Is anyone out there interested in a subject for a doctoral dissertation? I have one: “The Use of Rape as Local Color in Historical Novels.”
It occurred to me on my just completed road trip to and from Canada while listening to Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt. To establish the evil of the bad guys and the ferocity of the the day, in the first few pages we are given a) a disgusting rape in a London stable, then b) a gigantic gang-bang of nuns in the French town of Soissons. Having posited that bit of nastiness, as a sort of throat-clearing narrative device, the book then goes on to its true subject: longbow technology and the effect, graphically described again and again and again, of a steel-tipped arrow ripping through eyes, throats and various internal organs, followed by pole-axe blows to the brain.
All very medievally well and good, I suppose, but why the rape overture if the author is clearly interested more in gore and merrie olde England? He drops the lurid sex stuff for the remaining 95% of the book. So, could rape be to the historical novel what a subject sentence is to the middle-school paragraph?
Author Michael Baldwin’s treatment of my friends the Cathars, helpfully entitled The Rape of Oc, opens with a bravura fifty or so pages of torture, mutilation and rapine. This then is one horrific extreme – cinema’s equivalent would be Monica Bellucci’s infamous scene in Irreversible – but there are all sorts of other examples in medieval potboilers.
Let’s just take one: Ken Follett. That’s not a name normally associated with this type of unseemliness. Follett has written two books set in the Middle Ages, The Pillars of the Earth (which I have not read but will doubtless watch on cable, medieval junkie that I am) and World Without End. The latter I reviewed for the LA Times (it’s on my website), and in that review I demurely wrote that Follett has a “flair for non-consensual sex scenes [that] borders on the distressing.” I wish I had said more, for in fact Follett uses rape whenever the action flags a little. It’s like a recurring thunderstorm, or a twister touching down every eighty pages or so (the novel is over a thousand pages long). I suspect that he could not get away with this if it were not a well-established, almost expected device in novels set in medieval times.
You say the Middle Ages were like that. Well, perhaps, but there are fine modern medieval novels that do not resort to prurience and sexual violence. Not all authors are like the guys on the couch hitting the scene selection button on their dvd of Irreversible.
Barry Unsworth, ever reliable historical novelist, doesn’t do it. Neither did Hans Koning, whose slim and gracious A Walk With Love and Death (1961), remains one of the most memorable fictional evocations of the Middle Ages (The other, from 1946, which I mentioned in that same Follett review, is Zoe Oldenburg’s The World Is Not Enough). Koning, in fact, does a fairly splendid job at consensual coupling scenes, countering the notion that all medieval sex has to involve daggers, mailed fists and torn undergarments. You have to wonder whether all the rape writers, like my pizza-sharing friend from an earlier post on this blog (“Lost in Translation”), have even heard of courtly love.
So, here are some questions that must be addressed by the doctoral candidate:
Is this device more prevalent in the work of male writers?
On which page of the opening is it most likely to occur? (Statistical analysis required)
Is it an Anglo phenomenon, or does it crop up in the literature of other cultures?
And finally:
Why are so many of the predators priests?
Ahh… but here, you say, we are leaving the realm of historical fiction…
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