False accusations…

  linked to this précis of a report into the false accus­a­tions of rape. It reminds me I’ve been mean­ing to write a post on the false rape accus­a­tion that is cent­ral to To Kill a Mock­ing­bird. We watched the film of it recently (having named our daugh­ter after the author of the book it was based on, it seemed appropriate). 

I remembered it as a story about racism and about class (well, poverty and edu­ca­tion levels in Amer­ica, which amounts to class). If there was a fem­in­ist aspect to it, I would have said it was in Scout as the nar­rator, a young tomboy who Harper Lee is sup­posed to have based on herself. 

Listen­ing to Atti­c­us’s clos­ing remarks during the trial, I sud­denly real­ised there was a very advanced fem­in­ist state­ment about female desire in there, about the way that soci­ety polices women’s desire and how Mayel­la’s father has pun­ished her for having that desire. To cover up pat­ri­archal viol­ence against women and con­trol of women (lit­er­ally the rule of the father), Mayella falsely accuses the object of her illi­cit desire of having taken what she was prof­fer­ring (or in those days, what a kiss prom­ised to prof­fer). The issue I have is about this false accus­a­tion: is this a fem­in­ist defense of false rape accus­a­tions? I can’t ima­gine a fem­in­ist author today being com­fort­able having this as a cent­ral moment for a key char­ac­ter. Yet it’s hard to ima­gine another option for Mayella given her time and cir­cum­stances. An Eng­lish teacher I spoke to on the week­end about this actu­ally sees Atti­cus as defend­ing his client using the “victim was actu­ally asking for it” defense, which I hadn’t con­sidered (mainly because I don’t think Atti­cus is imply­ing that sex occurred and is clearly blam­ing Ewell for her bruises, so he does­n’t seem to me to say she was asking for anything).

Anyhow, I wonder if it would be pos­sible to make the points of To Kill a Mock­ing­bird without a false accus­a­tion and I wonder whether that is an arte­fact of the time or some­thing else entirely…

And if Ewell is in fact a met­onymic rep­res­ent­a­tion of the pat­ri­archy, then who is the object women falsely accuse to dis­guise the bat­ter­ing we receive for daring to dis­play our desire?