Rape, Victimization, and Agency in Fang Siqi’s Paradise of First Love

This article undertakes a feminist analysis of rape in the semi-autobiographical novel Fang Siqi’s Paradise of First Love (“房思琪的初恋乐园” / “Fang Siqi de chulian leyuan”) by Taiwanese author Lin Yihan (林奕含). For Siqi, the traumatic experience of rape intertwines with a discourse of love, interpreted as an effort to disavow victimization and claim agency. A major strength of the novel is the way depictions of personal tragedies are accompanied by lucid exposures of rape as a decidedly social act, which shifts the conventional focus of rape narratives from victims to perpetrators and, in so doing, interrogates the victim-blaming culture and places the responsibility on both social factors and individual perpetrators. In the end, the novel identifies women’s bonding and collective resistance as an effective site for hope and agency.