Rape: A Love Story — The Rescue We Are Made to Want

David Lapadat | Music PhD
2 days ago
7 min read

Spoiler warning: This essay discusses the assault, the later violence, and the ending of Rape: A Love Story.

Joyce Carol Oates begins Rape: A Love Story after the assault, with a sentence whose grammar leaves us waiting: “AFTER SHE WAS GANG-RAPED, kicked and beaten and left to die on the floor of the filthy boathouse at Rocky Point Park.” The period closes a dependent clause; something should follow after, but the next sentence starts the word again, returning us to the assault, then to the approach through the park, as if each attempt to continue required another return. The story has barely begun, and its aftermath already has a rhythm.

Within that rhythm, facts give way to accusations almost without a change of voice. Teena Maguire's decision to take a shortcut, her clothes, her smile, her presence outdoors with her twelve-year-old daughter become occasions for other people to explain why she deserved what happened. With attribution deferred, the judgments run through the narration in the blunt, familiar manner of things everybody knows. Only at the close does the chapter gather them under “Some of the things that would be said of your mother Teena Maguire.” The girl beside her in the park is now the person being addressed, and what sounded like the world's verdict becomes part of what Bethie must live through.

I found the opening devastating, then almost immediately felt the admiration turning into resistance. Its speed and concentration are extraordinary; so much of a family's exposure has been made present before the story has properly unfolded. But the accumulation can also feel like being scolded for a judgment one has never made. The borrowed voices are plainly being condemned. Their insistence leaves little room between disgust at their cruelty and submission to the narrator's emotional direction. There is something aesthetically impatient in this performance of indignation, as though the existence of cruelty still needed to astonish us before its particular consequences could become interesting.

People described before we meet them

The same impatience affects the way Oates introduces John Dromoor, the policeman whose intervention will dominate the family's future.

Long before we can watch him negotiate that responsibility, the narration has supplied his resistance to authority, his attraction to guns, his pleasure in their weight and accuracy, his experience of killing in the Gulf War. His discomfort with words is bodily—they seem capable of choking him—while handling a gun promises the reliable progress that books and school never did. The portrait connects language, humiliation, competence, and violence with considerable economy, while making his danger unmistakable from the beginning.

That economy also restricts discovery. An uncertainty about what Dromoor might do has been carefully prepared, but his psychological outline comes heavily labeled. Even his hair contributes: first it resembles cutting wires; later, during a recorded interview, it gives off “a sullen glow, like pewter.” The metallic association belongs to his characterization, though I find the latter image labored, its mood too conveniently supplied by the adjective. Such touches are occasional irritants in otherwise alert prose. More pervasive is the feeling that people have been assigned their moral and emotional appearance before they have had much opportunity to surprise us.

The crime is established, while the responses to it leave Oates ample room for uncertainty, including the responses of people who sincerely want to help.

She begins to find that uncertainty when the voices acquire immediate, competing purposes. Once the need for a statement confronts the need to let Teena sleep, the right words for pursuing a case can become unbearable to hear at home.

Who can speak for Teena?

Harriet Diebenkorn, the prosecutor, needs Teena and Bethie to cooperate. Her appeals move between professional obligation, reassurance, wounded ambition, and solidarity with other women, these registers interrupting and compromising one another as she speaks. An offer of help becomes a demand for help, and the family's suffering becomes entangled with the prosecutor's need to recover from humiliation in court. To the grandmother she is another adult insisting on access to her daughter; for Bethie, another account of the assault to receive and repeat. Speech keeps prolonging the family's exposure even when its declared purpose is restitution.

The narration still leans on caricature. Diebenkorn's breath, lipstick, and damp eyes make her physically oppressive, and this loaded presentation limits how freely we can assess her. But her pressure now meets resistance inside the dialogue. The grandmother's repeated interruptions break Diebenkorn's reassurances into unfinished replies, so that institutional authority has to struggle for a hearing in her house. Indignation acquires an opponent and a practical consequence. The exchange has a friction that the opening's procession of ugly opinions could only announce in advance.

Bethie's answer develops through a more delicate change in who possesses the right to speak. Asked to fetch her mother, she goes upstairs and finds her asleep. The child's attention moves through the darkened room to the body on the bed, the possibility of death, the sound of breathing. For a moment she sees her mother lying like a child. That change of scale makes the prosecutor's request feel intolerable: waking Teena would require Bethie to surrender the small safety she can presently preserve. She closes the door without speaking to her.

Downstairs, Bethie says that all her mother has told her to pass on is “fuck you.” Oates has let us witness the silence upstairs, so we hear the fabrication inside the reported message. Bethie knows her mother's hostility; she has invented this particular authorization to voice it. Her lowered voice and performed embarrassment make a child's dutiful delivery the means of refusing an adult. Having repeatedly been required to tell the truth about what happened, she now protects her mother by claiming to repeat words that have not just been spoken. The tenderness, defiance, and small calculation develop together in the act of speaking.

Dromoor's words on the record

Dromoor's protection depends on a much more dangerous difference between what is said and what the reader can infer. With the family still being intimidated, he shoots one of the assailants while defending Teena's former boyfriend. Oates pares the recorded interview down to questions and replies: Dromoor selects his words carefully, denying prior acquaintance with the man and explaining his intervention through purpose and sworn duty. The bare exchange gives his account a procedural composure that sits strangely beside the volatile man already described. We can follow its usefulness as a statement without confusing it with everything the book has disclosed about him.

Away from interrogation, his private language lingers over the pleasure of shooting. The narration moves into his mind with an intimacy his public replies refuse, then withholds the decisive acts of further violence. When the Pick brothers meet a supposed legal investigator, a pair of baby shoes hangs from the car's mirror; Oates later lets Dromoor anticipate the reassurance those shoes will offer. A father's accessory has become part of a deception, and a way for us to identify the unnamed driver. Oates cuts from the meeting to the abandoned car; the killing is left for us to infer. The reader receives more than the official account and less than a fully witnessed event. Dromoor's appetite is explicit enough to disturb the satisfaction of rescue, even when the withheld violence makes that satisfaction easier to bear.

His capacity for such a role has been amply prepared. His attachment to Teena and Bethie receives less development, although it must sustain the plot's enormous reliance on him. Oates allows him to wonder about his feelings and about having been the first officer on the scene; the uncertainty belongs plausibly to a man who avoids examining himself. It also leaves the novel dependent on an explanation it does little to deepen. The resolution has some of the convenience of a deus ex machina, despite the substantial preparation for Dromoor's intervention. Relief comes through a figure whose competence is more convincing than the bond that commits it to this particular family.

With the Pick brothers, the gap makes us supply an act that could disturb our relief. Around Dromoor's attachment, it leaves the rescuer's importance more secure than our understanding of him. Oates relies on both uncertainties, though only the first consistently deepens the drama. The second can make the emotional bond feel like another circumstance arranged to secure the ending.

Two lives after the rescue

Oates gives Teena a conclusion small enough to fit on a postcard. The penultimate chapter, “Heaven,” lets handwriting replace the ordinary body of the narrative: a cheerful account of travel and remarriage reaches the mother and daughter left at home.

Teena can now send news from elsewhere. Against the opening's mass of things said about her, she has a little space in which to report her own happiness. The compression grants her release without requiring her to explain her recovery for our benefit.

Bethie's final chapter makes the release unequal. Now married and living in New York, she repeatedly catches sight of a uniformed officer and feels that she has seen Dromoor. She knows that he would be older, probably elsewhere, no longer doing that work. Oates places the shock of recognition before these corrections. The man whom Bethie knows to have changed keeps appearing in the form in which she needed him.

The return to “you” carries this interruption into the adult present. Marriage and another city have supplied a new life without giving the old one a safely completed tense. Her husband knows virtually nothing of that history; the person walking beside him can suddenly become unreachable while staring at another man in the street. Oates ends with his attempt to recall her: “You looked so lonely, suddenly. As if you'd forgotten I'm here.” The sentence is gentler than the voices that began the book, and comes from someone who wants her company. For the moment, he too can only speak to the aftermath of something he has not been allowed to know.

For another encounter with a narrator who directs our judgment before we know the person being described: Pnin: The Man on the Wrong Train.