Metafiction and #MeToo: A new way to tell charged stories

182 et me tell you a story, one you’ve probably heard before. An older man gains the trust of a younger woman. He is experienced, knowing, with charisma to spare. She is young, troubled, talented, precocious. (To some eyes, she might not even look that young.) She talks; he listens. She cries; he comforts. He kisses; she responds. For maybe the first time, she is seen the way she wants to be seen: that is, as special. It’s only later that any injuries become apparent: stains, bruises, empty spaces where pieces of herself used to be. By then, it’s too late for her to say what she wants, or doesn’t want, and why. L books Metafiction and #MeToo A new way to tell charged stories Maggie Doherty METAFICTION AND #METOO | 183 This story is just a template, a script, ready for adaptation. I could tell it to you in different ways and with different effects. I could give the man and the girl names, personalities, backstories, make them people we can study and psychologize. I could use the second person, make you feel the way the girl feels (a little proud and a little scared). Or I can tell it to you in the first person: I am the girl sitting with the much older man who runs a magazine. I have just published my first book review. I am going through a devastating breakup, and I can’t really manage to eat or to sleep. I find myself flirting—even though I feel no attraction, even though I mostly feel dead inside—because it seems like what I am supposed to do. I feel like I’m auditioning for a play. I’ve taken my cue from the man in front of me, and I’m trying not to mess up my lines. There’s something to be said for the first-person approach when it comes to telling a story like the one above. It’s direct, intimate, seemingly authentic. It makes clear demands on the audience: listen , believe, bear witness. But an audience is rarely a blank screen, and a speaker is usually aware of what an audience demands or expects. Victims have scripts too, ways of making themselves more credible. In September 2018, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her memories of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulting when she was fifteen years old, she was praised for telling her story in the most convincing way. She was clear and controlled. She remembered the things she should remember and forgot those things—how she got home, for example—that a traumatized person would forget. She was the right amount of emotional, at the right times. But in testifying to a personal experience of sexual violation, Ford faced a problem familiar to many women: how to tell this kind of story in a way that was truthful and credible to both the victims of sexual assault and the many skeptics in the audience. You could see her strain to meet competing demands. Only nine days later, Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court. 184 | MAGGIE DOHERTY Blasey Ford’s testimony—much like the many public statements by women who have been violated or harassed by powerful men—demonstrates both the value and the limitations of firstperson testimony when it comes to stories about sexual misconduct . On the one hand, if violation silences a woman, a victim who tells her own story can feel empowered: by testifying, she reclaims her voice. On the other hand, first-person accounts struggle to be received as anything other than subjective: This is what she said, sure, but what about his perspective? The women delivering these first-person statements are easily dismissed, or ridiculed by their opponents as vindictive or unhinged: “A little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” as political operative David Brock once sought to portray Anita Hill. And so in an effort to be taken seriously, a woman might shape her story to satisfy certain expectations. This isn’t to say she lies or fabricates. Rather, in telling her story to an audience, she hews to a...