victims.
but not the one where a protagonist I'm supposed to "root" for joins in the assault. (Unless the author was trying to make some sort of Point about Something Or Other, perhaps, but i certainly wouldn't feel sad when this character got killed.)
It's physically sickening. It's actually been about eight months since I read Yellow Sun and I'm still not sure how to process that part. I'd always assumed that if I ever had a son I could raise him never to do that, but this scene made me confront the hypothetical.
I'm totally cool with thinking of rapists as evil, super-evil, subhuman, whatever insult I can come up with for 'em.
As for Star Wars, apart from some mild tension between Han Solo and Leia, they are pretty much sexless movies. My guess would be the lack of sexual torture employed by the villains probably had something to do with them wanting to keep it a PG rating. Even the genocide is presented in a detached way--we are shown an exploding sphere, it's not as though they showed actual people being incinerated in the blast or anything graphic.
I'm totally cool with thinking of rapists as evil, super-evil, subhuman, whatever insult I can come up with for 'em.
Me too. But it's not accurate, and is it also unhelpful? If someone's not an eight-foot tall horned demon from the shadow realm who pets a white cat and twirls his whiskers, is he therefore not a rapist because he seems so normal? Lots of rapists are family men, ministers, respected members of the community, devoted fathers, etc., right? So does depicting rapists as all sophisticated uber-criminals or raving psychopathic cavemen obscure the reality in harmful ways? It's kind of like tying the concept of a racist to Bull Conner unleashing the dogs on peaceful marchers, and klansmen blowing up churches. Sure, it succeeded in making racist a really dirty word, but now most people have trouble recognizing anything short of a literal lynching as deserving the term.
Ok, the reflexive Star Wars reference illuminated nothing but my own nerdom, but the fact is that fiction (books, movies, cartoons, etc.) treat killing as a pretty nonchalant thing, and rape as an almost supernatural crime from beyond. That's how I see it too. But the fact is that there are a lot more rapists than murderers out there, and being a rapist is clearly much more comfortable a fit with being "normal" than being a murderer is.
I have not read either book. My husband read the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, however (he told me not to read it- I'm not good with violence in books).
When he finished the book, he was very upset. He felt that the girl with the dragon tattoo was a very strong interesting character, but that the author wanted to make her "broken" in some way, and the only way the author could think to break a woman was with rape. He thought this was lazy.
As for the other book, again, I haven't read it, but it sounds like it is making a statement about the hellish situations alive in many places around the world (including the US). Some books have good characters do horrible things to challenge us to think about why that would happen. Was it his own fear that lead him to join in? Many times things are not black and white.
As I said, I am speaking without having read either book.
I bought Dragon Tattoo for a book club and planned to give it to my mom after, as she loves murder mysteries. Now I've recommended she not read it.
Yellow Sun I would still highly recommend, although if you wouldn't read Kite Runner and Thousand Splendid Suns you shouldn't read it either.
The main character in Dragon Tattoo is, in my opinion, nothing but broken, and there's a lot more to her than just one rape. The sequels make it apparent that she has very much reasons to be 'broken'. In the book, the rape doesn't really faze her since that's what she's used to getting from men.
And actually I found the rapist to be a very standard type rapist, not at all super-evil. He's not calculating, he doesn't actively loathe women, just enough to make him seize the opportunity to assault a woman he deems his inferior. And he keeps and keeps justifying the rape he committed, keeps assuring himself that it was really all her fault. To me, that reads as very typical rapist behaviour. I haven't read the English translation, though, only the Finnish, so there may be tone differences.
Stieg Larsson's original point was to show that truly evil men live among us, and misogyny is horribly hurtful, and I think he did achieve that reasonably well. The first book of the series (it's a trilogy) is horribly triggering, though.
Thank you for adding perspective from the other two books. The reason I referred to that rapist, the one who isn't part of a Nazi-rape-murder-cult, as super evil is because he does things to hurt her beyond subdoing her and forcing sex on her (the second time, in his house, the first time in his office was "mundane" rape in comparison). Elsabeth herself points out that she was surprised by his sadism the second time, whereas the first rape was, as you say, what she expected a man with power over her to do.
Of course this sick bastard still has nothing on the father and son pair who rape and murder hundreds of women over decades.