Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in American Women's Fiction (review)

Certain topics are of such profound and painful importance that one applauds every serious effort to address them. One such topic is the subject of Deborah Horvitz's recent book on sexual violence and its representation in American women's fiction. Sexual violence and the sadism that accompanies it, and the profoundly difficult and painful processes by which the survivors psychologically respond to such traumas, are realities that demand attention by their intolerable existence. They are also symptomatic of the pervasive oppression of women that mars the history of culture. Horvitz, a social worker and psychotherapist, deserves credit for her willingness to derive insights from a number of critical methodologies (notably feminism and psychoanalyis) while remaining steadily cognizant of the political dimensions of her topic. For Horvitz, the fictions that she reads "deconstruct the relationship between political power and sexual violence at both institutional and individual levels" (2), and she argues that these texts "document how . . . ideologies [of power] when enacted, permeate . . . protagonists' conscious and unconscious intrapsychic lives" (4).

Focusing on fictions that cluster around the ends of the two last centuries—such as Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina (1992)—but looking primarily at recent novels, Horvitz consistently applies a psychoanalytical framework, asserting a parallel between the premises of psychoanalysis and the works she reads: "past experiences of trauma must be consciously acknowledged in order for personal and political relationships to be reconstituted" (18). She finds a "recurrent trope" in these works in the protagonists' "varying capacities to use art, especially narrative, as a method of ‘working through' or healing from trauma" (18). While she does explore the healing capacity of creative expression, Horvitz is at least as interested in a more pessimistic theme: "how powerlessness becomes eroticized, then entrenched within the victim's self-identity" (21).

Many of her insights into texts are valid and thought-provoking; she comments, for example, that Bone, the protagonist in Bastard out of Carolina, "reveal[s] how the masochistic side of her sexuality becomes structured" (45) through her masturbatory fantasies, a clear example of Horvitz's general point that desires can create in women an unconscious complicity in their own oppression. In addition to its focus on sexist oppression, the book has an important subtheme of the relation between violence and racism. Horvitz's reading of works such as Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, and Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, reveal how, as a result of racism, "culturally instituted, legally sanctioned sadomasochism . . . becomes inseparably entwined with individual and psychological sadomasochism" (39). This topic is a rich one and deserves a more careful discussion than Horvitz gives of the complex mediations that connect societal oppressions with individual psychopathologies.

For all its strengths, the book's absence of thorough historical contextualization of its texts is one of a number of flaws that prevent it from being fully successful. The prose style is not felicitous, containing unclearly motivated digressions from central arguments and vague gestures at critical or literary traditions that can deteriorate into mere catalogues. (The "literary tradition of American realism" is exemplified by "Dreiser, Howells, James, Lewis, Roth, Styron, Wolfe" [88].) A more serious problem is that Horvitz's readings do not examine all the issues that her critical stance necessitates, even those clearly germane to a work's central themes. It is odd, in a political reading of Bastard out of Carolina, to have issues of social class almost completely ignored. Although Horvitz does cite Bone's aunt's resonant comment that "trash rises all the time" (50), readers of the novel will recall that the major characters are defined by their relationship to the pain of being "trash"—the impoverished working class—and the depiction of the effects of...