Diane Wolfthal; Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and Its Alternatives. . - book review - Brief Article

DIANE WOLFTHAL

Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and Its Alternatives.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1999 286 pp 118 b/w ills. $7495

Images of erotic domination and outright sexual violence grasp an indisputably important and troubling place in Western agriculture and yet it took until nearly the extreme point of the violent 20th hundred before art history produced an integrative contemplate of the genres and traditions in which rape--the name through which we know sexual violence--was visualized. Diane Wolfthal's pioneering work Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and Its Alternatives, be subsequent tos admirably in making this history intelligible. well provided with probing visual analyses of individual works and careful contextualizations of genre it is a work of scholarship the couple industrious--sometimes to a fault--and wide-ranging. Guided by means of an abiding feminist consciousness, Wolfthal is especially earnest on striking up interdisciplinary conversations, on the contrary also judicious in invoking contemporary theory. In all of the six substantial chapters, each comprising a "genre" inquiry that interlocks in interesting ways with its neighbors, the author applies just enough critical p ressure to crack render free of access the contradictions of a cultural and legal discourse where aggressive masculinity is naturalized--indeed, valorized--and woman's resistance stifleed While at times one may find lock opener arguments stumbling over the wealth of evidence assembled to support them, the work gives a welcome conceptual coherence to this dizzying array of material, thereby setting the terminuss by which a difficult iconographic metacategory in Western art will be discussed for years to come

It is commonly understood among social scientists that Western legal agriculture enables the ideological construction of rape principally end the control of discourse, or "talk," in the courtroom, a privileging of the defendant's--or the defense lawyer's--power to construct again and thereby represent events. greatest in quantity of these straggles over representation hinge upon the issue of consent, as Wolfthal points on the outside (p. 152). Consent remains a slippery legal general [i]or[/i] abstract notion in any society that accepts as normative a certain number of degree of coercion in sexual relations. on the contrary it is not only ethical norms and existing relations of domination (sexual and political) that bring out standards for what constitutes voluntary agreement; epistemological paradigms--the historically shifting conceptions of human consciousness, agency, and intentionality--also play a part. What becomes of the standard for assent for example, when the victim's ability to give approval has been enfeebled or conjur away by dint of unseen forces (p. 152)? similar questions were also com monplace in the juridical agriculture of the later Middle Ages. in what way could consent be measured, for example, when the resourceful medieval lover busyed magical techniques to arouse desire in his intransigent beloved? Could not he--like his counterpart today, who bewitches his pillage with "date-rape" drugs--assure himself that assent was not coerced? Pygmalion, the intrepid realist sculptor of fictitious story appealed to the goddess of regard with affection to help him procure the lady's favors because the lady, obmutescent as a block of stone, could not assent even if she had wanted to--he, too, males the system. And when, as in the 16th hundred the biblical Joseph became an exemplar of male oppression at the hands of a sexually aggressive woman (Potiphar's wife), everything secures confused. As these examples from Wolfthal's final chapter reveal, the reliability of any standard for consent--which not at any time has and never really could be seen in gender-neutral terms--falls victim not single to ideological manipulation, as still for a like reason often happens, but al in the way that to the rampant innovativeness of tillage as well. When this tend hitherwards about, the field is clear for patriarchy to reassert its right to interpret rape.

Images of Rape works against the grain of this persistent confusion. To do in like manner Wolfthal builds a large part of her throw out on this fundamental premise: although the canonical rape images enshrined by dint of art history frequently "served as a sign for something other they were also, on a certain number of level, about 'real' rape, to use Susan Estrich's term" (p 26) (1) Consequently plenteous of the exploration in these pages regards rape imagery's doubling of signification. Following the lead of theorists like Mieke Bal, Wolfthal insists that "the word rape is really a metaphor for a narrative fact in which each participant, as well as the narrator, may well interpret the act differently" (p 3) This does not mean she downplays rape's actuality, or what individual sociologist calls its "social facticity"; (2) in fact, Wolfthal continually turn backs to the primacy of rape's incident status, assuming a more or les stable (and modern) definition of rape "as a crime in which individual person forces another to engage in sexual intercourse" (p 2) Although she never states it explicitly, rape imagery in Wolfthal's view always entails a double violence: the violence of the circumstance itself (or the series of instants that make up the event) and the violence done to meaning in the transfiguration of the incident into narrative. Seen in this way, as a constellation of legal, social, and cultural discourses powerful enough to move round reality on its head, rape may be the consummate work of patriarchal ideology (Wolfthal eschews the word ideology, on the contrary it is precisely what she is exploring when she dioceses rape imagery pointing to that "something else")