Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction by Robin E. Field (review)

Robin E. Field's monograph Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction begins with a historical look at how the idea of rape consciousness and rape culture began, using the infamous rape scene from the film Gone with the Wind (1939) to set the tone for how representations of rape conditioned American viewers to downplay women's claims of sexual assault. Field's next example, Grace Metalious's novel Peyton Place (1956), depicts a writer empathizing toward characters experiencing rape and incest; however Field argues that the book's use of voyeurism did more to alienate real-life survivors from coming forward for help and assistance. These two examples help set the scene for those interested in how American culture desensitized reactions to claims of rape and sexual assualt and foreground the literary landscape that writers used to create societal awareness. The chapters of Writing the Survivor, archived by decade, move across the twentieth century to our present day in order to demonstrate the trajectory of silence, awareness, and need for survival regarding rape in both literature and culture.

The chronological organization of Field's book creates an easy-to-follow structure for her readers. Field outlines the literary history of rape culture in her lengthy introduction, using a dual historical and cultural approach to understand how reading audiences internalized and responded to claims of sexual assault. In the five chapters that follow, Field pairs research from each selected decade with a close reading of the rape literature from the time period, beginning with the first chapter, "Rape Consciousness: From Activism to Text," which uses the 1970s as its archive. Field argues that this decade became the impetus for the anti-rape movement, beginning with activists' successfully redefining rape as a response of violence versus desire. As a result, Field claims, much of the literature that proliferated within the 1970s—including memoirs authored by Billie Holiday and Maya Angelou—place their focus on the experiences of the rape victim.

As the book progresses, Field complements her chronological organization by labeling the discussed female (and male) characters into three separate types: rape victims, rape survivors, or rape victim-survivors. As Field explains, "Many of the rape novels of the 1980s extend the rape narrative beyond the incident of assault to detail how women recover from rape" (p. 111). These different characterizations, she claims, depend on how readers understood rape and its repercussions within their particular climate. Victims, Field argues, await acknowledgement from their community, while survivors have entered the healing phase. In her usage of "victim-survivor," Field explains how the evolution of rape fiction has created a place of ambivalence where the recurrence and remembrance of one's trauma may conflict with the recovery process; Field argues that the third designation is necessary, as it provides textual reaffirmation of real-life individuals' personal dignity.

Perhaps most notable about this book is Field's historical and contextual analysis of how writers of color and ethnicity navigate female reporting of rape in the third chapter, "'The Victim Demands Narrative': Writing the Perspective of the Rape Victim-Survivor in the Long 1980s." This chapter offers a glimpse at how literary examples of rape survivors reveal authors' decisions to balance political versus personal concerns. For these writers (and their characters), Field claims, the political becomes personal. Through the works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Sandra Cisneros, and Bharati Mukherjee, Field's argument suggests that characters' choices to report their rape—or remain silent—are not simply dependent on their reactions to rape; instead, as Field elucidates, whole communities often feel the punishment if and when a woman decides to come forward about her sexual abuse. In her close reading of Walker's Meridian (1976), for example, Field ties the title character's denouncement of her white friend's rape accusation to the probable anti-black violence such a...