Justine Leach Dissertation Master Document
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Consent to Rape? The Ambiguation of Sexual Consent in Contemporary World Literature by Justine Tara Amy Leach A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Justine Leach, 2017 Consent to Rape? The Ambiguation of Sexual Consent in Contemporary World Literature Justine Tara Amy Leach Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2017 Abstract This dissertation studies that which divides rape from sex: the unstable line formed by the concept of sexual consent. It combines an exploration of the promises, paradoxes and problems associated with locating the liberal subject’s sexual consent at the heart of rape law with an analysis of contested representations of consent and nonconsent in several key literary texts about rape. These texts include the paradigmatic rape novel of the eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and four twentieth century novels from Africa and North America: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. This interdisciplinary and transnational work connecting law and literature draws on the theoretical perspectives of feminism, postcolonialism and trauma theory to fill an important gap in literary analysis of what is constituted as the grey zone of sexual experience between rape and consensual sex. To explore this critical space, I attend to heterosexual representations of sexual violence that cannot be categorized as rape ii because nonconsent is ambiguous, and to representations that meet definitions of rape, but that critical and cultural commentary identifies as ambiguously consensual sex. Racial, sexual, colonial and national discourses among others overdetermine the female characters whose consent is at stake in these representations, obscuring their nonconsent to sex. An exploration of the problematics of the female subject’s sexual consent reveals that the liberal subject premised by rape law is an unattainable ideal compared to which actual individuals are found to be lacking. What emerges from my analysis is not just the power of rape myths, the rhetoric of seduction, and the denial of female sexual autonomy and desire, but the ambiguating force of narrative itself. The problem of representing rape is not encapsulated by a dialectic of speech and silence. Rather rape appears most indeterminable when it is represented in narrative as a sequence of events over time, for the female subject is treated as though she exists in a state of perpetual consent, and so nonconsent can only ever be a temporary action of no duration and little force. iii Acknowledgments A Ph.D. dissertation can feel at times like a long journey walked alone. I am, therefore, extremely grateful to everyone who has made sure that my path has not been one of isolation. I offer my very special thanks to my supervisor Professor Ato Quayson for his unwavering belief in the value of this study and belief in my ability to live up to its promise. His guidance especially when I have doubted the path before me has been of the utmost importance. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee, Professor Neil ten Kortenaar and Professor Dana Seitler, whose suggestions and robust questioning of my analysis have pushed me to interrogate my assumptions and led me to make stronger textual and critical insights. In addition, I am grateful to the members of my Final Oral Examination Committee: my external appraiser, Professor Carine Mardorossian, for her careful reading and thought provoking response to my research, as well as my internal appraiser, Professor Denise Cruz, and departmental representative, Professor Lynne Magnusson, for their critical and inspiring conversation. I am indebted to Professor Nick Mount for his mentorship: with his help I became a better scholar through becoming a better teacher. My thinking about consent has been invaluably enhanced by the wonderful panels put together by Professor Keja Valens and Professor Jordana Greenblatt at the ACLA in 2013 and 2014. My work has been facilitated by funding from Canadian Commonwealth Scholarships, University of Toronto Fellowships and the Doctoral Completion Award without which my studies would not have been possible. My sincere thanks are also due to my friends and family. To my parents, Judith Fewell and David Leach, who have been unwavering in their support of me, I would like to say that your encouragement has sustained me, your practical help has carried me and your love has fortified me. Special thanks must go to my mother for listening so patiently and responding with such care as I read every sentence of this dissertation out load to her. Always by my side has been my husband Jason Zebchuk whose pride in me has been iv abiding. Jason, you have held my hand, calmed my fears and carefully proof read my work. Any thanks I offer cannot encapsulate what you have done for me. Finally, to my son Callum Zebchuk-Leach thank you for so cheerfully playing with your caregivers while I was away from you working and so joyfully greeting me upon my return to you at the end of the day. Without your capacity to let me come and go, I would not have been able to pick up the journey of this dissertation after your birth. Your joy and wonder at the world puts everything in perspective. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1 Consenting Negatives: An Introduction to the Ambiguation of Sexual Consent ......................................................................................................................1 1.1. Can Clarissa’s “No” be heard? ..........................................................................3 1.2. Framing the Subject Whose Consent is at Stake .............................................11 1.3. Outlining The Argument ..................................................................................30 Chapter 2 The Subject’s Ambiguous Consent in Rape Law ........................................34 2.1. The Precarious Subject of Rape Law ...............................................................36 2.2. Doctrinal Skepticism ........................................................................................49 2.3. To Be a “Subject Before the Law” ..................................................................58 2.4. Surrounding Circumstances: Excising Consent from the Definition of Rape .64 Chapter 3 J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and The Limit of Rape .......................................78 3.1. “Real Rape” and a Rape that is “Not Quite That” ...........................................84 3.2. “Seduction” or “Affair”? The Problem of Labelling Melanie’s Rape .............96 3.3. The Language of Non-Agency .......................................................................103 Chapter 4 Trauma and the Erasure of Sexual Consent in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. .........................................................................................................121 4.1. Intergenerational Trauma and the Ambiguation of Sexual Consent ..............124 4.2. Slavery, Rape and the Question of Desire .....................................................139 4.3. Filling the Gap: Sexual Agency in Traumatic Repetition ..............................153 Chapter 5 The Seduction of Rape as Allegory in Postcolonial Figurations of Desire ....................................................................................................................159 5.1. Fantasia: A Language of Love and Rape ......................................................163 5.2. Rape as Seduction in Season of Migration to the North ................................177 vi 5.3. Subverting the “Code of Recognition:” Marital Rape and Its Disavowal .....193 5.4. Postcolonial Allegory and the Problem of Consent .......................................198 Chapter 6 Conclusion: Rape and The Temporality of Nonconsent ...........................205 Works Consulted ........................................................................................................220 vii Chapter 1 Consenting Negatives: An Introduction to the Ambiguation of Sexual Consent A good encouraging denial, I must own . And such like consenting negatives, as I may call them, and yet not intend a reflection upon my sister; for what can any young creature in the like circumstances say when she is not sure but a too ready consent may subject her to the slights of a sex that generally values a blessing either more or less as it is obtained with difficulty or ease? (Samuel Richardson, Clarissa 44) The precariousness of nonconsent–its transience, its dependence on social codes, its ambiguity–is brought to light in Samuel Richardson’s epistolary classic Clarissa (1747- 48). In this literary world, the apprehension of another person’s communication of consent or nonconsent is not aided by appealing to a “no means no”/“yes means yes” binary. This is a world in which consent may be communicated through a negative, while at the same time genuine dissent may be taken as merely a precursor to assent. Such ambiguity is perilous for the one who gives or withholds her consent. With only equivocal communications of assent and dissent