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Naming Villains


“whan that dronken al was in the crowke,

To bedde wente the doghter right anon;

… up Aleyn rist, and by the wenche he crepte.

This wenche lay uprighte and faste slepte,

Til he so ny was, er she myghte espie,

That it had been to late for to crie,

And shortly for to seyn, they were aton.” –Chaucer, The Reeve’s Tale

“It seems, some certain snatch or so

Would serve your turns…

Single you thither then this dainty doe,

And strike her home by force, if not by words.” –Shakespeare, Titus

In the months following the Brock Turner case, and in the ongoing fallout of Access Hollywood’s leaked Donald Trump bus video, the nation’s deep seeded rape culture has taken center stage in cultural discussion. Numerous political commentators, bloggers, pundits, and citizens have spoken in outrage at a presidential candidate dismissing his graphic descriptions of sexual assault as “locker room talk,” and many have connected this to Turner’s similar attempts to blame his conviction on excessive alcohol consumption and “20 minutes of action.”

As this post’s leading quotations suggest, this type of language surrounding assault is not new. Authors like Chaucer and Shakespeare have depicted the dangerous power of words in helping predators justify their sexual violence and then reduce the significance of their violation. Yet at least in these two examples, something significant separates John, Aleyn, Aaron, Demetrius, and Chiron from the likes of Trump and Turner: the literary characters are recognized as undeniable villains. In “The Reeve’s Tale,” Chaucer’s narrator acknowledges that Aleyn uses the family’s excessive alcohol consumption to target the miller’s daughter. Asleep before the others, she is unable to see her attacker or cry out before he commits his crime; and the narrator, immediately after admitting this, must turn away abruptly from the scene. Aaron and the princes animalize Lavinia demean the site of her rape as a “snatch” as well as using the word to evacuate the seriousness of their behavior; yet they later term their action “rape and villainy”, and the language will be echoed by other characters in the remainder of the play. These men’s crimes are undeniable, regardless how the men themselves characterize or minimize their actions. No one besides the villains themselves dismisses the evil of assault.

While depictions of the literary rapists mirror the language of Trump and Turner, they also teach us a great deal about wider culture’s reaction to that villainy. Unlike our modern world, these two literary worlds do tag the attackers for their evil. Like our modern world, though, the wide-spread justification for defending survivors relies on the women’s position not as humans in their own right, but on their relation to others as “daughters, wives, mothers, sisters.” Chaucer’s miller discovers his daughter’s rape and, rather than grieving her violation, he decries the rapist for reducing her marriage value. Shakespeare’s Andronici learn of Lavinia’s rape and immediately wail at their own loss of masculinity, and at their lapse in protecting the honor of “their” daughter, sister, wife. It harkens to the responses of GOP men, such as Jeb Bush’s use of the phrase “our women” in explaining his disgust at Trump’s tape.

One could argue that Chaucer’s character is a victim—nameless, assaulted, devalued, and ultimately silenced. She represents so many who have been similarly silenced. But Shakespeare’s Lavinia provides an alternative reference point for the survivors of today. Despite her attackers’ attempts to silence her—they literally remove her tongue and hands to prevent communication—and despite her own male relatives’ attempt to narrate grief for her, Lavinia speaks. In writing the names of her rapists, she further uses the Latin “stuprum” (violation) rather than “raptus” (theft) to bring focus back onto her body and psyche as the sites of the crime. And she actively participates in bringing her attackers to poetic justice.

The powerful impact statement read by the woman Turner attacked similarly reset the terms of the assault, making it clear that fault lay not in alcohol, not in partying, not in clothing, not in the survivor, but in the predator alone. Similarly emergence of hashtags such as #notokay and #pussygrabsback, among other protests, give survivors space to vocalize their own experiences, recalibrating the vocabularies and attitudes around assault, opening the door to healing and providing community for still-silent victims. These voices—not to mention the college women who bravely speak out and protest their own assaults—recast the issue, drawing attention to the villainy rampantly occurring and being dismissed in our time.

As women (and men) speak out about surviving assault, another promising difference emerges. They are not alone. Men who are not predators, men who do not consider women’s value to be relational but individual—men being loudly represented in the media by professional athletes as well as commentators John Oliver and Trevor Noah to name only two—stand with survivors and draw attention to a shared “humanity.” In this sense, the survivors’ experiences matter because they are human and for no other reason. And the suggestion that predatory or violent actions are typical, dismissible, or to be expected of men degrades the dignity of those whose consent is denied as well as those men who respect that consent.

So where do we go from here? The literature tells us that violence and revenge beget more violence. It shows us the importance of social collaboration in resisting villainy, in forming equal and fair communities, and in defining our shared values. And it teaches us how crucial our choice of leaders is to this process. Whatever the results of this election season, the problem of rape culture will not simply or easily disappear; but it does become clear that one result takes a stand, however big or small, against violence and intolerance, while the other simultaneously dismisses the seriousness of the problem and therefore perpetuates it.

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