As anyone who’s read Romeo and Juliet can imagine, being an English teacher sometimes includes talking about sex with large groups of other people’s children. It’s often awkward and accompanied by much giggling, but there’s one aspect of human sexuality--rape--that is often presented as simultaneously catastrophic and unmentionable, especially in older books. As a result, teachers can easily shy away from discussing sexual assault even when it’s an important part of a book’s plot.
The omission of a sensitive topic like rape from a middle school or high school classroom discussion may seem like common sense. It’s upsetting, and it can be hard to know when students are ready for such material. However, ignoring the presence of rape in a text does a real disservice to our students.
I’ve just finished teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and A Tale of Two Cities, two books in which rape plays an often unacknowledged role. Most people remember To Kill a Mockingbird for its expose of racism: Tom Robinson, who is Black, is on trial for raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. His innocence becomes clear through court testimony, during which, among other things, he testifies that Mayella Ewell hugged him and tried to kiss him, saying that she’d “never kissed a grown man before” and that “she says what her papa do to her don’t count.”
Since the jury convicts Tom shortly after this scene, most students focus on the injustice of the ruling, not at the revelation that Mayella is being victimized by her father. In fact, the book encourages us to ignore Mayella’s plight because the child narrator, Scout, doesn’t understand what’s said, and no one will explain it to her. As a result, Mayella and the abuse she’s experiencing are simultaneously erased from the text and very much in her present: her father is in the courtroom during Tom’s testimony, and she has no one to protect her from his wrath.
Rape also motivates the plot in A Tale of Two Cities, although most readers only realize it at the end of the book. The story of the book’s foundational crime is told earlier, but it’s told from the rapist’s point of view: “Our not remote ancestors held the right of life and death over the surrounding vulgar. From this room, many such dogs have been taken out to be hanged; in the next room (my bedroom), one fellow, to our knowledge, was poignarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—his daughter?”
To clarify, the Marquis St. Evrémonde is recalling the time he killed a man for complaining that his daughter had been abducted and raped by the Marquis and his twin brother. However, no names are used, and readers don’t realize that the victims of this crime are the sister and father of arch-villain Madame Defarge until the end of the book. The brothers were exercising their rights to the droit du seigneur, the alleged right of medieval noblemen to have sexual intercourse with new brides before they are allowed to consummate their marriage with their husbands. In this particular case, the bride-to-be went mad and died.
Before the last fifty years or so, stories about rape generally ended with the madness and/or death of the victim. They portray rape as a life-ending experience; stories also abound of women who choose to die rather than be raped. At the same time, however, rape is also romanticized and even eroticized--from the rapist’s point of view--by renaming rape as seduction, emphasizing how alluring the victim is, and otherwise teaching victims to blame themselves and keep quiet about it.
Statistics indicate that today one in six women will be raped. When I first began writing about sexual abuse during the 1990s, it was one in three. This decrease is encouraging, but the numbers are still high enough that it’s reasonable to assume that one or more students in any given class may either have been or are currently being sexually abused at home or elsewhere. Such students might interpret Mayella’s treatment--both in the story and in classroom discussions--as a message that abuse victims are trapped and that their stories, even if heard, will fall on resoundingly deaf ears. Making clear that more help is available to victims today might encourage such a student to ask for help. (And yes, I have been asked.)
We need to keep talking about rape and incest when they appear in books because the outdated passages that students may absorb about these topics need to be addressed. If we ignore literary representations of rape, we risk ignoring the crime in real life as well. Our students need to know that victims are not at fault and that being victimized doesn’t have to be a life-ruining event.
RESOURCES
Resources
Helping Survivors is an organization that provides resources for individuals who have experienced sexual assault and abuse or whowho are seeking to learn how to best help survivors of sexual violence. Helping Survivors is affiliated with RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the United States.
RAINN created and maintains The National Sexual Abuse Hotline (1-800-656-HOPE).
Ride Sharing Sexual Assault Safety - helpingsurvivors.org/rideshare-sexual-assault/
*For anyone who remembers this post with another picture, you aren't crazy. I removed the first post because readers pointed out that the picture I chose to accompany it was inappropriate because it was too graphic/triggering. They were right, and I changed it--or so I thought. Anyway, it remained up for a few weeks because of a technical error. When I realized, I tried to fix the post by deleting and reposting, which broke all the links. So no, you didn't imagine either the post or the image.
What's interesting to me, however, is that I didn't realize for myself that the image was inappropriate. The title, "The Rape of Lucrece," is clearly a major red flag, one that should have been a clue (read "major red flag"). Was I simply not paying attention?
After some thought, I realized that I selected the picture because I have seen pictures like it many times at museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I spent many idyllic hours as a child. How could such blatant images of sexual violence be hung on the walls of major institutions like the Met? It must be okay, mustn't it? So, basically, I'm not saying that I wasn't paying attention but that I've been exposed to what people now call "rape culture," which didn't have a name when I was a kid; it just was. Did I just prove my own point?
Yikes.
Elizabeth Breau, Ph.D. (she/her), is an award-winning writing coach and private English tutor. Her book, History According to SAT: A Content Guide to SAT Reading and Writing, won a silver medal in the teen category from the Nonfiction Authors Association and was a young adult nonfiction finalist in American Book Fest’s Best Book Awards. You can reach her at elizabeth.breau@gmail.com.
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