Performing Rape for Laughs: Male Desire and Female Ties Gone Awry

Abstract

Abstract:

By focusing on the relatively unexamined Nouvelle 45, I want to continue my exploration of Heptaméron comic tales that focus on rape, and to foreground the role of female alliances in such tales. By female alliances, I am referring to the partnerships that women form, often transcending class divisions, as a means of thwarting aggression. As a corollary, I will explore what is at stake when this female uniting of forces is replaced by succumbing, often unwittingly, to competing allegiances that comprise the patriarchal strictures that characterize the world in which these protagonists circulate. The lack of female bonds characterizes Nouvelle 45, and the consequences, albeit recounted in a comic register, are telling. As for the comic, my goal is to focus primarily on the narrative devices that Marguerite mobilizes that transform a rape story from one that elicits terror and horror (for that, we need to turn to Nouvelle 2) to one that has all the markings of a text designed to spark the reader’s laughter and amusement. My aim is to show that there remain avenues to explore that privilege the ludic dimensions that infuse the Heptaméron’s complex structure, even when it comes to such freighted topics as the premeditated sexual violation of innocent victims.