Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction by Robin Field

Reviewed by: Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction by Robin Field Michaela Tashjian (bio) Field, Robin. Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2020. 256 pp. $120.00 hardcover. The term rape novel connotes a genre recognized by many, analyzed by few, and recently defined by one scholar in particular—Robin E. Field. In Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction, Field traces the evolution of the rape novel from its birth in the 1970s, through its development in the long 1980s and 1990s, to its status today as a full-fledged genre of literary activism. Writing the Survivor will interest readers of the Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies. Its author engages with the theoretical work of noted trauma scholars, some of whom have been reviewed in previous issues of this journal, such as Cathy Caruth and Michelle Balaev. Perhaps the most essential qualities of Writing the Survivor, however, include its timeliness and sincerity. Movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, along with the pushback they have provoked, have culminated in 2020 in a breaking point at which people inside and outside academe recognize a desperate need for unwavering antiracism and unbridled empathy. The 2020 release of Writing the Survivor offers just that. With care-filled rhetoric, responsible feminist and antiracist citation practices, and startling optimism, Writing the Survivor demonstrates to readers how "the rape novel, as a form of literary activism, makes the world a better place" (67). Writing the Survivor takes an interdisciplinary approach to its comprehensive overview of this reformative class of literature. Each chapter is [End Page 115] widely informative about the historical catalysts that led to each change in the genre—from the first memoirists to break silences about sexual trauma, to the antirape movement and resulting waves of feminism, to the widespread allegations by male victims of sexual abuse in the early twenty-first century along with the #MeToo movement of 2017. Literary critics will feel at home within the pages of Writing the Survivor, as each chapter consists of close readings of novels that build upon the work of previous rape fiction and significantly transform the genre for the literature that follows. Field takes on the responsibility that every scholar of rape representation must: to acknowledge and correct the racism in our early antirape literature—namely, Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will and Diana Russell's The Politics of Rape. Without disregarding the importance of such foundational texts, Field recognizes Billie Holiday and Maya Angelou as the forerunners of the antirape rhetoric embraced by white feminists more than a decade later, demonstrating that it was ultimately Black women who opened the door to breaking silences about rape and speaking out against rape culture. In her rhetorical analysis of Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues, Field notes that "Holiday asserts in 1956 what was revolutionary to anti-rape activists in the 1970s," attributing both this memoir and Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings with setting the rhetorical groundwork for depictions of sexual violence later embraced in rape fiction. Such rhetoric, according to Field, emphasizes the humanity of the victim, dispels widely believed rape myths, resists the impulse of the community to shift blame onto the victim, and inspires its readers to advocate for cultural change. Field's trajectory of the rape novel begins with these memoirs and the activism that followed, then examines the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s, respectively, before turning to the emergence of men's stories of sexual abuse. The final chapter of Writing the Survivor juxtaposes the close succession of women's memoir, activism, and fiction with the simultaneity of men's fiction, activism, and memoir, bringing the history of the rape novel completely to date and rightly attributing its legacy to women such as Holiday and Angelou. Having established the rightful predecessors of this genre, Field sets out first to answer a question of utmost importance: What is the rape novel? A term so loaded with such ambiguity certainly warrants definition. For [End Page 116] Field, a rape novel qualifies as such...