The Sadistic Reader: Gender and the Pleasures of Violence in the Novel

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2015 The Sadistic Reader: Gender and the Pleasures of Violence in the Novel Pamela Burger Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/533 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE SADISTIC READER: GENDER AND THE PLEASURES OF VIOLENCE IN THE NOVEL by Pamela Burger A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 © 2015 PAMELA BURGER All Rights Reserved Burger ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum Date Chair of Examining Committee Prof. Mario DiGangi Date Executive Officer Prof. Rachel Brownstein Prof. Steven Kruger Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Burger iii Abstract THE SADISTIC READER: GENDER AND THE PLEASURES OF VIOLENCE IN THE NOVEL by Pamela Burger Adviser: Wayne Koestenbaum This project seeks to explain the prevalence of narratives that feature sexual violence against women in the tradition of the Anglophone novel. To this end, it posits the existence of a sadistic reading practice that coincides with readers’ sympathetic identification. A sadistic reader takes pleasure in the bodily violation of the woman at the center of a novel; such a reader enters the text expecting violence, and experiences a sense of narrative gratification when the inevitable violation plays out. These expectations emerge from repeated interactions with a literary tradition in which victimized heroines are routine. To explore such sadism, I follow two lines of inquiry. The first examines the literary mechanisms that create meaning and pleasure from textual violence, and determines what devices exist within the text to engage the reader in a virtual complicity with that act. The second explores how violent representations implicate the culture at large: to what extent do these texts reify cultural attitudes towards violence against women, to what extent do they code sexuality, and to what extent do they react to existing sexual norms? Combining historical theories of the novel, reader response theory, and psychoanalysis, I trace the uneasy relationship between readers and female protagonists. Although readers sympathetically identify with a novel’s heroine, her bodily vulnerability Burger iv makes her a fraught site for such identification, and, in the moment of her violation, she is easily maneuvered from the position of the sympathetic “me” to the abjected “not-me.” Thus readers can enjoy identifying with the heroine throughout her narrative, while still rejecting her vulnerability. I explore this seeming paradox by analyzing the works of Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, and J.M. Coetzee. These authors self-consciously examine the rape narrative as it operates in the literature of the postmodern era. Their respective novels The Magic Toyshop, Blonde, and Disgrace, consider both the influence of literary history on the self-perceptions of the modern heroine and demonstrate the complex, shifting form of identification through which readers interact with novelistic heroines. Burger v This dissertation is dedicated to Karen Starr, without whom it never would have been written. Burger vi Acknowledgments I would like to extend a special thank you to Wayne Koestenbaum, whose support was essential to my completing this dissertation, and whose ability to offer critical insight while giving me the freedom to explore my ideas allowed this project to blossom. I also want to thank Rachel Brownstein for her perceptive readings and incisive comments. And of course, I extend my thanks to Steve Kruger for all his thoughtful advice not only as a member of my committee but throughout my graduate career. Finally, I would like to thank Anton Borst, who has been a model of great scholarship and a wonderful partner to me during every step of this process. Burger vii Preface While working on this project over the past few years, I have dreaded the regular question from friends, colleague, and acquaintances, who ask, out of politeness or basic curiosity, “What is your dissertation about?” It is not easy to bring phrases like “sexual violence” or “sadistic pleasure” into casual conversation. And yet I have been surprised that so many of these questioners, after an initial silence, want to offer a sample text for me to consider. Many replies begin with, “That makes me think of…” and end with a variety of well-known contemporary texts. Frequently such suggestions include popular genre fiction, usually including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Fifty Shades of Grey, and, oddly, The Hunger Games. Just as often, I hear sensational crime-oriented TV programs like Law and Order: SVU and Criminal Minds suggested as exemplars of sadistic audience involvement. Recently after I presented a paper on this topic at a conference on women in crime fiction, an audience member asked me why I thought people click on links from news feeds to online videos that show women being stoned or beheaded in the Middle East. There are, of course, countless examples of gendered violence depicted in the media we regularly consume. The variety and range of texts suggested to me signal not only this prevalence but also a general consumer anxiety that surrounds such graphic depictions of violence. This work, however, is not a study of such horrifying representations. It is instead my purpose to examine a more normalized, even acceptable, form of violence against women as it plays out in the late-twentieth-century Anglophone Burger viii novel. Although there are more obvious examples of literary violence in genre fiction or in the avant-garde, I have chosen texts that fall under the general category of mainstream narrative fiction—that is, not “genre”-specific novels like detective or noir fiction— precisely because they are not so explicitly graphic. Although I discuss literary rape at great length, I apply the term to scenes of sexual violence that might not, in either the courts of law or public opinion, be considered “Rape” writ large. The rapes presented here might require all manner of prefixes: date, spousal, fantasized, threatened, or play- acted. As in real life, concepts of consent and violation are blurred by circumstances and by the characters’ conflicting gestures. Indeed, when scenes of physical rape do occur, they are brief, whereas the looming threat of violation lingers throughout the novels, as the women inhabit precarious situations without easy routes for escape. What I find troubling in these representations is no different from what I find troubling in more sensationalized depictions. The violence I examine is normalized, constructed as a natural, or at least inevitable, part of women’s narratives. The threat of violation that haunts heroines in more mainstream fiction reflects such naturalization within the culture: we can easily accept that women are violable creatures who, upon reaching sexual maturity, are continuously cast as potential victims. Even as we condemn overtly sadistic acts or extreme brutality, we accept subtler forms of violence that affect women on a daily basis as normal facts of life. There is perhaps something puritanical in a study that questions how and why we derive pleasure in novels, as though any attempt to scrutinize pleasure necessarily condemns it. However, I have chosen to explore this very question because, in so doing, I hope to point out the subtle violence that is integral to the construction and enjoyment of Burger ix the Anglophone novel, and to consider how, in consuming such fantasies, we continue to normalize the threat of violence as a natural aspect of female experience. Burger x Table of Contents Preface viii Chapter One 1 What is a Sadistic Reader? Chapter Two 35 Authorial Sadism and the Ambivalent Reader in Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop Chapter Three 67 Reading Like a Voyeur: Identification and Visuality in Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde Chapter Four 106 J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: Confronting Violence in the Global Novel Conclusion 141 Works Cited 149 Burger xi Chapter One What is a Sadistic Reader? The term sadistic reader, which titles this work, is in many ways destabilizing: as readers, we tend to view ourselves as empathic beings, depending upon our humane impulses to identify with fictional characters as though they were real beings. It is difficult for most of us to admit that we can take pleasure in the pain of another, and yet the presence of violence against women in the novel remains a troubling point of contention for authors, critics, and readers. In this project, I examine the reader’s role in representational violence against women by positing the presence of sadism in the tradition of the Anglophone novel. A sadistic reader, as I formulate him/her, takes pleasure in the bodily violation of the woman at the center of a text; further, such a reader enters the text expecting violence, and experiences a sense of narrative gratification when the inevitable violation plays out. These expectations emerge from repeated interactions with a literary tradition in which victimized heroines are routine. Sadistic readers are made, not born: they are trained through exposure to certain generic conventions to take pleasure in literary acts of violence against women. Although this readership exists within a larger culture of gender inequity and sexual violence, it is not necessarily complicit with such misogyny. By identifying a sadistic reading practice, I do not mean to infuse an act of fantasy—that is, engaging with a work of art—with moral culpability.

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