It Is Not Enough to Speak: Toward a Coalitional Consciousness in the Young Adult Rape Novel

“Let me tell you about it” (198). This line, in which Melinda, the protagonist of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999), responds to the observation of her aptly named art teacher, Mr. Freeman, that she has “been through a lot,” concludes the novel and its narrative trajectory, tracing Melinda’s recovery from the trauma of rape as a movement from passive silence to active speech (198). In breaking her silence about the rape, Melinda, and thus the novel, utilizes what Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray identify as “the principal tactic adopted by the survivors’ movement” (261). This enormously popular novel must then be credited with propagating a feminist perspective on rape that young readers might not otherwise access.

However, Alcoff and Gray’s warning that “survivor discourse has paradoxically appeared to have empowering effects even while it has in some cases unwittingly facilitated the recuperation of dominant discourses” applies not only to Speak but also to the majority of young adult rape novels (263).¹ Survivor speech, Alcoff and Gray argue, is liable to be “co-opted” (261) when it employs a confessional mode that focuses on the “survivor’s ‘inner’ self and feelings … rather than … a discussion of links to the ‘exterior’ and ways to transform it” (280).²

It is clear that Anderson and the authors of other young adult rape novels are motivated by the feminist insistence that women tell the truth about their lives by making public tabooed issues like sexual assault. However, the feminist effort to politicize what has historically been understood as private can be undermined by formal features of the novels. While Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the novel is particularly effective in representing competing perspectives on social reality, the first-person narration utilized by Speak and by many other young adult rape novels frequently results in a univocal, individual, and psychological focus that aligns, ironically, with postfeminist rejections of feminism in favor of neoliberal individualism (263). Tanya Serisier traces the “epistemological primacy” of personal stories of rape in feminist discourse to Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, which Serisier says is commonly understood as the “founding text of feminist anti-rape theory” (89, 88). Serisier identifies a problem with this theory that is also pertinent to the YA rape novel: the feminist storytelling that has emerged “has been complicit in erasing crucial differences around race, class, and sexuality, and has acted to prevent other stories from being told” (89).

This essay seeks out those other stories, which have—at least to some extent—been told, but accorded lesser critical attention. A number of young adult rape novels depict sexual violence in more adequate and complex ways, including representations of the significance of difference, and avoid the co-option that Alcoff and Gray identify. In Sandra Scoppetone’s Happy Endings Are All Alike (1978), Alice Childress’s Those Other People (1989), and Erika Tamar’s Fair Game (1993), multiple firstperson narrators offer a more complete perspective on social reality than, for example, Melinda does. Narrators who are black, poor, gay, or intellectually disabled articulate the experiences and insights of disadvantaged social groups and offer a privileged epistemological perspective on social reality, representing the ways in which gender interacts with other social institutions to structure violence. Other narrators articulate the hegemonic perspectives on gender, race, class, disability, and sexuality that normalize violence. As Sarah Day argues, “multivoiced narration … highlights questions of power by constructing complex networks of character relationships that demonstrate the challenges that adolescents face while navigating various institutional and social hierarchies” (66). In doing so, these novels both represent competing understanding of rape and offer a systemic analysis of the social conditions that underlie gender-based oppression, including rape. In addition to mapping the structural conditions leading to rape, Those Other People and Jacqueline Woodson’s I Hadn’t Meant to Tell you This (1994), two of the few novels that highlight the significance of race, suggest the kind of interracial coalitions that must be formed to end violence against women and girls.

Speak

Elaine O’Quinn’s analysis of...