The narrativization of rape in the Hebrew Bible and 3 contemporary television shows

This thesis examines three pairs of rape stories from biblical texts and contemporary television to examine what informs varying perceptions of the severity of rape. It argues that perceptions of sexual violence are informed by social prejudices about key people within these stories as well as (or indeed more than) “what happened”. In undertaking a “sticky reading” of two texts alongside each other, the methodological approach of this thesis draws partially from Rhiannon Graybill’s strategies for reading rape stories: specifically, “attending to sticky affect” and “reading through literature”.

I use a narratological framework of hero/victim/villain to interrogate the explanatory power of storytelling tropes and how they inform varying responses to rape. When confronted with the inherently uncomfortable subject of rape, these familiar narrative tropes serve to hold discomfort and often help facilitate a satisfying and rewarding storyline. The thesis uses three sets of central case studies. It establishes the existence of these core narrative tropes via a comparative examination of the rape of Anna Bates in Downton Abbey (2010 – 15) and of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13. Using the attempted rape of Cheryl Blossom in Riverdale (2017 – 23) and of Susanna in Daniel 13, it demonstrates how these tropes can be played with. Finally, it problematises these tropes and demonstrates the limiting factors of restrictive narrative structures through an examination of the rape of Jamie Fraser in Outlander (2014 –) and what I read as the rape of the suffering man in Lamentations 3. In seeing how these six stories function, and how their narrative patterns both hold discomfort and prop up harmful stereotyping, I demonstrate the appeal of the “rape myth”. More broadly, I argue that these tropes and stereotypes profoundly affect socio-cultural responses to rape by informing perceptions of illicitness and transgression.