Henri Lafon: "De l'"entreprise" au "crime": romanciers, romancières et le topos du viol"

Abstract:

Many French novels by male authors in the late eighteenth century seem to use rape sequences without any restraint: it is a rather unequal struggle in that there are no witnesses and the victim suffers an act of outrage that will exclude her from the story, the possibility of pleasure in this act seeming to make the aggression less blamable. Novels by women including the rape topos are more reticent: without ignoring the victim’s «trouble», they either play variations on a version where aggression is controlled by a certain authority of «vertu», or position the rape sequence in a more domestic and common framework of time and space. This confrontation allows a territory of tolerable violence to be delimited, what one could call the «heureuse défaite», precisely when love relations are to be recognized by law.

AsK, jan 2011

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