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 Press, 1999. 286 pp., 118 b/w ills. $74.95

Images of erotic domination and outright sexual violence hold an indisputably important and troubling place in Western culture, and yet it took until nearly the end of the violent 20th century before art history produced an integrative survey of the genres and traditions in which rape--the name by which we know sexual violence--was visualized. Diane Wolfthal's pioneering book, Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and Its Alternatives, succeeds admirably in making this history intelligible. Replete with probing visual analyses of individual works and careful contextualizations of genres, it is a work of scholarship both industrious--sometimes to a fault--and wide-ranging. Guided by an abiding feminist consciousness, Wolfthal is especially keen on striking up interdisciplinary conversations, but also judicious in invoking contemporary theory. In all of the six substantial chapters, each comprising a "genre" study that interlocks in interesting ways with its neighbors, the author applies just enough critical p ressure to crack open the contradictions of a cultural and legal discourse where aggressive masculinity is naturalized--indeed, valorized--and woman's resistance suppressed. While at times one may find key arguments stumbling over the wealth of evidence assembled to support them, the book gives a welcome conceptual coherence to this dizzying array of material, thereby setting the terms 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 culture enables the ideological construction of rape principally through the control of discourse, or "talk," in the courtroom, a privileging of the defendant's--or the defense lawyer's--power to reconstruct and thereby represent events. Most of these straggles over representation hinge on the issue of consent, as Wolfthal points out (p. 152). Consent remains a slippery legal concept in any society that accepts as normative some degree of coercion in sexual relations. But it is not only ethical norms and existing relations of domination (sexual and political) that produce 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 consent, for example, when the victim's ability to give consent has been enfeebled or conjured away by unseen forces (p. 152)? Such questions were also com monplace in the juridical culture of the later Middle Ages. How could consent be measured, for example, when the resourceful medieval lover employed magical techniques to arouse desire in his intransigent beloved? Could not he--like his counterpart today, who bewitches his prey with "date-rape" drugs--assure himself that consent was not coerced? Pygmalion, the intrepid realist sculptor of legend, appealed to the goddess of love to help him procure the lady's favors because the lady, mute as a block of stone, could not consent even if she had wanted to--he, too, bucks the system. And when, as in the 16th century, the biblical Joseph became an exemplar of male oppression at the hands of a sexually aggressive woman (Potiphar's wife), everything gets confused. As these examples from Wolfthal's final chapter reveal, the reliability of any standard for consent--which never has and never really could be seen in gender-neutral terms--falls victim not only to ideological manipulation, as still so often happens, but al so to the rampant innovativeness of culture as well. When this comes 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 so, Wolfthal builds a large part of her project on this fundamental premise: although the canonical rape images enshrined by art history frequently "served as a sign for something else... they were also, on some level, about 'real' rape, to use Susan Estrich's term" (p. 26). (1) Consequently, much of the exploration in these pages concerns 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 event, 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 one sociologist calls its "social facticity"; (2) in fact, Wolfthal continually returns to the primacy of rape's event status, assuming a more or less stable (and modern) definition of rape "as a crime in which one 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 event itself (or the series of moments that make up the event) and the violence done to meaning in the transfiguration of the event into narrative. Seen in this way, as a constellation of legal, social, and cultural discourses powerful enough to turn reality on its head, rape may be the consummate work of patriarchal ideology (Wolfthal eschews the word ideology, but it is precisely what she is exploring when she sees rape imagery pointing to that "something else").