Meanings of Rape in the Classroom and Community

The last few years which have been loud with a persistent questioning of the value of a liberal arts education have made me question whether a liberal arts curriculum formed out of the Renaissance collision with classical texts might have anything at all to say to modern students. Henry Giroux in a recent Op-Ed essay in Truthout asked a question similar to mine in a fiercer way: “What role should the university play at a time when politics is being emptied out of any connection to a civic literacy, informed judgment, and critical dialogue, further deepening a culture of illiteracy, cruelty, hypermasculinity and disposability?”¹ What is to be done when the classical texts themselves seem to legitimize “cruelty, hypermasculinity and disposability?”

One egregious difficulty is the problem posed when teaching Titus Andronicus—a play of brutal vengeance that seems to legitimize ever more violence. One classical source for the play is Ovid’s story of Philomel and Progne. Philomel is brutally raped by her brother-in-law who believes he has secured her silence because he has cut out her tongue, yet she is able to communicate her story through a tapestry that she weaves. Shakespeare’s version of the story intensifies the grotesqueness of the rape. In the play, the rapists, limited readers of classical texts, decide that they will avoid discovery by not only cutting out their victim’s tongue but also chopping off her hands. Yet Lavinia does accuse her rapists by assembling her body into a “pen” to writing the word “stuprum.” The accusation allows her father to pursue vengeance, in which he punishes the men by baking them in a pie and serving them to their mother, who had encouraged the rape. What can such a terrible story mean to students? As it turns out, quite a lot.

Let me describe two widely separated incidents at the college when the meanings of the classroom spilled out to animate action.

About twenty ago, in an English course called ”Literary Perspectives on Women,” I was introducing students to the classical stories that Shakespeare had drawn on for Titus Andronicus. I quickly ran through the three classical rape narratives from Livy and Ovid that Shakespeare had merged in the play, so that we could think about how Shakespeare had revised his sources, in particular the transformation in the gender of the revenger and the elimination of the sister Progne of the Ovidian story; indeed his play sets women at odds with one another. This examination of literary sources did not engage the students. In fact, at the following class they took me to task for my cheerful detachment in describing the representation of three rape narratives. (It’s a tone I used to adopt when reciting some of the gruesome details of torture in medieval literary or religious texts.) The students were outraged by my tone in summarizing the stories and my failure to anticipate the impact that these stories might have on those who had experienced rape themselves. During the uproar in the class four students out of twenty revealed that they had been raped; for them the literary representation of past victimization of women was only too immediate. Since they felt so strongly, we couldn’t take up the differences between literature and life. That incident taught me greater caution and the need to acknowledge the immediacy that the representation of violence, even when clothed in antique costumes, might have for contemporary students. In this instance, the past tale echoed only too painfully with present experience, even though I attempted to move them away from a focus solely on victimization, by explaining how some feminist literary critics had read the story of Philomel and Progne. I offered, in particular, an essay by Patrica Klindeinst Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours,” which explores the extraordinary attentiveness of Progne’s reading of her sister’s tapestry that tells the story of her rape. Joplin finds in the model a claim for feminine alliance and sensitivity in reading the sister’s story, but this offer did not calm the storm.

As it happened this uproar in the class occurred at the time of an occupation of Main Building intended to draw attention to the needs of minority students of various kinds—racial, religious, sexual. The furor over sexual assault remained local to my class and was not a feature of the larger demonstrations, for the problem of sexual assault on campus seemed to have been addressed. Student activism some years earlier had persuaded the administration to fund a rape crisis counselor. Over time the responsibilities of that position were folded into a less inflammatory job description; rape on campus as a political issue seemed taken care of. I learned to introduce the topic of rape with care and all seemed well.

Yet as second-wave feminism with its alertness to rape and the communal responsibility to support rape victims was being transformed, at least in popular culture, to postfeminism with its emphasis on individualism, personal empowerment, and sexual bravado,² sexual assault again began to concern to some faculty and administrators. In the early part of the 21st century, the cooperation of administrators and faculty secured a grant for education about sexual assault and violence and a number of students as well as staff engaged in activism and self-education: support for victims of sexual assault, volunteer work at the rape crisis center, training in the “victim-centered approach,” and education about the issue on campus. When the grant ran out, the duties were continued by administrators –until the financial crisis led to the elimination of support for an administrator devoted to the issue. Unfortunately, the financial crisis occurred at a time of war and in a period of what Henry Giroux has described as a “culture of hypermasculinity.”

Last semester, students who were concerned over sexual aggression and instances of sexual assault on the campus began to speak up. Drawing on the model of Progne’s careful listening to her sister’s story and then the sisters’ coalition in action, they spoke up at town meetings, asked for restoration of the position of Sexual Assault and Violence Prevention coordinator to train and educate; they even organized a website for the anonymous reporting of experiences of sexual assault. Their patient, persistent, and respectful raising of the question led to positive change. The position was restored. In the Ovidian story, the punishment of the rapist is extreme and injurious to Progne as well as the king she punishes. Yet the students seem to have found a way to draw on Progne’s model without precipitating the cataclysmic destruction of the Roman story. They also seem to have recognized that the Shakespearean version of the story, in which the patriarch takes over the task of justice for the injured woman–“For worse than Progne will I be revenged,”–erases the connections between women. By building a feminist community for action, they have carefully constructed a coalition of support and connection that revives the important feminist lessons of some decades ago.

Henry Giroux asks, “What role should the university play at a time when politics is being emptied out of any connection to a civic literacy, informed judgment, and critical dialogue, further deepening a culture of illiteracy, cruelty, hypermasculinity and disposability?” Recent events at the college show that education about sexual assault continues to be a necessity to contest residual assumptions about rape that are only too ready to surface and blame the victim. Our response to rape becomes a test of the community. To respond to Giroux’s question, the students have shown me that in the dynamic spaces of a college where old texts are brought into engagement with contemporary experiences, new practices evolve and are remade.

¹ Henry Giroux, “Why Faculty Should Join Occupy Movement Protesters on College Campuses,” Truthout Op-Ed, Monday, 19 December 2011. .
² Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism : Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009), 14-23.