Aimee Parkison | October/November 2016

NOTES

Women of all races, classes, levels of education, and age are challenged by the threat of violence. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to determine the intent of an author of any gender when it comes to the portrayal of violence in the lives of women. As a result, women who write about violence are often misunderstood and the trend of women writing violence is often ignored.

Studies of violent literature usually focus on the works of popular male authors, masculine perspectives of war and power, and the so-called literature for men. George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, a series of violent fantasy novels with over thirty-one million copies in print, has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, adapted into a popular series on HBO, and broadcast into 150 countries to become the most pirated show worldwide. The series typically has over fourteen million viewers, making it HBO’s most watched series since The Sopranos. According to a recent article in the New York Times, as the popularity of Game of Thrones has escalated, so has the unease over rape’s recurring role. This has led many critics and scholars to ask troubling questions about rape and entertainment. Though a fantasy writer of escapist fiction, Martin, the author of Game of Thrones, believes violence is a realism concern, saying “rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought, from the ancient Sumerians to our present day,” adding that “to omit them from a narrative centered on war and power would have been fundamentally false and dishonest.”¹ What does the prevalence of sexual assault mean in fantasy novels or escapist fiction by a male author when that series has become so beloved by so many millions of readers and viewers? Does rape mean something different to audiences in Game of Thrones than to readers who confront such violence in works by Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison, or other women writers who dare to dramatize violence not meant as escapist entertainment?

Throughout literary history, women have always written about violence, though in more covert ways. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, for instance, ends in a suicide, but it’s not explicit. Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and other black female writers have often written about violence. Decades ago, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” challenged readers’ assumptions about violence and society and was initially met with outrage. Readers demanded an explanation upon the story’s initial publication by the New Yorker in 1948. Jackson found it difficult to explain what she had hoped the story to say. Jackson wanted “to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”² She succeeded, and then had to deal with numerous readers demanding an explanation, but where are the accounts of male writers of her time similarly assaulted by readers demanding an explanation for their stories about violence?

Contemporary literary novels by women writers with complex violent female characters have recently hit the mainstream market. This suggests an emerging trend of women writing violence with more mainstream success than ever. A new generation of women writers, fearless and unapologetic about the violence in their work, are reaping the benefits of those who came before them. A mainstream literary work, Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa presents a rendering of female sexual predation which some have called American Psycho–esque. Tampa portrays a fully humanized female sexual predator, Celeste Price, a middle-school teacher in Florida, who longs for prepubescent teenage boys. Another well-known contemporary mainstream literary work by a woman writing about a violent woman,
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, depicts a complex marriage gone wrong, complete with the round characterization of a murderous, vengeful, and dishonest wife, who seems to capture the sympathies of most readers in spite of her violent tendencies.

Despite a few dazzling success stories, there are still numerous women writing violence who are making a mark on the literary community without seeing financial success or mainstream recognition because their work pushes the boundaries of gender and violence farther than many readers or mainstream publishers are ready to embrace with comfort. Violent female characters are often dismissed by society as “insane,” and insanity becomes a blanket term to rob them of their humanity. As a result, women writing about violent women are often writing about women who have no voice. Perhaps this explains why the true character of the violent woman is still one of the deepest mysteries in American literature.

In The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive, Marta Caminero-Santangelo questions the power dynamic of portraits of violent women in literature written by women authors, especially when it comes to subversive female characters. Caminero-Santangelo identifies a counternarrative in writing by contemporary women authors. This counternarrative rejects madness, even as a symbolic solution, for why female characters commit acts of violence upon the self and others. Morrison’s fiction, for instance, is punctuated with the figure of the murdering mother who kills her children out of the impulse to protect them. Such is the case of the character of Sethe in Beloved, based on an actual slave mother who murdered her child rather than have the child returned to slavery.³

Many of the most stunning and original literary works about violence have been written by women authors, even though the realm of violence in literature, criminology, and human nature is often associated with male behavior and masculine territory. Upon being confronted by women writing violence, readers still demand an explanation. In discussing her debut novel, An Untamed State (Grove Press, 2014), Roxane Gay is careful to explore the motivations behind violence. The novel forces the reader to examine the motivations for kidnapping by exploring the link between inequity and violence, as well as violence’s impact upon women. In an interview with Deirdre Sugiuchi, featured on Electric Literature, Gay says that there is so much violence in the writing because “the world is a violent place and all too often, women are the victims of that violence. This does not mean that violence defines women’s lives.” Gay claims that violence is “a symptom of a much more profound malaise,” citing specific examples like “absolute poverty, where you feel so helpless, so unable to even conceive of how to change your circumstance, that all you can do is lash out. All you can do is give physical voice to your rage.”⁴

Edwidge Danticat examines violence in Haiti in her work. Over the years, Danticat’s work has explored many types of violence. Not only has she has written about sexual violence, political violence, historical violence, massacres, human rights abuses, she has also written about a more intimate kind of violence, parents being violent towards their children, children being violent towards their parents. Her depiction of violence is often brutal and highly detailed. However, Danticat is careful to point out that she doesn’t write about violence to titillate or in a sensational way. Violence evolves from the story itself, rather than from any agenda to write about violence for violence’s sake. Danticat talks about how she discovers her characters’ reaction to violence: “It’s like if you were on the street and two people started fighting or someone started shooting, the way you respond has a lot to do with who you are and what your past experiences have been. You might run or you might stick around to get a closer look. Or you might try to insert yourself in the situation to help the defenseless. I think it’s the same with writing. Your history, your past, your life, figures a lot into how you address violence in your work.”⁵

Testifying to the marketability of violence, Megan Milks says she had wanted to title her story collection after a different story, but her editor and the sales team convinced her that another title would be more marketable. As a title, Kill Marguerite and Other Stories (Emergency Press, 2014) is pretty overtly straightforwardly violent. “Violence towards a girl equals more sales,” says Milks, who identifies as genderqueer and addresses girl-on-girl violence in a number of ways, informed by a queer feminist perspective. When Milks approaches violence, she approaches it queerly—using camp, humor, and kitsch. “In my stories,” she says, “girl on girl violence is always troubling, occasionally hot.” However, Milks is also careful to point out that for women, queer, and trans people, violence is a pervasive threat in a culture that persists in proliferating misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. “In most ways, gender-based violence is out of our control,” Milk says. “Writing about violence is a way to control it, to bring it under our authority.” Milks’ fiction sometimes revels in sexualized violence as a form of weaponized femininity. “Writing about violence can be terrifically empowering,” says Milks. “I’ve found revenge fantasies to be an important coping mechanism.”⁶

Venturing even further beyond the boundaries of realism to convey violent women, Joyelle McSweeney’s book Salamandrine: 8 Gothics (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2012) is a radical reorganization of the dimensions and dynamics of motherhood, configured within a systemic violence at once political and generic. McSweeney points out that we live in an age of ambient violence: “As humans in America, we are extremely literate with some species of violence while other areas of violence remain obscure yet obscurely present.” McSweeney’s goal as a writer is to constantly bring this violence into view, from the subtext into the text.⁷

Also delving into the fantastic realm in between violent reality and the violence of fairytale, Lily Hoang recently finished a fictionalized account of serial killer Martha Johnson, who smothered her children as revenge against her husband. As a fairytale writer, Hoang says she writes about violence because fairytales are violent. Fairytales contain a necessary threat of violence to the innocent and the young, especially the virginal female. Without violence, there is no fairytale. However, Hoang also writes about violence for verisimilitude. As an essayist, she revisits her violences and the violences forced onto her. These violences can be physical or violences of self-recognition, the psyche, passive-aggression, family, or even love. Her books Parabola, Changing, and The Evolutionary Revolution contain exterior violence and violence that remains covered and obscured, even to the interior, so far interior that it can be neither seen nor spoken.⁸

Selah Saterstrom is a major influence on Hoang. In “Me, Selah Saterstrom, and Everyone We Violate,” Hoang writes about Selah Saterstrom’s Beau Repose trilogy—The Pink Institution, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and her forthcoming Slab, all with Coffee House Books. The trilogy forces readers to confront suspected genres of violence. These five genres of violence in Saterstrom’s work, according to Hoang, are the violence of forgetting, of education, of silence and speech, of form, and of optimism.⁹

Hoang points out that in indie publishing, most editors welcome women writing violence. If Hoang were writing for a different audience, however, she assumes her violent works would not be received with such a welcoming embrace. Hoang says, “Women must justify first themselves and then their writing if it contains violence. We must prove that we are not like our texts: that we are separate; whereas men seldom need to settle down with accountability. I think the issue here is why women writing violence are often misunderstood, and I think this has everything to do with the gender roles we—both consciously and unconsciously—persevere to hold close. Women writing violence challenge gender roles in an obvious way, so obvious a way that it must be refuted and rejected.”¹⁰

Sometimes when it comes to the complexities of violence, accessibility is not a virtue. Inaccessibility leads to discovery by inspiring readers to ask difficult questions. Doing violence to language can be freeing for the writer and the reader in poetry and prose. Revising and revisiting traditional cultural narrative renderings of violence against women and all peoples can lead to cultural discoveries through literary experiments. Language is full of surprises and forms, and if violence becomes a structure or an institution of language and culture, there is much to be said for the freedom of creative destruction.

Creative destruction often does violence to language in poetry, as well as in innovative or experimental prose. At the AWP Panel Presentation on “Women Writing Violence” at the 2014 Seattle Conference, Gretchen E. Henderson offered the following craft points on writing about violence across the arts:

• According to the Oxford English Dictionary, definitions of “violence” include “the exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property.” It also means, “Improper treatment or use of a word; wresting or perversion of meaning or application; unauthorized alteration of wording.”

• The very language that we speak brims with violence, with speech patterns that have been acquired and steered by power struggles and wars, class and race and gender. A simple exercise of “disavoweling” (which sounds as violent as disemboweling) excises all vowels from a word, leaving only its consonants, building from that rubble and new vowels a new word. The shift in meaning is startling. For instance, “violence” disavoweled can yield a VioLiN Cello or VioLiN Concert, VaLeNCe, VaLieNCe, VaLeNCia, or the archaic VoLaNCe (which bears some capacity of flight). A minor inversion of letters turns the word into a VoLCaNo. On the small material level of words and letters, it is an intervention.

• What forms do literary interventions take? Are women writing violence, in some way, intervening in something, even if the what and how differs? Does some engagement with writing violence—even if not directly by that name—arise through interruptions, juxtapositions, or oppositions, where writing violence paradoxically can be an attempt to temper it and carve out new spaces for others to think and make, whatever their approach?¹¹

Poet, cofounder of Les Figues Press, and author of a nonfiction work about the legal system and criminals accused of violence against women, Vanessa Place wrote The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law. When asked about the public perception of her writings on women and violence, Place responded: “I am a thought criminal.”¹² Such a response is highly complicated when one considers Place’s work as a criminal defender and her findings in The Guilt Project, a controversial thesis that says systematic injustice is routinely perpetrated on accused sex criminals due to problems with legal language regarding the prosecution of rape in America.

“Of course, men can care about violence against women,” says poet Erika L. Sánchez, “but they have to be particularly careful of how they handle this issue in their texts, chiefly by interrogating their own privilege.”

Among Sánchez’s chief obsessions in writing is the female body—the ways in which it’s scrutinized, brutalized, objectified, and coerced. Many of her poems examine what the body means in different spaces. Sánchez grew up only a few doors down from a motel that was primarily used by prostitutes and their johns, and these images made an impression. “I’m not interested in women who perform sex work as an empowered choice, but rather those who have been forced and exploited,” says Sánchez. “Though I know poetry isn’t going to save the world, I can’t help but think literature has the power to make us more compassionate. I also write a lot about self-inflicted and emotional violence, which is also a product of patriarchy.”¹³

Sánchez has written about young women’s struggles with mental illness and self-mutilation. “Misogyny in both Mexican and American culture runs so deep, that it often forces young women to annihilate themselves. History, media, and everyday life bombard us with violence. Sometimes it feels like a miracle to simply be alive,” says Sánchez. That’s why she thinks it’s important for women to explore all facets of their human experience in order for others to understand the ways in which we’re dehumanized.¹⁴

For Sánchez, writing about violence is political. Sánchez points to a double standard: “When a woman writes about her own experience, it’s often considered touchy feely. When a man writes about the same topic, it’s considered the zeitgeist. I think that many audiences consider women’s writing as therapeutic and self-involved (chick-lit) while men are seen as the serious creators and arbiters of literature.” There is a strong history of sexism in literature when it comes to writing about violence. “Men who write about violence are seen as brave while women who write about the same things are often believed to be, consciously or unconsciously, too transgressive or emotional.”¹⁵

Sánchez sees the female body as a site of public inspection and discourse. The female body attracts unwanted attention, and oftentimes, danger. No one woman can escape her body, so Sánchez’s method of coping with this fear and anger is writing. As a result, Sánchez admits that she sometimes worries that her work may be perceived as too aggressive or grotesque. “I’m crossing so many lines when it comes to race, gender, and poetry. Historically, women have been the ones most systematically brutalized. That is undeniable,” says Sánchez. “When it comes to sexual violence in my work, all the victims are women. It’s nothing I ever questioned because it’s so deeply ingrained in my experience as a woman. I think it could be dangerous in unskilled hands.”¹⁶

Poet Sade Murphy, whose current project is a work-in-progress entitled The Dream Machine, was interviewed about how poets, especially women and people of color, engage with violence in their work: “I’m going to say there have definitely been times where I felt discouraged from engaging with violence, especially when that violence is an experience of personal trauma. I feel like there’s a certain way that I’ve witnessed women or people of color labeled because of the ways their writing has spoken to the experience of violence,” says Murphy. Murphy envisions Dream Machine as having a way of getting around this potential barrier to expression and creativity addressing violence. “Being able to speak to the experience of violence and trauma without the danger of having my work reduced to sad black girl poetry, or more politely labeled ‘heavy.’”¹⁷

Murphy speaks of a term she calls “violent ornateness” in her work, and says, “I don’t want ornate to be confused with superfluous because the violence is necessary, it serves a purpose and isn’t ornamental. I think The Dream Machine takes a very Chaotic Neutral stance when it comes to violence.” If violence is a tool, Murphy says the quality of the tool is determined by who wields it. “I think the function we see played out with the use of violence in The Dream Machine is a landscape ripe with and melding subjective violence, symbolic violence, and systemic violence. Violence isn’t actively sought out, but it occurs. Violence is done to the dreamer and the dreamer does violence to numerous characters throughout the poems.”¹⁸

In October 2013, VIDA members chose the theme of BANNED for HER KIND, and in doing so created a widespread message about violence and women writers. “Repression and the silencing of women is a form of violence,” says poet and playwright Rosebud Ben-Oni, “and our writers explored this theme by focusing on the banning of books by Chicana authors in Arizona and artists whom have been exiled from their home countries.” The fracturing of identities of borders, the possibilities of tongues carving space, the spirit realm—these were Ben-Oni’s first guiding lights into experimentation and fighting against the violence that silences certain voices. Her new poems are the aftereffects of growing up as a biracial child of two religions. Ben-Oni’s work is the wreckage of ideals. Not only imprinting herself on the wreckage but building from it, Ben-Oni says, “I set that narrative—the one of hope my parents had in me—against the biblical Tower of Babel, against the tragedy in which all people were gathered, speaking one language and building a city to grow themselves—until it was destroyed.”¹⁹

Violent things “either happen to you, are going to happen to you, or are happening to other people,” says Lucy Corin (Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, FC2 2004). Corin’s first book, a work of innovative fiction in which the reader becomes the killer, the watcher, and the person on the verge, focuses on teenage girls growing up in a culture immersed in serial killer mythologies. For Corin, the threat of violence in American childhood has always been present, something lurking just beneath the pleasant trappings of the American dream. As a young teenager, Corin lived in Florida, where a boy was beheaded by a serial killer in her hometown. Corin went on to examine the victim/prey dynamic in a coming-of-age story, revealing how cultural elements that American girls are surrounded by make them attractive as prey.²⁰

Corin points out that in terms of the way violence is historically theorized, when people talk about violent books by men, they often talk about events of the plot as “violence,” but when people talk about violent books by women, they often talk about violence as “trauma.” The difference is people asking, after reading violent work by men, the question of “why do people do this to each other,” as opposed to people asking “how does this feel” to women authors.²¹

Corin suggests a particular approach to reading analysis, which would serve any reader who is interested in how literature about violence—or any subject matter whose site is the female body—creates meaning in the reader’s mind: “Think a lot about where, physically, in the story, different kinds of events happen—not only events as in action and depictions of emotion but also events such as ideas blinking through and then coming together.²²

Any literature becomes unsettling when one thinks of becoming immersed in a narrative of violence, yet Nina Shope’s Hangings, winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, is a startlingly beautiful work about women and violence. “Girls grow up keenly aware of the violence that can be perpetrated against us, the way we can become victims. There is far less attention paid to the way girls can inflict violence,” says Shope.²³ She writes about female acts of violence that emerge from feelings of vulnerability in her novella Hagiographies, which traces the effects of gendered violence throughout a lifetime, as violence resonates through friendships and love relationships. Hagiographies explores the ambivalence, guilt, betrayal, and confusion that results as gendered bullying in childhood gets warped and twisted. Sadism and masochism merge, and the narrator seems to partly view herself as a perpetrator of violence because she is unable to stop it.

Another of Shope’s novellas, In Urbem, is inspired by Roman histories and foundation myths—the majority of which revolve around disappeared, dead, or raped female bodies. Shope says she is fascinated and disturbed by the way such texts absorb the female body into societal structures while erasing the female presence, often very violently. In Urbem creates a city of desire inspired by Italo Calvino, and the violence toward women is literalized into the very structures of the unnamed city (just as the mythology of the Rome literally built itself upon the violated female body). Women are entombed under buildings, encased in marble pillars, transformed into archways. Throughout the narrative, boundaries blur and break down—revealing a multilayered and often devastating complicity. The novella foregrounds the sexualized nature of fiction’s traditional climactic plot structure by relying on fragmentation and conscious frustration of linear narrative.

Shope grew up loving language and myth, but as she explored both more deeply, that relationship became troubled. She notes that, for a female writer, language can be “a tricky ally—stemming as it does from a patriarchal system of roots and meanings and burgeoning as it did into constrictive linguistic systems (and narrative structures) intended to support a repressive order.” In Urbem helped Shope find a way to express, critique, and reclaim some of the complex and often conflicting demands of gender, language, sexuality, and voice. In the novella, descriptive excess and the foregrounding of words such as “erecting,” “mounting,” and “building” highlight the sexually loaded vocabulary of architectural and textual terms. Shope uses violence to wrench language and narrative free of its structures and expose all that burrows beneath the surface. “Failing to do so can make writing feel like a masochistic act—like I am assisting in covering up violence (and thus colluding in it),” says Shope.²⁴

If the disconnect readers and society have to the reality of violence, especially from the female perspective, allows violence to continue, it’s critical that we examine violence and write about it so that no one can easily look the other way, according to publisher and author Debra Di Blasi. Di Blasi has written about women committing violence and women as victims of violence. “Writing is a way to answer existential questions,” says Di Blasi. “Unlike journalism, literature allows the writer to pass into the bloodstream, so to speak, to inhabit violence in a way far more enlightening than a newspaper report that presents humans as body counts.”²⁵

Di Blasi’s novella, Drought (New Directions, 1997), contains a scene where a woman is raped by a man and also a scene where a woman murders a man. Even before the novella was adapted into film, Drought inspired many intense conversations among readers who questioned Di Blasi’s views on men and women. When a male reader at a public lecture asked Di Blasi why she hated men, Di Blasi says her first reaction was to laugh. However, the question led to a fruitful discussion about how a writer’s gender can affect the reader’s interpretation of the characters and their actions. Di Blasi suggests a reader’s perspective would be different if she, as writer, were a man because “where we read from is critical to our interpretation of what we read.”²⁶

The book Drought contains a single reference to a character named Willa being raped when she was a little girl: “When she was nine, her two big cousins raped her and then burned a tiny heart onto the white skin over her breastbone with a hot pocketknife.”²⁷ In the film, director Lisa Moncure focuses on Willa’s rapes in order to bring the story full circle, since circles are the overriding visual and narrative shape.

“That scene of Willa’s childhood rape is one of the most disturbing I’ve seen in film,” says Di Blasi. “It made me cry because it’s not sexualized like rapes depicted by male directors and writers. It’s not sexy. Rape is ugly and tragic and wrong.”²⁸

Di Blasi was in the audience when Drought was a finalist at Taos Film Festival and could feel the uncomfortable shift of the audience during the rape scene. Di Blasi believes Moncure’s handling of violence in Drought, as contrasted to how a man would have handled it, is why the film won so many awards and was one of only six US films invited into the Universe Elle section of the Cannes Film Festival.²⁹

Audience members at another screening of Drought found the rape scene so disturbing that many were in tears and a few had to leave the theatre. According to Di Blasi, after the screening, an audience member raised her hand and asked, “Considering how much violence there is in the world, what right do you have adding more?”³⁰

“It took me a moment to respond because that type of thinking—of not understanding the role narrative plays in the development of civilization—is foreign to me,” says Di Blasi. When she found the words to answer, Di Blasi calmly said, “I went to school with girls who were raped and molested by family members and strangers, whose lives were a living hell and who could not concentrate on their studies as a result. They didn’t have a voice. They don’t. I’m their voice.”³¹

Also giving voice to the voiceless, Carol Guess is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose. In Tinderbox Lawn (Rose Metal Press, 2008) and Homeschooling (PS Publishing, 2012), Guess addresses fictional instances of female-on-female violence. The writing is influenced by Richard Siken’s Crush, specifically his representations of domestic violence within a gay context.³²

Guess says, “I wanted to risk depicting lesbians engaged in violence against each other. This felt taboo to me and still does. I’m interested in creating female characters who commit violent acts not in order to justify violence, but to challenge assumptions about power, desire, and justice.” Guess is especially interested in feminine forms of violence, saying, “There’s pink power in bullying, shunning, and gossip. Female-on-female violence can be devastating with or without a physical component.”³³

When asked her opinion of how violent literature by women compares to violent literature by men, Guess says, “Violence directed against women is sexualized and sensationalized. It’s usually perpetrated by men. In contrast, violence experienced by men is often represented as heroic. Women are taught to fear violence; men are taught to read it as meaningful, as the language of power, related to sports, money, politics, and war.”³⁴

But how does this play out in author intent? Guess points out that the answer depends on race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and other elements of experience. “There are lots of male writers (Shane McCrae and Richard Siken come to mind) who challenge that paradigm. But speaking very generally, I’d say that male writers often use violence as a plot device, a way to tell a story. Female writers are more concerned with the cultural meaning of violence, represented through character development or experimental structures.”³⁵

Part of the problem has to do with the voyeuristic nature of sexualized violence directed against women. “In print and onscreen,” says Guess, “it doesn’t matter if a woman is dead or alive; she’s still represented as a sexual object.” It all becomes a question of audience identification tied to gender and point of view. “If a man is writing this sort of material, he’s part of dominant culture and it’s okay to look. We’re looking with him, we’re the audience.” However, Guess points out, “If a woman represents this experience, we might slip and identify with the object, rather than the subject. We might be the victim, not the investigator or perpetrator. It’s not as easy for the audience to enjoy sexualized violence if they’re reminded of the cost.”³⁶

When asked why she writes about violence, Guess says, “Imagination is limitless, and therefore the opposite of violence.” Nonetheless, she is careful to point out that the reader often reads violent work by women differently than violent work by men because women who write about violence are often assumed to be writing from personal experience. Personal experience is assumed to be biased in a way that fiction somehow isn’t. “Male perspectives on violence are perceived as objective, neutral, and factually accurate,” says Guess. “A man writing about violence is heroic, while a woman writing about violence is didactic. Her work is viewed as a political platform, activist rather than literary, even if that’s not the case. We aren’t supposed to look at what’s really happening. When we look, we make our dual status as subject/object visible. We see, and are seen, in the context of violence.”³⁷

If a woman is represented as the victim of sexualized violence, the audience doesn’t have to grapple with questions of agency, consent, and female sexuality. If the victim is passive, the depiction of sexualized violence viewed through the eyes of a male protagonist (or an emotionally removed female protagonist with no feminist consciousness) is often just sloppy character development. “Here’s a female character with wants and needs; here’s a dead or damaged girl,” says Guess. “Which story do you tell? What’s actually interesting is what she wants and needs, but we don’t usually hear that story. She just gets raped, and then someone gets paid to investigate in a city by the water.”³⁸

Though it may be difficult to determine the intent of an author of any gender when it comes to the portrayal of violence in the lives of women, attempting to engage with this complicated subject matter is crucial to understanding the impact of violence on our lives. In spite of the fact that women who write about violence are often misunderstood and the trend of women writing violence is often ignored, authentic writing about violence in the lives of women can cut through the lies of political correctness to uncover a truth that’s waiting to be spoken.

It takes courage to write about women and violence, because this writing often flies in the face of what society typically accepts as its ideal vision of womanhood. Sometimes, writing about violence leads to telling the truth in a courageous manner because our characters can say things that we are not encouraged or allowed to say, at least publically. Sometimes our characters will tell us a truth we need to know, something we once knew and have somehow forgotten, a new necessary truth to unlock meaning in what might appear to be the senselessness of violence in our lives.               

Aimee Parkison has received a Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a North Carolina Arts Council Prose Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize from North American Review, and a Hearst Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society. Her books are The Petals of Your Eyes, The Innocent Party, and Woman with Dark Horses.

Notes

1. Dave Itzkoff. “For Game of Thrones, Rising Unease over Rape’s Recurring Role.” New York Times. May 2, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/arts/television/for-game-of-thrones-rising-unease-over-rapes-recurring-role.html?_r=0
2. San Francisco Chronicle, July 1948. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery
3. Marta Caminero-Santangelo. The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 169.
4. Deirdre Sugiuchi. “Hurt People Hurt People: An Interview with Roxane Gay.” Electric Literature: June 2, 2014: http://electricliterature.com/hurt-people-hurt-people-an-interview-with-roxane-gay/
5. Edwidge Danticat, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 7, 2014.
6. Megan Milks, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 16, 2014.
7. Joyelle McSweeney, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 8, 2014.
8. Lily Hoang, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 3, 2014.
9. Lily Hoang, “Me, Selah Saterstrom, and Everyone We Violate.” 2014 AWP Seattle Conference Panel: Women Writing Violence.
10. Lily Hoang, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 3, 2014.
11. Gretchen E. Henderson. “Craft Points on Writing Violence” from Women Writing Violence, AWP Panel Handout for Audience Members, 2014 AWP Seattle Conference Presentation.
12. Vanessa Place, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 4, 2014.
13. Erika L. Sánchez, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 12, 2014.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Paul Cunningham. “I want to write poems that touch something chaotic and messy without destroying myself in the process: Paul Cunningham interviews Sade Murphy.” Montevidayo. May 5, 2014: http://www.montevidayo.com/i-want-to-write-poems-that-touch-something-chaotic-and-messy-without-destroying-myself-in-the-process-paul-cunningham-interviews-sade-murphy/
18. Ibid.
19. Rosebud Ben-Oni, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 5, 2014.
20. Lucy Corin, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 8, 2014.
21. Ibid.
22. Lucy Corin. “Material.” The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House (Portland: Tin House Books: 2009), p. 81.
23. Nina Shope, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 10, 2014.
24. Ibid.
25. Debra Di Blasi, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 5–7, 2014.
26. Ibid.
27. Debra Di Blasi. Drought & Say What You Like (New York: New Directions, 1997), p. 3.
28. Debra Di Blasi, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 5–7, 2014.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Carol Guess, interview by Aimee Parkison, May 7, 2014.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.