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V. Sackville-West and Rape

Bill Tope

    I recently read a scholarly tome titled “Saint Joan of Arc,” by an author I’d never heard of, but should have: Vita Sackville-West. I delved into this writer a little and discovered that in her lifetime she had penned more than seventy books. She was a prodigy as well, having written eight novels and five plays by the age of 18. She was a leading light of the 20s and 30s, taking down her smug contemporaries for their elitist ways in her bestsellers.
    Sackville-West had assignations with prominent Europeans, men and women alike. She is perhaps best remembered as a lover of another famous and talented writer, Virginia Woolf. Vita’s work sometimes gets lost in the furor over her bisexuality.
    I wanted to investigate this writer because of a passage in “St. Joan of Arc” she uses to describe the physical attributes of the young French phenome: “....it is not unfair to qualify her as unattractive.” She goes on to explain this assertion by noting that “Men attempted no rape, nor were women jealous.” Sackville-West thus stoops to express the flawed assumption that rape is a function of lust, of hormones, of the physical attractiveness of the victim; rather than the perverse obsession to control, manipulate and humiliate women, on the part of the assailant. She later went on to characterize sexual assault as “mischief” and “what men do,” thus ameliorating it from the heinous to the natural course of human existence.
    Rape has long been used as a means of terror; in Franco’s Spain, during the Spanish Civil War, rape was widely regarded as a “weapon of war.” The aptly named “Rape of Nanking,” during which the Japanese in World War II overtook the capital of China, is another powerful example of rape being used to control and terrorize: more than twenty thousand girls and women were systematically and violently raped during the Japanese incursion.
    These events occurred in Sackville-West’s day (she wrote this book in 1936). So it’s not like this writer was a contemporary of St. Joan (1412-1431). Perhaps she relinquished her tired and discredited opinions on rape in later years (she lived until 1962) but it is a sad reflection on an otherwise brilliant scholar, bon vivant and writer. One would think that she would have known better.

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