Rape and Reverence: Culling the Lessons from 20th Century Ethics

This thesis aims to contribute to contemporary feminist theory through the integration of several interdisciplinary texts from the last century, all of which challenge an existing, male-oriented norm of woman as ‘lesser’ in a particular field of study. The historical position of woman as ‘other’ in a negative light is a postulate that contemporary feminist studies may take too much for granted. The supposed lack of prominence of women in scripture, such as what Phyllis Trible gestures to, for example, is not erasure at all, but women present as archetypes, a mode of representation later dispersed in literature and film. The textual ‘absence’ of the feminine which has been previously understood as erasure may in fact be a clandestine interpretative tool which must be sought for, or, within a textual framework, explicated. Instead of accepting woman as a minimized ‘other’ to be merely a given in biblical and other texts, her peripheral role must be teased out in order to be fully appreciated. The critical most important to this claim include Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development and film theorist Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, the latter of which lends this thesis its title. Lastly, I will be using erasure as an interpretative method as applied to a series of case studies: to analyze the female figures in Hamlet using Carol Gilligan’s psychological development framework; to consider Haskell’s rigorous critique of American cinema alongside Woman in the Dunes, a 1964 film based on a fabulist novel, which uses erasure as its modus operandi; and to apply Phyllis Trible’s hermeneutic interpretive method to Lot’s wife. The interdisciplinary design of this thesis allows for the inclusion of scholars from a variety of inherently ethical disciplines to showcase how societal perceptions of women have informed women’s ethical decision-making and identity.