The Worst Fate: Male Rape As Masculinity Epideixis in James Dickey's Deliverance and the American Prison Narrative (Critical Essay‪)‬

Epideictic, rhetoric of praise and blame, addresses perception of goodness, shame, honor, and dishonor, and remains an excellent method to formulate, maintain, and solidify ideas concerning virtue and vice. According to Lawrence W. Rosenfield, "Epideictic's understanding calls upon us to join with our community in giving thought to what we witness" (489-496). It is with this conception of epedeixis that this article looks toward literature and film, to critique the representation of sexual assault, its causes, its consequences, and most importantly, its effects on the apperception of masculinity. Early novels, like Rousseau's Emile and Richardson 's Pamela, only barely shrouded literary conventions that reproduced acceptable gender identities as fiction, literature that, like the courtesy book before it, served as a call for normalization. The novel called for normalization by creating sympathy for some characters and scorn for others. Victorian authors, such as Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and (notorious for his depiction of "The Angel in the House ") Coventry Padmore, appealed to readers for generalized acceptance or rejection of particular behaviors and gendered identifications. The Victorian marriage plot can be read as a coded epideictic where the characters who met the anticipated gender materialization--those who conformed to "gender obedience"--were rewarded with praise, while those who did not meet the anticipated gender materialization were penalized with blame. Chaim Perelmen and Lucy Olbrechts-Tyteca say of epideictic that, "The speaker engaged in epideictic discourse is very close to being an educator. Since what he is going to say [promotes] values that are shared in the community ... " (52). Therefore, the only way that the marriage plot could function as an epideictic is if the reading members of the audience already ascribed to the heteronormative patriarchal imperative. This method worked until the late nineteenth century when the Emma Bovarys, Edna Pontilliers, and Anna Kareninas began drinking poison, drowning, and walking headlong into moving trains. The Realist novel, ending with the heroine's death rather than her wedding, interrogated the customary narrative and opened the door for the audience to question assumptions concerning "successful" gender representation. With the expansion of proto-Feminisms, Freudian psychoanalytic theory, continued industrialization, and decolonization, ideas surrounding gendered identities lost some of their hegemonic durability. Just as each culture (and each era within each culture) decides what feminine characteristics support its ontology best, it also decides what masculinities are most useful; that culture in turn supports those masculine "useful" characteristics. It seems natural and it seems to function organically; however from a Foucauldian standpoint, we have to consider the docility of the body that causes it to manifest characteristics based on discipline. In Foucault's model (which intends to demonstrate how meticulous "discipline" of the human body in turn develops a social discipline where functioning collectively ends in greater utility) collective action is the objective. Like interchangeable parts of the industrial age, such standardization of gendered action presumably ends in a greater utility to the ideology it supports: "useful masculinity." What's more, there are penalties for failing to meet these standards; in other words, men become categorized as "manly" in order to avoid the punishment of becoming "unmanly." But this still begs the question, how do we determine what is "useful" masculinity? Judith Halberstam states: "although we seem to have a difficult time defining masculinity, as a society we have little trouble in recognizing it, and indeed we spend massive amounts of time and money ratifying and supporting the versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust" (1). In our contemporary mediated culture, the images of masculinity that cha