Writing rape, troping history : story, plot, and ethical reading in Julia Franck's 'Die Mittagsfrau' (2007)

This article examines the rhetorical function of sexual violence in Julia Franck’s novel 'Die Mittagsfrau' (2007), which unflinchingly relates the degradations to which the protagonist is subjected from infancy: sexual exploitation by her sister; psychological abuse at the hands of her mother; sexual harassment by a family friend; abuse by her eventual husband; marginalization as a “Mischling” in the Third Reich; gang rape by Soviet soldiers. Franck extensively and graphically describes individual episodes of sexual harrassment within chapters that span several years. This narrative excess warrants a “hysterical reading” that magnifies textual details in order to demonstrate the link between representations of sexual violence and wider patterns of structural and symbolic violence. The gaps and tensions that emerge as the narrative shifts between the mimetic and tropological levels provide the basis for a broader exploration of the ethics of reading and the ethics of representing sexual violence more generally