# Is Love a “pathological condition of the soul”? Joyce Carol Oates’s Beasts and Rape: A Love Story

Nicolas Pierre Boileau

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Nicolas Pierre Boileau. Is Love a “pathological condition of the soul”? Joyce Carol Oates’s Beasts and Rape: A Love Story. Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, 2025, 6, 10.15867/331917.6.6. [https://hal.science/hal-05512845v1](https://hal.science/hal-05512845v1) [Submitted on 16 Feb 2026]

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Submitted on 16 Feb 2026

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# Is Love a “pathological condition of the soul”?
## Joyce Carol Oates’s *Beasts and Rape: A Love Story*

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Nicolas Pierre Boileau
Aix-Marseille University, LERMA, UR853

Beasts (2002) and *Rape: a Love Story* (2003) were published a year apart and have a similar, sulphurous approach to sexual desire in its anti-social and disrespectful aspects. In both, one could say that love is addressed from the perspective of violent sexual intercourse, which is a criminal practice, leading to the notion that love is pathological indeed. Both novellas, while dealing with the violation of the main protagonists’ bodies, are focused on, but not limited to, the traumatic aftermath of a rape recounted some time after the event but not necessarily in hindsight. In that respect, the novellas align with the very contemporary foregrounding of sexual violence in the wake of #MeToo<fnref n="1" /> and invite us to consider that what is now presented as unprecedented interest in a subject previously thought as taboo can, and allegedly must in fact, be regarded as having a long history

<footnote n="1">¹ #MeToo is a hashtag that emerged in 2017 to encourage rape and sexual assault victims to speak out so as to raise awareness about a systemic social problem. The hashtag followed a long campaign on various social media, including *MySpace* as early as 2006, but has gained unprecedented momentum on Twitter (now X) and other such media, spreading globally as a tag to be used by all victims. The movement became so big that it reached many professions and fields and is now a catch-phrase to suggest any form of sexual violence towards women and minorities.</footnote>
of being silenced and voiced, seen and hidden, theorized and experienced. Sexual violence often seems to be central, and supposedly inherent, to heterosexual desire in Oates's fiction. The social acceptation or rejection of said violence is described as a constant hesitation between openness and silence, guilt and shame, alienation and emancipation—a tension that damages the characters and distorts their apprehension of reality. Rape in the works of Joyce Carol Oates keeps surfacing as a subject that is blatantly taboo, openly undiscussed, or secretly acknowledged to use paradoxical turns of phrase that might reflect the place this question holds in the public debate and the way this ambiguous subject serves her fiction. In an early interview, Oates had described love as a “pathological condition of the soul” and this phrase resonates with the two novellas published in the 2000s where love and rape become entangled and intertwined to feed into the storyline of two short, shocking stories in which “love” and “desire” seem to be used interchangeably.

However, it is striking that in both relatively short texts, none of the
expected effects of shame and guilt seem central to the victims' experiences,
nor to the narrative. Unlike contemporary testimonies of sexual violence
which encourage women to account for their traumatic experience—
testimonies in which women are expected to narrate their emotional
turmoil—Oates puts side by side two narratives in which the main
protagonist's emotions regarding the rape itself remain distant and hardly
analyzed as if the event had made a hole in language that could not be
mended and the introspective narration is somehow defeated. In *Beasts*, the
narrator tells her own story but does not reinterpret it from the vantage
point of her more mature self. Strong emotions of “panic” and “resistance”
are mentioned, confusion too, but readers will not be given a full account of
the abuse, nor will the abuse be named or theorized: “It was an animal
reaction, unthinking”, the narrator explains when Harrow forces her to kiss
him. If “he would provide the narration, the interpretation, for what had
happened” (B 62), the narrator does not fully embrace the role of offering a
counter-narrative now, some twenty-five years later. In *Rape*, Teena
Maguire’s story is filtered by the narrator and the many people that observe
her. The stories thus highlight the complex ways in which the main protagonists negotiate their sense of responsibility and identity with what is said about them—in stories that are said to befit their experiences and which, as Oates as author does, are created on their behalf: One could argue that these women are spoken of but their voices cannot be heard. The stories therefore each offer a paradoxical account of a rape that forces readers to follow the mesmerizing attractiveness of the criminals (in *Beasts*) or their despicable shameless attitudes (in *Rape*).

The two novellas deal with the violence women fall prey to when they are targeted as sexual objects and expected to obey the demands of other people's sexual drives.<fnref n="2" /> The short texts share a common storyline based on rape, which is far from uncommon in Oates's fiction. However, I argue that there is something very specific in these two novellas in the way Oates chooses to handle the testimony of the rape, both overtly and covertly, both in graphic details and in repressed forms of expression, giving way to a reflection on women's vulnerable position within the symbolic order as defined by psychoanalysis. *Rape* opens with the gang-rape of Teena Maguire, who is left almost dead by her assailants. The heroine of *Beasts* defers the revelation of trauma by first addressing the question of her passion for a woman artist and the arsons that keep occurring in the halls of residence where she is boarded. In both cases therefore, the accounts of these women's abuse is complexified by the narrative: In one case, there was no trial and the assaulters have continued their lives; in the other, the trial is a fraud and leaves Teena dejected and unprotected by justice. In both cases, the abuse is not unrelated to love, and the texts can be said to be about acknowledging the way desire and pleasure are systemically connected to violence.

Both women are thus presented as experiencing the dangers of sexual desire, or the power relations involved in sexual relations. As a result, their association to feminine stereotypes of naivety and ignorance is

<footnote n="2">² Interestingly this is the vocabulary used in the story of Philomena by Ovid, the words “prey,” “predator,” “object of my desire,” “guilt” being used in the story itself.</footnote>
enhanced.<fnref n="3" /> In both novellas, women are dis-membered physically and unhinged psychically, undoubtedly because they are women: “It was punishment I knew: for being a girl” (B 98). This objectification remains unfathomable because Oates chooses two narrative modes that fail to make the experience entirely graspable. In *Beasts*, the internal narration proves unreliable at all stages (Tromble-Giraud), while in *Rape* the narrative never delves into Teena’s thoughts: Teena is seen, talked about and insulted, while readers can never approach a sense of what she feels, if anything. The absence of emotional response is central to the narrative of both men and women, and affects, so to speak, the general tone of the texts. The alleged convicts that raped Teena seem more concerned about escaping the due course of justice than their sense of guilt and the rape that is making the headlines of the local press is described as a fact rather than as a subjective experience. Within this context, it cannot but seem odd that Oates should cling to the word “love,” in a scandalous fashion because the stories seem to be about anything but love. She thus plays with a long tradition of romance in order to subvert it by showing that it enacts fantasies in which violence is untold or unrecognized. She exaggerates and exacerbates the antisocial dimension of desire and thus reveals the “pathological” dimension of love through her work on language and the symbolic dimensions.

Oates can be said to be interested in the symbolic operation by which women, or rather feminine subjects, are associated to insignificance and failures, or are treated as objects of a desire that reduces them to a position of despondency and, surprisingly, boundless resilience. I will read the novellas through the lens of Lacan's theory of womanhood and love as expressed in *Encore*, where he says that women are said to be women, therefore that they are defamed (Lacan 79). In French, Lacan playfully uses the expression “on la dit femme” (she is said to be a woman), which sounds exactly like “she is defamed.” What Lacan means by this pun is that a woman is not born a woman, but rather is said to be a woman in a symbolic order

<footnote n="3">³ See the link between gothic literature and romance extensively explored by Tromble-Giraud in her PhD thesis.</footnote>
where she is constructed as the other, as a challenge to the phallic order.
Thus "woman" is always susceptible to being rejected from the
heteronormative order, and feminine subjects are radically vulnerable in
language. It is this aspect of femininity that is, I argue, at the center of both
stories: the stories show women grappling with an account of the way in
which what they are said to be makes self-apprehension and self-
knowledge extremely difficult. The practice of life-writing turns out to be
much more difficult than is suggested in any theory that construct the links
between bodily experience, self-knowledge and self-writing as being
natural or unproblematic—a tendency that can be noted amongst feminist
and anti-feminist thinkers alike. Although the two novellas demonstrate
signs that the women who are victims of sexual assault went through
emotional and psychological conundrums, the narrative, necessarily brief
and concise, avoids the lamenting effect and sympathetic approach, so as to
confront readers with the bare pathological aspects of the social and cultural
positions love and heterosexual desire reduce these women to.

This vision of femininity as mistreated in language is framed by
psychoanalysis, and especially the Lacanian theory of sexual difference as
operated by the lack of a signifier to represent both sexes. And yet, this
framework might be considered irrelevant to Oates, who has never
acknowledged any form of influence by psychoanalysis—Freud, for one, she
calls “limited and biased” (Milazzo 74). She is, more generally, critical of
psychoanalytic theory for neglecting the social factor, a point that I would
like to explore more in other contexts as one of the failures of the history of
ideas in the USA:

We seem to have inherited, along with its two or three blessings,
the manifold curse of psychoanalysis: the assumption that the
grounds of discontent, anger, rage, despair—"unhappiness" in
general—reside within the sufferer rather than outside of him.
Psychoanalysis maintains that if the Oedipal aggressions of the
male are a function merely of the domestic triangle, arising
ineluctably out of the "family romance," so too are the female
emotions - with the added embarrassment that the female is
doomed to the greater imperfection of being both non-male and
presumably resentful as a consequence of this condition. ("Why
is your writing...?")

Freud's theory of sexual difference is simplified here, and Oates overlooks other psychoanalytical readings of feminine libido, such as Lacan, who does not seem to be a writer that she has read or referred to. However, it resonates with certain critics of psychoanalytic theory in feminism and constitutes one of the most blatant manifestations of the haunting presence of feminist theory in Oates's work.<fnref n="4" />

And yet, the unconscious lingers everywhere in the two stories under
scrutiny, which seem to be replete with traumatic experiences, acting-outs
and fantasies to be interpreted rather than based on Oates's social realism.
Besides, uncharacteristically, in *Beasts* Oates explicitly refers to Freud's *Totem
and Taboo*: It is the name given by Dorcas to her exhibition, and Oates uses the
psychoanalytic process of substitution and sublimation of sexual drives to
explain the fires (B 24), in a way that is ironic and yet strikes the right chord.

Oates therefore writes stories that acknowledge the marginal power
of women while keeping away from direct confrontation with theorists. Her
interest at the turn of the century for the anti-social behaviour of desire, its
violence and unchanneled trajectory, adumbrated some of our
contemporary concerns and understandings of the core violence of male-
female relationships. I wish to see how the traumatic stories told are a
smokescreen for Oates to delve into a more primitive understanding of
drives as linked to possession and destruction, its entanglement in the
intersubjective relations of demand and response, a knowledge that morals
tend to cover up with a discourse that feminism may, to a certain extent,

<footnote n="4">⁴ Soshana Felman, Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Laura Mulvey have all somehow discussed Freud and his theory of sexuality. See Zakin and Leeb.</footnote>
contribute to construct.<fnref n="5" /> Both stories question the realm of the symbolic, that is the phallic structure of society and language, and show two women who, being partially excluded from it, must make do with the inexistence of their stories—a very feminist realization.

## I. Desire, Love and the Sickness of One's Attraction

Beasts and Rape can easily be said to be about the place of women in the heterosexual intercourse, in a way that replays the dialectics of master and servant: In both cases, the woman that is victim is socially weak, economically below or on a par with the male predator(s), and in a state of moral and intellectual despondency. Yet her desirability lies in her being able to be aware of this subservience while showing no signs of self-lamentation. When Dorcas breaks up with Gillian, so to speak, she says, "Chérie, you are too cruel to yourself. Now you look, what's your word, eh—un martyr—comme Jeanne d'Arc" (B 125).<fnref n="6" /> Both stories are about a rape, one with multiple victims, the other with multiple assailants; in both cases, the community of women is ripped apart by the event which is treated as a more systematic crime than a personal trauma. Oates seems to reiterate most of her important themes in a condensed manner, similar to this passage from a well-known early novel: ""All you want to hear is dirt, so why should I tell you about it? Your idea of the past is dirt,' Jules said. 'Forget everything that's over with. It doesn't belong to us"" (them 93). This is what Beasts is about: dealing with the most violent and abject of stories in such a way that this dirt is not avoided and beautified but looked at straight in the eyes. "Now, I was annoyed that recent visitors to the exhibit had left the usual litter. Why hadn't anyone cleaned up?" (B 17) says the narrator, who does not realize that Dorcas's works are about the dirt of sexual desire, its

<footnote n="5">⁵ Feminism ranges over a large scope which tends to be reduced in contemporary popular culture, from conservatism to radicalism, from liberal to Marxist, and their appreciation of rape will thus differ. See Canan and Levand, 2019.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ As often, the origin of the story, especially Beasts, can be traced back to some biographical context that is relevant to Oates: her living on the outskirts of a campus and her well-known disinterest in sexual matters in her private life (Les cahiers de l'Histoire).</footnote>
filth. The focus on dirt and filth recurs in *Rape* where the state of the
boathouse where Teena is gang-raped is repeatedly described as filthy,
smelling of urine as it is a makeshift abode for the homeless, who cannot be
expected to clean up after they sleep overnight (R 23).

Very few stories of rape take such a frontal, in-yer-face approach:
Slang terms, obscene phrases and recurring graphic images abound, as if to
make us partake in the jouissance observed and the act that is reputed beyond
language. The beginning of *Rape* reads:

After she was gang-raped, kicked and beaten and left to die on the
floor of the filthy boathouse at Rocky Point Park. After she was
dragged into the boathouse by the five drunken guys-unless they
were six, or seven-and her twelve-year-old daughter with her
screaming... (R 3)

The fragmented style lays the emphasis on the secondary clauses,
grammatically showing the place usually given to the sordid details of these
events while also perhaps calling to our collective unconscious that such
stories indeed make the quotidian of local, sensationalist news articles.
Readers are made incapable of averting their eyes, of pretending that what
has happened did not – this is what the narrator of *Rape* says of the tabloid
headlines (R 129). There is no attempt to tone under or embellish the event
in the (literary or poetic) language of ambiguity. What we are given is the
dirt and filth in language, straight on. *Beasts* similarly starts with the
confrontation with a totem in the Louvre bringing back the memory of the
traumatic experience, i.e. the “deaths [that] were believed to be accidental,”
about which the narrator has “nothing to confess”: The expression of her
denial at the start of the story makes us very dubious as to her capacity to
have analyzed and given a fruitful interpretation of the event (B 2-3). Both
stories revel in this blatant, almost too clear expression of a violent desire
only to conclude that they cannot articulate it into a story that gives it
another status or meaning than the sense of dejection resulting from its
violence. Or in other words, instead of using an alleged language of clarity,
both the trials, told sideways, as well as Teena's and Gillian's accounts, will
make the confession of the crime more otherworldly than what had been
announced by the violence of the opening scenes. The novellas thus confirm
the difficulty of conveying the primitiveness of a violent desire that is
enmeshed in language and symbols.

The circumstances surrounding the crimes—whether they be the
whiff of intellectual freedom and license of Harrow and Dorcas in *Beasts* or
the destitute squalor of Niagara Falls in *Rape*—are marked by the exuberant
narration and the, perhaps sadly, unsurprising story-lines: the drunkards
turned rapists are from a family of unexceptional troublesome thugs, the
exuberant couple of intellectuals reign supreme over a court of mesmerized
and ignorant girls in a provincial college, the primitiveness of the totems as
well as the foreignness of Dorcas, and the avenging policeman, all make for
two cases of classic, slightly hackneyed stories, perhaps such as can be found
in best-selling romances or in TV talk-shows. They also reinforce the naiveté
of the heroines who, quite laughably for some, have neglected to protect
themselves from the lures of their own admiration or from the dangers of
drinking nights: Conservative readers such as the ones that read tabloids
might be intent on wondering how they could have been so “immature” as
to not see the beam in their own eyes, something which the chorus-like
voices heard in the beginning of *Rape* suggesting that Teena was “asking for
it” evoke. The accusation becomes “contagious” when Marv endorses this
conservative rhetoric during the trial, showing it to be efficient in creating a
kind of collective opinion that objectifies the rape and further estranges the
emotional dimension of its narrative.

The scene of Harrow's seduction is filled with red flags and clichés: “I've
been waiting for you, girl, for a long time” (B 86). The position of
exceptionality strikes the right chord for Gillian, who wishes to be treated as
a special woman, convinced as she initially is that Dorcas will never set eyes
on her, or that Harrow will fall for other girls, but her. She does not notice the
cliché in the language of “love,” its tradition of being codified for romance,
and instead takes the bait: She is blinded by her own ideal of exception.
There lies the singularity of the story, because Oates does not make of her
victims mere spokeswomen for a universal state of victimhood: These heroines are sensuous, they pursue a certain satisfaction, however common and unspecified, but their assault reveals to them how they function in the symbolic order, which the “totems” created by Dorcas cannot fail to evoke. Because the symbolic is organized by the phallic rule of the totem, and in *Rape* the phallic rule of the family organization, these women have no place outside the heterosexual relationship, and are always at risk of becoming like the litter that is disposed of outside the exhibit, i.e. reduced to waste, the beautiful rottenness of D.H Lawrence’s poem that gives its French title to *Beasts* (B 28, 74).

## 2. Everyone is Sick—A General Sense of Deprivation

The psychoanalytic framework by which I read these two stories enables us to reflect upon the pathologization of these women in the texts and the way a certain discourse of deviance is used. The young adults on campus or the underprivileged community of *Rape* are caught in social, psychological and cultural states of dysfunction. In *Beasts*, the narrator’s discomfort with therapy is based on a denial of the processes of transference and an illiteracy about psychological treatment at large: “My thoughts are my own private business” (B 78), she says in what is clearly a refusal to analyze and translate her thoughts into words to try and pass on her thoughts to a third party who is supposed to understand them better. This is in keeping with the character’s general resistance to and denial of what is occurring to her: She is presented as claiming that she was not a witness to any of the events she recounts while giving us an account of it all (B 87). There are many signs in the novellas that if madness does not exist, it has a manifestation in a form of pathological treatment: Everyone on campus is on Benzedrine. This reflects the very specific way in which psychoanalysis and psychiatry were conflated in the USA for many years, especially in the heyday of psychoanalysis, up until the 1980’s renovation of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) with the publication of DSM III (Shorter 299-305). This conflation results in current defiance of both disciplines, but in
the novel itself, this serves to show that the girls on campus are not to find
solace or help in therapy.

Just as much as *Beasts* tries to retrieve the mystery of the fires that
frequently forced all of these young women out of their beds at night for a
full year, the narrator seems to be in awe of the mystery of desire, described
as “love” (B 97), or as the unsaid word, rape, to the extent that she is blinded
even when faced with the evidence of the crime: “In the first file, on top,
were a dozen Polaroid shots of a giddy, disheveled girl with long messy hair
who resembled me.... / What were they doing to the silly, semi-conscious
girl...?” (B II4) The phrasing suggests incomprehension and incredulity at a
time when things could not be clearer; it denotes an absence of recognition
of the functioning of attraction and desire. However, one is equally struck by
the fact that the girl who is mistreated in these shots should be so much
disregarded in the language used by the victim herself. This is in keeping
with the general sense that the young woman at university is encountering
the world in its aggressiveness, not shunning much from the injunctions,
whether they be in the form of mottos repeated throughout such as “*Go for
the jugular*” (B 7) or in side notes about her sense of duty at the time: Does
she not present her “journal,” which the narrative is based on, as having
been “commanded” to her? The young woman is thus also a victim of the
way she is positioned in life and in the symbolic as subjected to a language
that makes her vulnerable and disreputable.

In the final chapter of *Rape*, Bethie keeps her love for Dromoor secret—
a love comparable to Gillian's love for Harrow, also a father-figure—but she
will need to move beyond this psychologically incestuous passion if she is
to experience a healthier form of adult love. It may be that her childhood has
scarred her so deeply that she will never give up her secret, and never
escape the loneliness it imposes. In any case, it suggests some deep-rooted
traumatic experience that affects the rest of her life in the form of
dysfunctional relationships and lack of clarity as to her position within this
relationship.

And yet, the novellas are interested in the writing of these stories, in
the possibility of an articulation of the event, however imperfect it might
turn out to be. The diary Gillian wrote together with the fact that Gillian
studies the art of writing and that Dorcas is an artist bring us to wonder what
the function of art is and the way sublimation functions in this text.
“Sublimation” is a Freudian concept by which artists are said to be able to
channel their desires into other constructions that express their fantasy
without needing to act them out. For Dorcas, this separation does not hold
as she seems to represent outrageous visions of femininity that she then
acts out in scenes of rape that involve her husband. Her works, far from being
examples of sublimation, seem to be the result of her fantasies and sexual
desires being out in the open, exhibited in the pathological sense of the
term, leading to a vision of outrageous, devouring womanhood (Dupont).
The totem in their grotesque, primitive aesthetic seems to signify the
impossible containment of femininity. The narrator’s response to the art is in
fact comparable to her reaction when she sees the Polaroid stored away in
Harrow’s study: “I never knew whether they excited me as works of art ... or
whether they repulsed me. For they were so ugly, so un-, or anti-, feminine”
(B 16). It is inasmuch as these works seek to say something of femininity
that they are ambivalent, rejected and endorsed, leading us to ponder
whether Oates indeed seeks to deal with the most obvious meaning of her
stories – the patriarchal system of predation – or to reveal something about
women’s desiring bodies as equally anti- or un-feminine?

Not only does Harrow touch and make the girls' bodies his but he asks
them to write about it "without self-censorship"—perhaps another sign of
Freudian presence as a haunting framework to the text in keeping with the
dominant ideology on US campuses in the 1970s. Exploiting his students'
journals and creativity, the professor discloses the vulnerability of his
students' bodies. Instead of resisting the incestuous desires of his students,
Harrow exploits them and damages them in a very material way, which
becomes apparent when one of them starts damaging the residence in
reaction to her own sense of depravity. One by one, they seem to suffer the
damaging effects of their teacher, and his freedom to indulge in his scheme
shows that other adults condone his activities, or are blinded by their trust
in him. The text therefore illustrates Lacan's point that, given their position
as young women being educated in the art of the symbolic, they are a
challenge to the phallic order.

The game of seduction and, at times violation, to take possession of
their bodies is expected to be turned into an aesthetic experience:

Candidly they wrote of intimate secrets. There was a focus upon
childhood, traumatic and demeaning memories. Initial sexual
experiences, anxieties. They described their own bodies, what
they liked about them and what they hated; they described
others' bodies, parents, lovers, in graphic detail. They described
lurid, violent sexual fantasies and sexual acts. (B 70-71)

What we discover here is the unleashing of the fantasy, the writing not
so much of the young women's singular questions about sexuality but of a
sort of collective, social and sexual fantasy that Oates writes with the
language of pornography and cliché romance to perhaps further explore
what she has often said before: One type of love is "the totally irrational,
possessive, ego-destroying love, which can't be controlled and is, perhaps,
a pathological condition of the soul" (Milazzo 57). In *Beasts*, the text
superimposes the questions of desire, fantasy and *jouissance* and knots them
all together in a complex skein, which can only be approached through its
antisocial and unfeminine manifestations in which norms are disobeyed.
Gillian was first presented as living in shameful fear that Harrow be made
aware of her desire for him, but once she meets Dorcas and becomes
involved, she is led into a world that disrespects the moral education she
received because fantasy has become the structuring principle by which
these emancipated people think it fit to live: "If she enmeshes you in her
fantasies you become exaggerated, too" (B 40). The phrase is not just a
promise, it becomes manifest: "My legs were wet to the thighs" (B 50). The
graphic details of *Rape* confirm the tendency Oates explores, i.e. we live
according to a fantasy that is tied into the collective apprehension of "love
stories," as the second part of the title indicates, and that the language to say
it is both that which we are subjected to and that which is exceeded. Writing
may well be the place where at least the overflowing experience may be
captured, or worked upon.

3. Literary References and Political Discourses.

Uncharacteristically in Oates's fiction,<fnref n="7" /> the violence women fall prey to in both texts is not treated mainly as a social or political denunciation of the place of women in US culture, but looked at through the lens of more psychic processes such as libido and the heteronormative context in which love can be malevolent, if not altogether destructive. In *Beasts*, Oates uses a quote attributed to Nietzsche's nihilist credo, "What is done for love always takes place beyond good and evil" (B 37).<fnref n="8" /> This formulation stresses a principle of enjoyment that is not ordered by the symbolic, and leads readers to connect it to the way sexual desire is portrayed in Ovid, one of the strong intertextual references of the novella. The heroine of *Beasts* is nicknamed Philomela by her mentor, which she understands the full connotation of when she reads Ovid's story of rape and tongue cutting (B 46). In the #MeToo context of our contemporary era, these two works easily make us wonder what type of feminist Oates is, if she is to be one despite her best claims. If Oates shows violent relationships in an attempt to represent the violence of the social and cultural determinisms of the USA, she has claimed many times to have had very little to do with feminism—without ever criticizing feminists themselves (Milazzo 107).<fnref n="9" /> Many have tried to define what sort of feminist Oates may be. E. Showalter, for example, affirms that women tend to blame Oates for having an ideal of ungendered imagination and writing, as if she as writer could avoid the constraints of her sex (65,

<footnote n="7">⁷ "What Joyce Carol Oates has done is to take the novel back to its root meaning – 'news' – in a period when some of the best of her contemporaries have frankly explored fiction as artifice or turned from fiction to the new journalism or to the 'non fiction novel' of Mailer or Capote. She is 19th century in her patient faith that the novel can show us *the way we live now*" (Milazzo 38).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ This is a quote from *Beyond Good and Evil* (1886), trans. Helen Zimmern, New York: The Modern Library, chapter IV, apothegm #153, p. 88.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ In "Why is your writing so violent?" Oates explains that "there is a violation of some unspoken rule in the very fact that a woman writes—that is, thinks."</footnote>
Milazzo (131), but most critics recognize that her fiction depicts the plight of women with no qualms about asserting its connection to the heteronormative, patriarchal system. Elsewhere, she is criticized for thinking the dichotomy between male and female matters less than the dichotomy between intellectual and non-intellectual people (Milazzo 8). In other words, she allegedly presents herself as seeking to represent society at large, a design that her early works demonstrate, but when so much of the violence and inequity touches on women, is it really possible to imagine that Oates has not been, at least indirectly, influenced by the feminist theories that have shaped our reception of women's experiences for fifty years or so?<fnref n="10" /> It is no coincidence that the two texts under scrutiny here were published in the context of the trauma studies that made a feast of rape (the epitome of trauma) without perhaps sufficiently taking heed of the inescapability of desire's wrongdoing – or to say it with Ovid/Oates, of desire always being beyond or heedless of good and wrong (Dupont).

Oates's novellas under scrutiny address these issues by more overtly than before referring to Freud's *Totem and Taboo* in *Beasts* (a full exploration of this is provided by Dupont) and by raising the issue of feminist ways of approaching the question of rape. Dorcas's sculptures are said to be "a betrayal of feminism" (B 15). The two novellas indeed intermingle love, desire and rape by playing with a literary tradition that they exhibit and thus

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ The dominant ethos of feminist theory is that rape is about power and social control, rather than sex. This became dominant in the 1970s, for example, with Griffin, 1971, and Brownmiller, 1975. This is well documented by people like Beverly A. McPhail, for example, who wishes to review this theory in order to include other factors than simply power relations in the handling of rape. She argues that "relying on only one early strand of feminist thought to explain the etiology of rape limits the feminist's understanding." Feminists also focused conversation on the actual experiences of the women who were assaulted (Marcus, 1992; Whisnant, 2017) when the discussion had previously centered around either the perpetrator's experiences or the women's father's/husband's experience (Donat & D'Emilio, 1992). Oates's stories serve to trace this history of feminist understanding of rape by showing that what has been treated in isolation for activist or theoretic purposes is in fact much more complex and never unilateral. The shortness of the story perhaps is her ironic comment that these stories are extremely dense and never unilateral (Canan & Levand).</footnote>
subvert: Gillian is persuaded she loves Harrow (19), but she is not indifferent to Dorcas. Yet she does not address the reason that drives her to follow Dorcas in the street on her way to the post-office: If the text questions the structure of accepted violence towards women, it does not fully articulate the question of what these women seek. The text thus starts with an inversion of the predator-predated pattern that is unsettling. In *Rape*, Dromoor, the policeman, is a pathetic version of the knight in shining armor, but his presence is felt as an anomaly, especially given that he will not get any benefit from his gratuitous act of saving Teena. The text of *Beasts* deals with a web of references that is understandable within the context of a campus story – Gillian is a junior at an all-girls' college majoring in English literature in 1975, when much critical theory and the second wave of feminism were at their peak, in the wake of the sexual liberation movement (B II).<fnref n="11" /> The date is obsessively repeated throughout, and it is interesting to note that Oates's first novelistic experimentations date back to the works she published in the 1970s, which may account for her obsessive return to this timeframe.<fnref n="12" />

These references also structure the time-honored story of an incestuous relationship between a series of young women and their professor. The storyline is so well known that it has led to many popular versions, a comic one being the 1983 film *Educating Rita*. The text is introduced by four lines from a poem by D. H. Lawrence, which immediately suggests a strong reference to Modernism, especially the idea that the object of desire, far from being beauty, is rot, dirt, and waste. Oates has named a number of artists as influences across the years, but her general appreciation of

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Here the name of Angela Carter pops to mind, but Cologne-Brookes, for example, never mentions her as a possible influence.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² I here refer to Cologne-Brookes's periodization of Oates's work up to *Bellefleur* in 1980 (Cologne-Brookes 82). Greg Johnson sees in the end of 1977 a turning point in her career by which she would take a leap into more innovative formats and feminist engagement and Cologne-Brookes notes how this shift was noted in her diary of the year 1975 (Cologne-Brookes 97, 98) She thinks of Woolf and James as “represent[ing] the furthest limits of the traditional English novel” (Cologne-Brookes 21), interested as she is in the interconnection within a full world rather than the dissection of the mind’s processes.</footnote>
Modernism is ambivalent (Cologne-Brookes 79). On the other hand, D. H. Lawrence is a central reference to Oates's teenage years according to Showalter (who refers to this in them).<fnref n="13" /> The title of *Beasts* is presented as having two origins. First, it is the title of D.H. Lawrence's collection of poems *Birds, Beasts and Flowers* (1923), published in the heyday of Modernist intellectual buzzing life. It is also derived from a sentence that Dorcas uses for her 1975 exhibit: "We are beasts and this is our consolation," a sentence whose relevance keeps being validated by the recurrence of the quote in the text, used as a motto coming back to the narrator's mind, like a symbolic landmark that guides her towards the resolution of her story, or, to use the novel's own symbolic structure, a totem in language.

Furthermore, Lawrence's poem is given two statuses. As part of the epigraph to the text, the poem is taken up by the author, Oates, as a reference that resonates with her story: "I love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness." The line is provocative and sensual, evoking primitive and tribal instincts of consumption of the flesh unmediated by the sublimated power of art, and tied into Dorcas's totems and Freud's essay on the origin of the taboo of incest. Read from this perspective, the poem serves to suggest that love is a term that hides a reality of unmediated and unchanneled desires that are organised by a symbolic function, all the more dominant as it celebrates the phallic role of those in power. The poem is also given a function in the story when Harrow uses it in one of his classes (B 74) after he has taught his students: "The wisdom of Lawrence, as well as the ancients, is simply this: you can't deny Eros" (B 61).

Harrow here refers to the later shift of Lawrence's work away from the intellectual apprehension of the body to a more sensual approach, based not on materiality but enjoyment (Cuny). In her study of the collection of poems, Sandra Gilbert notes an attempt at going beyond appearances and

<footnote n="13">¹³ Lawrence is often quoted by Oates in interviews: "My heroes are people like Yeats and Lawrence, who, when you read their poetry, you know are in immediate contact with an immense emotional reality" (Milazzo 17). She thinks Lawrence "doesn't seem altogether English" in that he has an intense interest in subjectivity, unlike most English novelists'. (Milazzo 68).</footnote>
reaching through to unsteadiness / the perpetual motion / anything that
contradicts the fixity of the world as it is shown (qtd in Stevens). Some
have pointed out that the medlar that is central to the poem may be a sly
reference to Rosalind in *As You Like It*: "You'll be rotten ere you be half ripe, /
and that's the right virtue of the medlar" (III.3.95-96), in which case the
rottenness is part of the venereal disease that Rosalind threatens
Touchstone with. The fact that Touchstone compares himself to Ovid may
indicate that Oates also read the Shakespearean reference in Lawrence's
poem. In D.H. Lawrence, this medlar is used as a celebration of the sensual
pleasure to be derived from the physicality of senses, in particular the
touch (stone?), against the intellectual possession of the beauty of things:
"The smell of the sorb apple thus acquires an untouchable sensuality that
again remains 'strange,' cannot be completely absorbed" (Brault-Dreux)
The reference to Modernism and Freud seems to help Oates create a tension
between the language of sexual liberation, the loss of sensuality and the
subjective apprehension of attraction while giving some depth and
perspective to the structures and persistence of the destructiveness of
desire.

The many echoes that densely constitute the texture of Oates's novella
are surprisingly inefficient from the point of view of the heroine, who is not
any the wiser as to what happens to her. The narrator herself remains in the
world of fantasy and images: "Our lovemaking was confused and fantastical
as a film run faster and faster until it burst into flame" (B 95). She does not
read in Ovid's myth Harrow's forewarning that he may rape her, nor does
she see in it a story of sisterly revenge, but the multiple references show the
long tradition of rape culture and the dynamics of possession/dispossession
and desire/rejection that inform western culture. The character's revenge by
arson, which is borrowed from the story by Ovid, is made extremely dubious
for the readers: Is it the failure of reading skills that lead these women to re-
enact the myth? Or is it our collective misunderstanding of what is at stake
in literature?

Hearing the poem being recited by Harrow, Gillian says: "I shut my eyes.
I wanted to cry. I had never heard so beautiful a poem, in so beautiful a male
voice” (B 75). The shocking nature of the poem, just as much as the scandalous nature of Harrow’s proposals to escape the normalcy of the heterosexual couple through bisexuality, is obliviated in the voice and the style, which attract Gillian like a magnet towards the excessive enjoyment of some demand she cannot accept. The beastly words of the language of desire cannot be understood and, or comprehended, because she is a victim of her own fantasy that he be knowledgeable about the dark continent of her own body: “The true subject of the poem was... / the vagina. / That secret femaleness at the core of a woman’s being, hidden from the world” (B, 29) – or perhaps should we add, hidden in language.<fnref n="14" />

In *Rape*, the textual and literary references are much more invisible, but for the title and the sensational headlines. However, the question of the symbolic room given to Teena and her failure to simply be lodged in it returns through the actual multiplication of discourses and narratives regarding the event. The rape is evoked by the headlines of the press and tabloid articles, a long variation of headlines that always mention the word “rape” but question the word “victim.” The “media Frenzy” evoked towards the end of the text sees the return of the initial gossip frenzy with which the novella opens. “What had been Teena, what had been Bethie, was suddenly eclipsed. Your mother would be *That woman who was gang-raped in the boat-house at Rocky Point Park* and you would be *That girl, Teena Maguire’s daughter*” (R 45). Teena and her daughter are no longer singular beings, they become a news story, deprived of their names and existence in language. Since Teena can barely remember what happened (R 48) and Bethie did not see the whole act, the trial really is the only place where the story could be told: “*When will you tell him? Maybe never. For why tell him? He would not understand. There was ugliness in that world but there was beauty, too. There was hatred, but love. Only one man could understand and your husband is not that man*” (R 153). As *Rape* finishes, we understand that the story indeed never was recounted: The trial did not happen, Dromoor was taken away from the station where he was based, and

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Here one can see a direct reference to Eve Ensler's *Vagina Monologues*, published only 4 years before and a major success.</footnote>
even Bethie has grown a habit of looking away, absorbed, “You looked so lonely, suddenly. As if you’d forgotten I’m here” (R I54).

## Conclusion

Canan and Levand have traced the history of feminism's approach to sexual violence, and in particular rape, trying to see how we moved from the 1960s' understanding of rape as an act of sex to the 1970s' consensus that it was an act of violence, hence power. The 1970s seem central to this and reflect Oates's choice of time frame, and the very date 1975 in particular: "most famously, Brownmiller (1975) shaped the conversation with her work *Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape*, which suggested, among many things, that rape was about power and a form of male domination over women" (Canan and Levand). Mardorossian explains that the consensual story of rape as violence has led to "a predictable pattern, namely, that of identifying the source of violence (gendered power relations) and its effects (trauma)." All these studies are valuable, but the one that illuminates Oates's two novellas is Marcus's analysis of the "rape script." According to Marcus, this script presupposes masculine power and feminine powerlessness, a script that society more or less successfully inscribes on men's and women's psyches. Rape victims are thus women whose minds are colonized by a sexual scenario they could instead learn to recognize and use to prevent the scripted experience.<fnref n="15" /> Although we may understand Mardorossian's frustration at this, because it somehow negates the social and political conditions that would favor the better prevention of the crime, Marcus's idea of a storyline seems to be a theoretical framework to account for Oates's works, in which the American author shows pre-scripted stories, not so much to desubstantiate the crime but to

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ “To speak of a rape script implies a narrative of rape, a series of steps and signals whose typical initial moments we can learn to recognize and whose final outcome we can learn to stave off. . . . The narrative element of a script leaves room and makes time for revision” (Marcus 390–91). According to Marcus (1992), the rape script preexists the act of violence and only “momentarily” creates the identities of rapist and victim when enacted (Mardorossian, 2002).</footnote>
tell the same old story that all women are sick and mad (B 102), not
because they are irrational, but because they are symbolically positioned
in what exceeds, what is never entirely contained within a totem (Lacan).
Oates's two novellas therefore deconstruct the totemic value of art in
representing rape while showing that the way discourses and scripts are
intermeshed reveal the fundamental dysfunctionality of desire in that it is
"beyond good and evil," that love is the name given to beastly acts of power
that are inherent to the use of language.
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