Outlander Brings Home Important Truths about Rape
By: Shoshana Kaufman
Tags: Rape, Television, Life Lessons, Feminism, Violence Against Women

A few years ago, my daughter was raped. I have gone through all of the emotions that a mother goes through after such a devastating attack on her child, and all I could think about was revenge. When I found out, I just wanted to kill that man (who was never charged). What helped me heal from my irrational desire to inflict violence was a fantasy/historical television series called Outlander.

Outlander is both feminist and anti-violence, even though the plot is peppered with violence, murder, and rape.

As I was watching the latest season of this amazing production, I got to thinking of how much the plot is fueled by revenge. The series is set in the eighteenth century, a time when the toxicity and futility of revenge was not much acknowledged, especially in colonial America, where the fifth season is set.

In case you are not familiar with this series, it tells the story of Claire Randal, a twentieth-century woman who was a nurse in the second world war, who is accidentally transported to the year 1743 when she visits an ancient stone circle in Scotland and inadvertently touches one of the stones.

Soon after traveling through time, Claire meets Jamie Fraser, and their love story is the center of the show, with Claire traveling back to the twentieth century, giving birth to Jamie’s daughter, training to be a doctor, and then coming back through the stones to her true love and husband twenty years later. What follows are several seasons of warfare, intrigue, murder, rape, and revenge.

Every major character and several minor characters are raped in this series, starting with Jamie Fraser. He is the strapping, tall, sexy, athletic warrior that Claire falls in love with soon after she travels through time and fixes his dislocated shoulder, a painful battle wound that Jamie has just suffered in a skirmish with English forces in the Scottish rebellion of 1743.

He may be tall and powerful, but Jamie falls victim to the violent sexual attentions of Jack Randal, a sadistic English lord and captain in the English army invading Scotland at the time, and who happens to be the ancestor of Claire’s twentieth-century husband, Frank Randal. Jamie is imprisoned for his part in the Scottish resistance to the British invasion, and Randal takes advantage of Jamie’s captivity to get what he wants from him.

Jack Randal is clearly based on the Marquis de Sade, an eighteenth-century writer who gave us the term sadist, and who celebrated a sexuality based on blood and violence. As Camille Paglia warns in her chapter about him in her famous book Sexual Personae, “Don’t have lunch before you read Sade!”

In a horrifying scene (almost worse than Jamie’s rape scene), Jamie is whipped on a scaffold. It is an excruciatingly violent sequence that has a clear sexual undertone. It is a prelude to Jamie’s later rape at the hands of Randal.

The merciless lashes on Jamie’s back make a bloody spectacle, which heals to a massive, intricate scar that is seen whenever Jamie takes off his shirt, often for a lingering sex scene with Claire. It is a message about sexual violence as well as the healing power of love.

You see, Claire is called a healer throughout the series. In the twentieth century she is a surgeon, but in her “real” life, her life with Jamie in the eighteenth century, she cannot be a labelled a surgeon because she is a woman, even though she performs numerous surgeries throughout the series.

It takes several seasons, but Jamie gets revenge on Randal by finally killing him in the famous battle of Culloden.

Jamie is nearly psychologically destroyed by the assaults, both the lashing and the rape, but Claire’s love helps him heal. Later, he has to return the favor. In the following seasons, Claire is raped by the King of France, and later gang-raped by a band of lawless ruffians who are angry that she is spreading feminist ideas in colonial South Carolina.

Meanwhile, Jamie and Claire’s daughter, Brianna, has been raped by a pirate named Steven Bonnet right after she consummates her marriage with her twentieth-century husband, Roger (both have traveled back to the eighteenth century). She conceives a son from this attack by the psychopathic Bonnet, and this fact gives her attacker power over her and her son, whom she is raising with Roger.

Of course he has to die. There was no justice system that would try him for rape and punish him appropriately. However, he ends up being executed for piracy and murder, not the rape of Brianna. And before that, he almost succeeds in getting custody of the young boy and stealing his inheritance.

You see, in the eighteenth century, a pregnancy resulting from rape was seen as evidence that the woman was asking for the attack. And a child was the property of his father, regardless of the circumstances of his conception.

So Jamie and Claire get revenge for their daughter’s rape, but not by directly killing the rapist; the imperfect wheels of justice take care of that, sentencing him to death for piracy. Brianna herself shoots Bonnet in the head as he is chained to a stake in the middle of a river, where he is essentially being waterboarded to death. Revenge, yes. But, in a sense, she does him a favor by killing him in a more humane way. But she gets the satisfaction of putting a bullet in his head.