Abstract
In the Trojan council, Paris argues against returning Helen to the Greeks:
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Sir, I propose not merely to myself
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The pleasures such a beauty brings with it;
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But I would have the soil for her fair rape
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Wiped off in honorable keeping her.
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What treason were it to the ransack’d queen,
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Disgrace to your great worths, and shame to me,
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Now to deliver her possession up
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On terms of base compulsion!1
So goes Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s 17th-century version of Homer’s Iliad. Written around the 10th century bc, The Iliad is the earliest literary work produced by Western civilization. Based as it is on the “rape” of a woman and her society’s attitudes and responses to it, The Iliad and its various interpretations throughout history provide some interesting perspectives on the cultural context of rape.
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References
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, edited by Society of Shakespearean Editors, The Modern Readers, Vol. 6 (New York: Bigelow, Smith and Company, 1909), pp. 53– 54.
Catherine Morrison, “The Counselor’s Notebook of Attitudes toward Rape,” published journal, 1975–1977.
Shakespeare, op. cit., p. 50.
Ibid., p. 55.
Ibid., p. 55.
Morrison, op. cit.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975).
Shakespeare, op. cit. p. 50.
Ibid., p. 55.
Morrison, op. cit.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, 1973, p. 15.
Brownmiller, op. cit., p. 369.
Homer, The Iliad, trans. by E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1950), p. 28.
Shakespeare, op. cit., p. 55.
Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, trans, by Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald, Pendle Hill Pamphlet, No. 91 (Wallingford, Pa., 1945), p. 23.
Ibid., p.l6.
Brownmiller, op. cit.
Morrison, op. cit.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, pp. 246–247.
Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Vol. 1 (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1944), pp. 276–278.
A very interesting footnote in Deutsch’s major work, The Psychology of Women, shows that she, too, was troubled by the disparity of her argument. The note answers an accusation made about her work by the “heretical” Karen Horney, who stood alone in classical analytic circles in opposition to Deutsch’s theory. Horney’s accusation and Deutsch’s defensive answer demonstrate the ultimate conclusion of the theory of “normal female masochism.” Deutsch said, “At this point, I should like to defend my previous work against a misinterpretation. K. Horney contends that I regard ferninine masochism as an ‘elemental power in feminine mental life’ and that, according to my view, ‘what woman ultimately wants in intercourse is to be raped and violated; what she wants in mental life is to be humiliated.’ It is true that I consider masochism ‘an elemental power in feminine life’ but in my previous studies and also in this one, I have tried to show that one of woman’s tasks is to govern this masochism, to steer it into the right paths, and thus to protect herself against those dangers that Horney thinks I consider woman’s ‘normal’ lot.” Cf. K. Horney, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1938), p. 110; and Deutsch, op. cit., p. 278.
Weil, op. cit., pp. 3–5.
Ibid., p.5.
Ibid., p. 10.
Morrison, op. cit.
Weil, op. cit., p. 15.
Ibid., 13.
Menachem Amir, Patterns in Forcible Rape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 314–331.
Brownmiller, op. cit.
Morrison, op. cit.
Weil, op. cit., p. 30.
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© 1980 Plenum Press, New York
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Morrison, C.H. (1980). A Cultural Perspective on Rape. In: McCombie, S.L. (eds) The Rape Crisis Intervention Handbook. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3689-1_1
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