It Is Not Enough to Speak: Toward a Coalitional Consciousness in the Young Adult Rape Novel

Abstract

[...]the feminist emphasis on women’s speech, which seeks to politicize female experience by moving it out of the private and into the public sphere, situating the individual’s experience within a collective one, is weakened by first-person narration which depoliticizes and privatizes rape by emphasizing the trauma experienced by survivors without exposing the social origins of sexual violence.4 Speech becomes not a way to communicate an alternative perspective on reality, but to mark healing and signal closure, imposing a happy ending on the painful narrative. [...]while the interests of adolescent readers could be served by narratives representing rape by helping readers to understand the social factors that support rape and how they might be transformed, many of the best-known examples fail to do so. (206) Like the girls in Park’s study, the novel suggests that individuals are responsible for preventing rape. Because the first-person narration focuses on Melinda’s psychological state, the representation of social relations and structures that result in rape is restricted. [...]male dominance may result from stress, including “an unpredictable food supply, endemic warfare, chronic hunger and famine, and recent migration” (331). In failing to represent the historical and social contexts for rape, novels like Speak and Watching the Roses naturalize rape, at the same time that they psychologize and individualize it. [...]while they encourage survivors to speak out as individuals, they don’t offer the example of collective feminist action, limiting their ability to effectively challenge the rape culture that itself individualizes blame and discourages social analysis.