Violence in literature

Jeanette Winterson's novel Sexing the Cherry addresses literary genres in which women's voices have been silenced or marginalized, demonstrating John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill's claim that only when women have "lived in a different country from men and [have] never read any of their writings [will] they have a literature of their own" (207). This philosophy may be viewed in light of Edward Said's theory of colonization in which he argues that a people who colonize by violence maintain authority, while those people who are colonized are subject to "the paternalistic arrogance of imperialism" (Culture xviii). Winterson's desire to reclaim the authority of women illustrates her need for permission to narrate and to be "taken out of the Prism of [her] own experience" (Winterson, Into 17). As a result, she rewrites history, myth, fairy tale, and pornography, reversing the traditional gender roles and inverting the gender hierarchy. Women, in Sexing the Cherry maintain the authority and the Power to molest the now weaker sex, man.

Robert Browning's dramatic monologues often characterize the darker aspect of romantic love through speakers who demonstrate their devotion to violence. Exploring the innovations in discourse, Browning gives his narrators voices that allow them to speak from an ancient literary tradition. For Browning's speakers, words make the silencing of the lover either the act of ultimate devotion or the result of disappointed expectations. The narrator speaks of the absence of God, as when Porphyria's lover holds her body to him: "and yet God has not said a word!" With the poet's strong speech---in all his attractiveness, his destructive display of love and his dismissal of God---Browning has helped to create a discourse that has sculpted the literary force of the romantic killer. Three novelists in particular employ the literary force of Browning's experiments: Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels. Intertextual comparisons among these narratives delineate how Robert Browning's innovation of the seductive antihero has persisted in literature.

This thesis examines the first two novels of Frank Herbert's Dune series, Dune and Dune Messiah, in order to consider these two novels from the framework of postcolonial theory and analyze how religious violence becomes a source of subjugation, military power, and colonialism within the works. The three chapters of this thesis chart the creation of a colonial project through epistemic violence, physical power, and cultural control enabled by religion. This thesis argues that, in the Dune novels, religious violence functions as a colonial project that closely resembles the goals of real-world colonial enterprises, and the failure to manage this colonial project by those who initiated it shows that the effects of colonial projects based on religious violence are dangerous and uncontrollable.