Dinah: a Novel
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Wright State University CORE Scholar Browse all Theses and Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2007 Dinah: A Novel Andrea Dinah Harris Wright State University Follow this and additional works at: https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/etd_all Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Repository Citation Harris, Andrea Dinah, "Dinah: A Novel" (2007). Browse all Theses and Dissertations. 113. https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/etd_all/113 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at CORE Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Browse all Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of CORE Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DINAH: A NOVEL A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts By ANDREA DINAH HARRIS B.A., Wright State University, 2005 2007 Wright State University COPYRIGHT BY ANDREA HARRIS 2007 WRIGHT STATE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES May 14, 2007 I HEREBY RECOMMEND THAT THE THESIS PREPARED UNDER MY SUPERVISION BY Andrea Dinah Harris ENTITLED Dinah: A Novel BE ACCEPTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF Master of Arts Erin Flanagan, Ph.D. Thesis Director Carol Loranger, Ph.D. Thesis Co-Director Henry S. Limouze, Ph.D. Department Chair Committee on Final Examination Erin Flanagan, Ph.D. Annette Oxindine, Ph.D. Kelli Zaytoun, Ph.D Joseph F. Thomas, Jr., Ph.D. Dean, School of Graduate Studies ABSTRACT Harris, Andrea Dinah. M.A., Department of English, Wright State University, 2007. Dinah: A Novel. Three years after her rape, Dinah begins to have visions of other rapes. Her visions are prompted by physical contact with the rapist or his victim. She decides that the visions are being sent to her so that she can stop the rapists. Although questioning her sanity and the morality of her actions, she begins killing the rapists. When Dinah later decides that the killings are futile, the ghosts of women who have been killed begin to haunt her. However, as Dinah begins to understand how the killing of rapists by a woman helps dismantle the social construction of women as victims, she recognizes these ghost women as her allies. Despite the complications of her personal relationships and the growing suspicions of police detectives, Dinah ultimately embraces the killings as her spiritual mission. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page I. BEGINNING THE SEVENTH DAY . 1 At the Door . 2 Crazy Chick . 14 What's in the Dark . 25 Beginning . 32 Straight Answers . 38 Purpose . 44 Access . 52 Swinging . 60 John . 68 The Seventh Day . 77 Waiting for the Right Time . 89 Getting Back Out There . 98 II. DOUBTING ONE BY ONE. 107 Small Talk . 108 Date Murder . 115 Called . 127 One by One . 136 "Beautiful" . 144 Will . 148 Chance . 160 Magic Act . 166 v Don't Say a Word . 180 Home . 188 Thank You . 198 Doubts . 211 Unresolved . 219 Fishing . 227 Coffee . 238 The Day After . 244 III. SHIFTING REVELATIONS. 257 Forgiveness . 258 Perfect . 265 Betrayal . 268 Haunted . 277 Sanctuary . 288 Revelations . 298 Red Roses . 304 Someone Special . 313 Why . 316 Shifting . 324 Heart Trouble . 335 The Strong One . 345 Dawn . 355 Marked . 364 vi PREFACE The text of Dinah contains multiple representations of rape, and, indeed, Dinah is a book about rape, specifically the societal construction of rape that enables its perpetuation as an act of gendered violence. And as a text containing representations of rape, Dinah is part of a long and distinguished succession of tales. Representations of rape are included in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, and in the Bible. In fact, the protagonist of Dinah shares her name with a woman whose rape is told in Genesis 34. This connection to the Bible is indicative of the long literary and societal history of rape, as well as Dinah's religious and spiritual quest. In addition, this connection to the Biblical story establishes one of the novel's key themes—retribution. Whereas the rape of the Dinah in Genesis 34 is revenged by the woman's brothers, the Dinah in the novel seeks retribution for the rape of women as a gender. The refiguring of retribution for rape as justice for a gender, delivered by an abused member of that gender, is representative of the way in which the specific treatment of rape in literature has changed. The Western canon has tended to treat rape as an inflicted absence—something men do that results in the exclusion of women from the text and vii society, often through madness and suicide. However, as the literary canon has been expanded to include women writers from diverse races and cultures, rape has become something experienced, and often overcome, by women. Essentially, stories of rape are now more frequently told in full from the perspective of the women who survive it, rather than told in part from the perspective of those who commit it. For example, in two of the oft cited canonized texts containing representations of rape, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, the rapes are characterized by elision. However, in one of the most frequently taught contemporary tales of rape, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, rape is described in graphic detail by the survivor, who becomes the text's heroine. Likewise, Dinah is a rape survivor and a heroine. She does not act out of a simplistic desire to avenge her own rape. Indeed, the man who raped her is not among the men whom she targets. Instead, Dinah kills men who have or will rape other women; she kills to save others. In this sense, perhaps, Dinah may be compared to the classic female heroine who puts others before self; however, simply as a woman who kills, Dinah also challenges the societal notion of women as victims. In fact, contemporary tales of rape often challenge the traditional rape narrative by including viii the death or attack of the rapist. For instance, in Frances Washburn's Elsie's Business, Buchi Emecheta's The Rape of Shavi, and Estela Portillo Trambley's "If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle" the rapists become victims of violence as a result of their crimes against women. In Dinah, the men become the victims. Dinah kills men who have committed rape and men who will rape in the future. Her killing of the men before they become rapists accentuates their status as victims and thus further undermines the gendered notion of victim. Not only is a woman killing men who are guilty of rape, she is also killing men who are "innocent." Within the text, however, these killings are both practically and theoretically necessary to the eradication of rape. In a practical sense, the killings are necessary to prevent the men from raping. Theoretically, the killings are necessary to change the notion of women as the inevitable victims of male violence— a notion that, at least in feminist theory, is deemed integral to the perpetuation of rape in society. Indeed, within feminist theory, the social construction of women as victims is the focus of current discussions regarding the anti-rape movement. Feminist scholars such as Pauline Bart, Kathleen Barry, Sharon Marcus, Martha McCaughey, and Renée Heberle have questioned ix the unintended conflation of irreparable harm and rape in the survivor discourse and the ultimate usefulness of speaking out as an effective political strategy. Claims of a "victim discourse" have gained momentum in recent years, adding a sense of urgency to our need to deconstruct the notion of women as victims. Dinah is testimony to my belief that this deconstruction will take place through new forms of discourse and narratives, rather than through a return to the historical silence surrounding the global epidemic of rape. In other words, this novel is an attempt to find a new way of speaking about rape, one in which women are not portrayed as inevitable victims, yet the full horror and reality of rape are still portrayed. By treating rape as a horrific crime that can be eradicated by the gender who most suffers the effects of this crime, Dinah proposes a radical shift in the current rape discourse, a shift toward violence as a necessary and moral tool of womankind's movement toward equality. This treatment of the eradication of rape as a feasible and worthy endeavor is necessary in part because of the claim that contemporary portrayals of rape are encouraging the view of rape as something that is not only an inevitable part of women's lives but also a catalyst of positive transformation in their lives. In other words, when texts x like The Color Purple portray rape victims as becoming heroines after their rapes, it can be argued that rape enables woman's transformation. Thus, a representation of rape that is intended as a positive portrayal of women can instead be used to undermine the urgent need to stop rape. The relationship between representations of rape in literature and the reality of rape in women's lives is established in two seminal scholarly works, The Violence of Representation by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse and Rape and Representation by Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver. However, the relationship is perhaps most vivid in the similarities between recent rape memoirs and fictional accounts of rape. As a rape survivor, I have become acutely aware of the enactment of representation on my physical body as a text. Moreover, I am stunned by the power of the spiritual connection with other women that is invoked in me when I read both fictional and non-fictional accounts of rape.