The Rape Narrative in the American South: A Psychoanalytical Examination of Sexual Violence and the Melancholic Internalization of Loss in the Modern Southern Novel

This study examines how sexual violence, specifically rape, is used as a trope to understand the complex and dysfunctional makeup of the South. Southern writers from William Faulkner to Dorothy Allison use rape as a means of figuring individual and collective disenfranchisement and perpetuate a vision of the South immersed in violence and melancholic nature. Sexual violence, then, is situated as a reaction to historical and cultural changes, tenuous race relations, deeply imbedded mores, social taboos, and rigid class distinctions. The study is informed by the trauma theories of Freud and Caruth, the abjection theory of Julia Kristeva, and Jessica Benjamin's theory of mutuality.