Reading Rape
Sanctuary and The Women of Brewster Place
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9597271 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Laura E Tanner (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Volume | 62 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 559 |
| Publication date | 1990-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2927068 |
| OpenAlex | W2322197493 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
UTHILE the relationship between the violence of a culture and its representational counterpart in art is probed in many literary and artistic works, few deal with the issue with the immediacy of Marcel Duchamp's room-size art work, Etant Donnes: I la chute d'eau, 2 le gaz d'eclairage. Etant Donnes occupies one small room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the viewer's entrance into the room is marked by the absence of light, and the looming presence of an actual wooden door that appears to have been taken out of a garden wall and set down in the museum intact. While the door will not open, closer examination reveals that it contains two small holes through which it is possible to peer past the door itself, through the gap in a brick wall set about three feet behind the door, and into the world beyond. The backdrop of the scene that meets the viewer is artificially natural, a glitzy combination of fake trees, glittering lights, and mechanical waterfall that seems a poor imitation of an actual landscape. The glance of the viewer, however, is directed not toward that artificial backdrop but onto a life-size model of a woman's naked body, a body splayed out relentlessly before the viewer's eyes, a body that announces as its most prominent feature a hairless vagina that is cut into the woman like a wound. The woman lies as if abandoned after an act of violation, her legs spread painfully wide in a tangle of dark brush and autumn leaves. The peepholes in Duchamp's wooden door succeed in aligning the viewer's eyes with the glaring wound of the woman's sex; subtle techniques of focus that may be contradicted in a painting are replaced here by a physical alignment, a concrete limitation of sight, that is as effective as a strong pair of hands that jerk the viewer's head into position
Art · Brewster · Optics · Physics · Political science · Reading (process) · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Photography and Visual Culture
| Citations per year | 0.12 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2000 - 2019 (20) |
| Highly cited | No |