Daughters of Troy/The Unspoken Scream: Theatre and the Normalization of Wartime Rape

The defining element of Brownmiller’s feminist rape theory is her assertion that rape concerns "violence, not sex.” The central motivating factor of rape is domination for the purpose of maintaining control over women. My dissertation addresses the question of how Susan Brownmiller's feminist rape theory can be used to demonstrate both spoken and unspoken assumptions concerning male power and dominance, women as sexual property, and the cultural normalization and acceptance of wartime rape in plays such as The Trojan Women by Euripides, which deal covertly (rape lies outside the dramatized events but shapes character and action) and plays such as The Love of the Nightingale by Timberlake Wertenbaker, which deal overtly (rape is directly depicted or essential to the primary story) with rape during wartime. Using feminist rape theory I examine six plays in which rape during wartime shapes the drama. In addition, the dissertation includes a practicum component: a production of The Women of Troy that I directed, deploying feminist rape theory to guide the performance text and mise-en-scène. I trace the evolution of the translation, production, and reception of The Trojan Women regarding the piece as an anti-war play to a new understanding of the play as one in which rape is recognized and foregrounded as a key component of war. My project focuses on what was already there but “invisible” in order to shine a harsh light upon the unspoken nature of rape in the context of war. I argue that feminist rape theory provides a lens for understanding the history of sexual violence against women. This argument is framed as the inability to see or acknowledge cultural rape scripts that are hidden in plain sight. This collective “rape amnesia” is a culturally institutionalized ideology that has deeply embedded rape scripts into law, gender identity, and relations between the sexes, and it directly contributes to psychological and societal causative factors of rape. I argue that rape is normalized when rape myths are accepted as part of a collective cultural consciousness. Further, behavioral rape scripts are acted upon because of a shared mythology when there is a societal reinforcement or justification for those actions. I further argue that by identifying underlying rape myths and by exposing rape scripts it may be possible to begin the process of deconstructing and de-legitimizing them within soceity.