Brevity is the soul of wit...

The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch is mostly pretty awesome: for the medieval torture porn and gruesome business of crime and punishment in post-Thirty-Years-War Bavaria, and the beginning of the end of witch-hunting as an actual pastime with deadly consequences. It’s all of my morbid fascination with things like Jack the Ripper and the Tower of London and the Tudors and the War of the Roses and the French Revolution all rolled into one German (Strike that, BAVARIAN! Therefore even better*) package, with forbidden romance, witches, powerful female magic, the divine feminine, midwives, and a classic-ish whodunnit murder mystery all rolled into one. I literally could not put it down. I read the whole thing yesterday and when my purse went missing from set, all I cared about was that this book was in it. Even when people were telling me that they saw my credit cards falling out of it and rushed to reassure me that they had put them back in (!) All I cared about was the book, and how it wasn’t, at that moment, in my hands, being read by me.

I’m gonna say this, though, I’m starting to have a real problem with books that threaten the brutal rape of a main character and don’t follow through. If you’ll forgive me a short-ish tangent, I first noticed this problem a few months ago when reading Mr. Darcy Takes A Wife by Linda Bardoll. One of the very few published Pride and Prejudice FanFics I’ve read, Mr. Darcy Takes A Wife is an epic tome, more Dickensian than Austenian in feel, but, you know, entertaining in it’s way, and very rich with period detail. And yes, I know it is at it’s heart a romance novel: a genre not exactly known for realism. I’m including it because, it brings this issue of almost-rape home for me though my favorite character in fiction, Elizabeth Bennet.

The climax of the second book features Elizabeth being kidnapped by the main baddie, who intends to revenge himself on Mr. Darcy through his wife. (To his credit, after the incident Darcy at least reflects how unjust it is that “the woman absorbs the assault and the husband somehow believes himself the injured party.”) I remember feeling hugely relieved in the moment that even though Elizabeth was kidnapped, brutally beaten and nearly raped - she was not, in the end, actually raped. Mr. Darcy, in a supernatural feat of the improbable, prevents my beautiful, witty, charming Elizabeth from suffering a violation worse than death. So improbable a feat, that I was shocked when he came through the door - I know, stupid me, it’s a romance novel, OF COURSE, he was going to. It’s just sloppy enough writing that it wasn’t in the least bit earned. In order to create enough suspense that you’re actually fearing for Elizabeth’s life (or her purity, if you’re that kind of asshole) Bardoll wrote herself into a corner and only Darcy being a demi-god could explain how he got there in time.

But why was I so relieved? My beloved was beaten to within an inch of her life and I was “okay” with that. She’s still going to have PTSD from the abduction and the violence, even without the rape. In the world before modern medicine, there’s the potential of pregnancy to contend with: If her first child, and therefore the heir to Pemberley, has a 50-50 chance of being fathered by either Darcy OR Satan himself - and abortion isn’t really medically or morally an option for the period… but these are just excuses for a deeply-internalized yet mistaken emphasis on the sexual purity of ‘good’ women. (And male primacy in inheritance is a shitty thing too…)

My point is, why can Elizabeth Bennet not be raped? The mere idea of it breaks my heart for her. It would NOT make me love her any less, or think of her as dirty, broken, permanently messed up or any of that victim-blaming shite. It would just hurt me vicariously. I end up feeling a portion of this love and identification for many female heroines I encounter - Anne Shirley, Eowyn, June Forsyte, Hermione Grainger, Ginny Weasley, Katiniss Everdeen. And in The Hangman’s Daughter, the eponymous Magdalena Kuisl certainly fostered plenty of “I want to play her in the movie” fantasies. She’s compassionate, sassy, clever, educated (wha? In 1659? Awesome.) and both beloved and hated for those very attributes. Obviously, I don’t want anyone to be raped, especially not characters I love. But I really don’t want authors to participate in the stigma of rape on survivors by jumping through ridiculous hoops to prevent it.

The Hangman’s Daughter is legit historical fiction. In medieval Europe, executioners and their families were ostracized. Every town needed one, but no one wanted them around. They were cursed and avoided like lepers, and left to marry only amongst themselves - creating huge family dynasties of hangmen, the largest of which, in Germany, was the Kuisl family. Torture, punishment and execution were literally the family business. The climax of the book is split in two when the three main characters are separated. Jakob Kuisl, the hangman of Schongau, and Simon, the physician’s son, go off to solve the mystery and provide the ransom, while Magdalena is kidnapped by the baddies and works to free herself.

HOWEVER. It is actually too much to be believed that Braunschweiger (the worst of those baddies I mentioned - they call him ‘the Devil’) doesn’t rape her. In real life, in the real 1650s Germany, he would have. There’s no way, NO WAY, he wouldn’t have. His cronies have her tied up for two days - all the while taunting her about raping her, beating her unconscious, teasing, laughing, tickling, threatening, looking forward to the event with glee - they don’t actually rape her because Braunschweiger has told them not to, that they’re to save her for him, and they’re terrified of him. But why doesn’t he ever? The book has depicted him time and time again as a man of pure evil and no conscience. Even when his cronies regret their actions, he laughs at them. And we’re supposed to believe he just puts it off for some kind of increase in delayed gratification and then never gets around to it? It’s like when the Bond villain delays pushing the button because he wants to revel in his victory just long enough for Bond to stop him… total bullshit, and what it tells me is that Pötzsch, the author, ties a significant amount of his heroine’s worth up in her virginity. Maybe even against his conscious knowledge, but he does it all the same. Ahhh, the comforting privilege of not seeing the patriarchy perniciously at work in your very own novel. He artificially delays her defilement until such a time as it is no longer inevitable, and then she is able to remain unspoiled. 

See, it makes sense (shitty, victim-blaming, rape-apologist sense) that the characters in the book would equate her value as a person to the state of her hymen - especially her father and her love interest. They’d feel she’d been sullied in an unforgivable way (being the hangman’s daughter in the first place is to be sullied in a ‘forgivable’ way) - that’s period appropriate. But the author is supposed to be above all that (in my head, at least. See, I don’t want people to be privileged jerks!) The author is supposed to take his characters’ sides. Instead, he had to pull a miraculous “rescue” out of nowhere. By which I mean, for the two days before she managed to free herself, Magdalena was ‘rescued’ by the author every moment in which she wasn’t actually being raped. Which tells me that the author shares the medieval view of rape victims, or at the very least, doesn’t trust his audience not to: Either he would cease to love Magdalena if she is a rape victim, or he’s afraid we would. Either way, gross.

The author Oliver Pötzsch is, himself, a descendant of the real Kuisl dynasty, and he has meticulously researched the history of his family and the setting for his book. I appreciate that; I love history and showing it like it is, warts and all, is how we learn from it. A lot of history is sexist. We can’t erase that, and we shouldn’t. We need to show historical figures with the feet of clay that they have. Historical accuracy is our friend here. It’s why Mad Men, a mostly feminist show about a very sexist time, forces us to watch how women were treated and own the shittiness as part of our history. Also why The Help, by making its time-period look much rosier, much less racist than it was, gives us permission to feel better about ourselves and our history than we have any right to do. I, personally, think that Simon could have continued to love Magdalena after being raped - and how much more awesome of a person would that make him to us in that day and age? I can hear the arguments about how I’m being hypocritical already, since historical accuracy demands most men of the period abandon the women they love after being raped without a second thought. But hear me out, Simon was already prepared and willing to defy all the social conventions of the time to marry her, he’s a rebel, progressive, man of science and supporter of accused witches, why couldn’t he also be enlightened about rape survivors? I’d not only buy that, I’d eat it up with a spoon. It would have been unique in 1659, but not impossible.

What does it say to real victims of rape that we have to artificially deus-ex-machina our favorite characters out of rape situations? Because rape is just a bridge too far - make our beloved female characters suffer anything else (and in the case of Elizabeth in MDTAW, everything else) but God forbid they actually have to overcome being raped, we all know that’s impossible (/sarcasm.) See, in fiction, being a rape survivor turns you into a blubbering damaged PTSD mess. Either that or Lizbeth Salander. (This is maybe the biggest contributing factor to why I love Lady Mary Crawley SO FUCKING MUCH. If you don’t think she’s a rape survivor, you haven’t been paying enough attention.)

Though rape is a traumatic and life-changing thing to happen to a person, it is NOT the victim’s fault. It is NOT something they should be punished by society for, NOT something that dirties someone or makes them unworthy of love for the rest of their lives, and we have got to stop treating it that way or we’re no better as humans than we were in 1659. In life and in fiction, and like so many things, here is a place where art can lead the way in changing the world. It’s just disappointing to love a book and then have it not quite be the beacon of all things feminist.

Here endeth the rant.

_______________________

(*I have this theory that Bavaria is to Germany as Texas is to the United States. See, everything that foreigners think they know about Germany/German culture: the beer, the pretzels, the lederhosen, the castles, the storybook architecture, Oktoberfest, even BMWs and the Dassler brothers’ Puma/Adidas rivalry… that stuff is all Bavarian, and has very little to do with the rest of Germany. Much like how the rest of the world thinks the whole US is made up of cowboys and deserts and cactuses, and jingoistic braggadocio, and overblown pride of place - when really, that’s mostly Texas. Both Texas and Bavaria were their own countries before being assimilated into the larger whole as the largest state thereof, but both retain a very unique (and loud) personality, one that drowns out a lot of other micro cultures around them. They still celebrate state-only holidays, have a very big addiction to ‘football’ and car racing, fly their state flags as much or more often than the national flag, and often describe themselves as natives of their state first and their country second. There is even a Bavarian Independence political party that is just like the Texas Federalists.)