#MeToo and Literary Studies

Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture

Mary K. Holland, Heather Hewett, Mary K. Holland, Heather Hewett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501372759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of sexual violence by confronting it through the study of literature. #MeToo and Literary Studies gathers essays on literature from Ovid to Carmen Maria Machado, by academics working across the United States and around the world, who offer clear ways of using our reading, teaching, and critical practices to address rape culture and sexual violence. It also examines the promise and limitations of the #MeToo movement itself, speaking to the productive use of social media as well as to the voices that the movement has so far muted. In uniting diverse voices to enable the #MeToo movement to reshape literary studies, this book is also committed to the idea that the way we read and write about literature can make real change in the world.

PART I

Critical Practices

1

“Dismissed, trivialized, misread”:

Re-examining the Reception of Women’s Literature through the #MeToo Movement

Janet Badia

While the media continues to frame the hashtag “MeToo” through the now-famous viral moment of October 2017—a moment centered on actress Alyssa Milano, film executive Harvey Weinstein, and Hollywood more broadly—we know that the story of the MeToo Movement does not begin there. Rather, the MeToo Movement originated more than a decade before Milano’s viral tweet when, in 2006, Tarana Burke, founder and director of the Just Be Inc. youth organization, developed the MeToo campaign on MySpace to help sexual assault survivors in underserved communities find resources and heal from their traumas (Ohlheiser 2017). On the website for Just Be Inc., Burke locates the roots of the campaign in one particular moment she experienced leading an all-girl bonding session at a youth camp (Burke 2013). The day following the session one of the girls, Heaven—who had “clung to” Burke throughout the camp and who had about her “a deep sadness and a yearning for confession”—asked to speak with her privately. Burke’s description of her reaction to Heaven’s revelation of sexual abuse is as honest as it is surprising:

I was horrified by her words, the emotions welling inside of me ran the gamut, and I listened until I literally could not take it anymore … which turned out to be less than 5 minutes. Then, right in the middle of her sharing her pain with me, I cut her off and immediately directed her to another female counselor who could “help her better.”

I will never forget the look on her face …. The shock of being rejected, the pain of opening a wound only to have it abruptly forced closed again …. I could not find the courage that she had found. I could not muster the energy to tell her that I understood, that I connected, that I could feel her pain …. I could not find the strength to say out loud the words that were ringing in my head over and over again as she tried to tell me what she had endured … I watched her walk away from me as she tried to recapture her secrets and tuck them back into their hiding place. I watched her put her mask back on and go back into the world like she was all alone and I couldn’t even bring myself to whisper … me too.

I quote this context at length here, first, to underscore Burke’s voice and place in the MeToo movement and, second, to tease out the complexities of this particular origin story. Burke’s retelling of this crucial moment in the formation of the movement is, importantly, about both the invitation to witness and the inability to listen; it’s about the sharing of pain and the retreat from what that sharing requires of its listeners; it’s about the discovery of one’s voice and about the repression of connection, of empathy, and of solidarity with that voice. In many ways, it is an unexpected origin story for a movement that is, above all, about connection and identification: me, too.

In fall 2018, I had the opportunity to hear Tarana Burke speak at Purdue University West Lafayette. Structured as a dialogue between Burke and an interviewer, the conversation on this occasion revealed yet another facet of the movement’s origin story, one defined not by Burke’s inability to whisper the words “me too” but by a suddenly materialized consciousness that Burke arrives at through her early experiences as a young reader. On the stage that day, Burke explained that her own MeToo moment of connection came when, as a young girl, she read the novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and the memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, two literary texts that place stories of childhood sexual abuse at their centers and that revolutionized literary culture when they were first published (Burke 2018a). As a scholar whose work has largely focused on women readers and the stories that are central to their reading experiences, I could not have scripted a better origin story myself. It highlights not only the “power of literature,” as the two discussed that night on stage, but also the question of whose literature matters and deserves to be read.

Indeed, Tarana Burke’s description of her own reading of Morrison and Angelou as a girl invites us to revisit the ways women’s writing in general but especially women’s writing about sexual assault and abuse has been understood or, as is often the case, misunderstood and devalued. In this essay, I explore this question of the politics of literary reception, focusing on how two women’s literary stories of sexual assault from the late 1960s and early 1970s have been banned, marginalized, misread, and suppressed. In particular, I will examine the reception of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Bluest Eye in order to consider the politics of literary canons and curricular decisions (as evidenced in efforts to ban such books) and the relationship between institutions and systems of power and privilege. The #MeToo movement has disrupted more than just male privilege; it has disrupted syllabi and class discussions, and, as I hope to show in this essay, it has the potential to disrupt literary history, suggesting new ways to map out the constellation of issues that emerge from an examination of women’s stories of sexual abuse and literary canons of male dominance.

It is perfectly fitting of course that Burke would single out I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Bluest Eye in a conversation about #MeToo. Published just months apart in late 1969 and early 1970, each centers on the lives of Black girls coming of age in the middle decades of the twentieth century; both would eventually establish their authors as major new voices in a literary landscape undergoing significant upheavals in gender and racial politics; and both have vexing reception histories. In A New Literary History of America, Cheryl Wall provides important context for thinking about the significance of these two publications in the early 1970s, a period defined not only by the production of new texts by Black women writers but also by the recovery and republication of forgotten or subjugated texts from prior literary periods, by authors including Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. For Wall, the 1950s and 1960s were defined by the works of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka, who produced a body of literature in which “female characters watched the action from the sidelines. Good women offered succor and encouragement, while bad ones got in the way.” But in the 1970s, “Black women changed the script … Their plots, characters, and prose introduced something new to American literature,” explains Wall. “Their protagonists were often females, who faced choices every bit as challenging as their male precursors, though their dilemmas were often more private than public” (Wall 2009: 968).

Bucking the tradition of autobiography as a genre about the lives of great men, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is certainly an example of one such game-changer. The autobiography opens with Angelou’s early memories as a child living with her paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, and ends with the birth of her son when Maya, now relocated to California, is just sixteen. While the autobiography has been largely hailed as a work about personal perseverance, it’s perhaps best known for the handful of pages that retell the trauma of eight-year-old Maya’s sexual abuse and eventual rape by her mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. It’s an act of violence the young Maya is not equipped to understand but that propels her life forward, nonetheless. As if the trauma of the rape weren’t brutalizing enough, Maya is also coerced into silence, as Mr. Freeman threatens to kill her beloved brother Bailey should she whisper a word to anyone about the abuse (Angelou 2015: 77). While Maya fully intends to heed Mr. Freeman’s injunction against telling, her brother Bailey discovers evidence of the assault, and Mr. Freeman is tried in court and sentenced to one year and one day for the crime, but for reasons never made explicit in the text, he is “released that very afternoon” (2015: 84). Shortly thereafter, Maya learns that Mr. Freeman is found murdered, likely the victim of a beating delivered by her uncles; Maya’s grandmother issues her own injunction when she realizes that the children had overheard the news of Mr. Freeman’s death, telling them: “you didn’t hear a thing. I never want to hear this situation nor that evil man’s name mentioned in my house again” (2015: 85). Convinced that “evilness [was] flowing through my body and waiting, pent up, to rush off my tongue if I tried to open my mouth” (85), Maya mutes herself to everyone but her brother Bailey. When her muteness is mistaken for impudence and sullenness, she is sent (once again) to live with her father’s mother in Stamps, Arkansas, where no one appears to acknowledge or even know of the violent assault, and where her silence is understood simply as a sign of how “tender-hearted” she is (91).

As Wall points out, “Relatively few autobiographies by black women had been published before Angelou wrote hers. None had delved as deeply into the writer’s intimate life. In the process, the book helped break a long-standing public silence around the issue of sexual violence” (970). At times, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings reads as if its author is fully aware of the mutinous nature of the narrative she unfolds, not only in terms of its treatment of taboo topics but also in its demonstration of the power of all kinds of literature in shaping consciousness. Indeed, it is literature, loaned to her by Mrs. Flowers, an acquaintance of her grandmother who invites Maya to her house and who encourages her to memorize and recite poems, that leads young Maya out of her silence (99). Although her time with Mrs. Flowers isn’t Maya’s first important experience with books, it remains a defining one and, one could argue, it initiates what one scholar has called Maya’s “psychic reintegration” after the trauma of rape (Henke 2005: 28). Reading and the connections Maya forms with Mrs. Flowers through literature are central not only to the restoration of her voice and story but also to her recovery and her empowerment.

An obituary for Angelou that appeared in the Guardian in 2014 described the author as “one of the most admired and most banned authors in US literary history” (qtd. in Kich 2016: 80). To measure admiration, one need only point to the memoir’s sales. Not only did the autobiography remain on the New York Times bestseller list for two years following its initial publication, but it has seen significant spikes in sales since then as well, including in the 1990s following Angelou’s reading of her poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. Reports collected by the American Library Association beginning in 1990 substantiate the second half of the Guardian’s claim, showing that I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was “the third most frequently challenged book of the previous twenty-five years” (2016: 80). Parents, school boards, politicians, and organizations with names such as “Parents Against Bad Books in School” have attempted to ban Angelou’s autobiography. Martin Kich highlights a 2004 example in which parents in Niles, Indiana, objected to the “graphic depiction of Angelou’s molestation as a child and other topics such as lesbianism and sexual activity of youths” (qtd. in Kich 2016: 83). This example is representative of challenges in other states, including Wisconsin, California, and Alabama, where the school superintendent reportedly argued that Angelou’s “descriptions of being raped as a little girl are pornographic” (qtd. in Kich 2016: 82).

Interestingly, 2007 marked the last year I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings would crack the top ten list of the most challenged books (2016: 80). Kich appears to believe that this decrease in controversy illustrates the memoir’s longevity and trajectory toward acceptance into the canon (2016: 80). But that conclusion seems less likely in light of the fact that over the past ten years, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye has become the target of the kinds of challenges that used to plague Angelou’s memoir. In 2006, The Bluest Eye emerged as the new I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, according to data collected by the American Library Association (“Top 10 Most Challenged Books Lists” 2013). Indeed, since 2013, Morrison’s novel has been the second-most challenged book after Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Given that these challenges tend to come from parents and conservative groups objecting to books included in school curricula and school libraries, this information suggests that The Bluest Eye replaced I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings on the list because it also replaced it within curricula. Tellingly, in at least one case of complaining parents, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings had just been added to the tenth-grade English curriculum to address complaints from the previous year that the curriculum lacked books by women and minority writers (Good 2002: 35). Apparently, there is room for a narrative about Black girls, provided, of course, that the content conforms to a single standard.

That The Bluest Eye has become central to debates about what stories are appropriate for and of value to teenagers is dismaying, if not surprising, given its obvious ability to impact young readers in positive ways about painful topics, as evidenced by Tarana Burke’s own experience. That the novel has repeatedly faced questions about its potential to harm some audiences is also ironic, given that the issue of conventional children’s stories and their potential for doing harm lies at the center of the novel. Built into the novel’s very framework—indeed title—is Morrison’s commentary on the harm white culture and white media do to Black girls as they come of age. Morrison makes this critique through retellings of the classic “See Dick and Jane run” stories from the readers that were used to teach children to read throughout the mid-twentieth century, while the title evokes white standards of beauty—from Shirley Temple films to blond, blue-eyed baby dolls—that surround the three Black girls at the heart of the story. These dominant cultural standards breed an internalized and intergenerational racial self-loathing that, in turn, leads a drunk Cholly Breedlove to rape his eleven-year-old daughter, Pecola.

Aware of the taboo she was breaking by telling Pecola’s story, Morrison opens the novel with the phrase, “quiet as it’s kept,” which she explains in the afterword “had several attractions for [her]”: “The words are conspiratorial. ‘Shh, don’t tell anyone else,’ and ‘No one is allowed to know this.’ It is a secret between us, and a secret that is being kept from us. The conspiracy is both held and withheld, exposed and sustained …. Thus, the opening (‘quiet as it’s kept’) provides the stroke that announces something more than a secret shared, but a silence broken, a void filled, an unspeakable thing spoken at last” (1994: 211–12). Whether the novel had an audience ready to encounter such an openly transgressive story is another question. Reception of the novel throughout the 1970s and 1980s was mixed. Mostly the subject of brief book notes and short reviews, The Bluest Eye did not sell copies the way I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings had. Morrison herself appeared to be disappointed in her first novel’s reception. “With very few exceptions,” she writes in 1993, “initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, misread” (1994: 216). One wonders whether, when writing those words, Morrison had in mind a 1970 review of the novel that argued that her depiction of “the imaginary conversation of the now-maddened and schizoid child, delivered of a dead baby at 12, weakens the structure and adds little to the story” (Marvin 1970: 3806).

As Morrison’s reputation as a writer grew with the publication of the novels that followed her debut, some reviewers returned to The Bluest Eye to give context to her latest publication. In a 1988 “Books of the Year” fe...