Rape and Regret
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describes it, he reflects the values of a society that agrees maybe not with the
extremity of his vision but with his general view of the girl as the young slut.
The text itself is devoid of moral judgment, except that the girl’s death makes
her a failure. She could not endure the dissolution one needs to face in order to
recover from trauma so she is erased. Bataille, in his final chapters, admits that
he was coping with the despair inflicted by a traumatic past, but in using the girl
and filling her with the debauchery of her rapists, he contributes to a common
theme, “it’s the girl’s fault.” Overrun by a will stronger than her own, Marcelle
becomes a pale, piss-drenched figure so filled with regret for what has been
done to her that she becomes an animal jerking off in a wardrobe. A girl raised
in a religious society (Roman Catholic), she raises the specter of a holy man
who both assaults and then accuses her. One of her fantasies is that of a
predatory cardinal. Then she is locked away as if she is the source of depravity
that created her despair. Transformed into a derivative of a male mind that
needed to dirty the girl in order to feel better, Marcelle cannot continue and
hangs herself And her death almost erases her from the scene. The protagonists
make no statement of sorrow or guilt when she is found. She rises one last time
in a church where a priest is sullied and killed. The fact of being hounded to
death by a nightmarish cardinal attaches every religious aspect of story to an
echo of Marcelle so when a priest is murdered we hear her voice. But now it is
our horror of the act that brings us closer to who she might have been and makes
us confront the realizations that frightened her to death. She had “an unusual
lack of willpower” (Bataille, 6), the narrator says after promising not to touch
her again. Then he feeds her champagne and drags her to an orgy. If she had
been stronger, she would have been less guilty, her weakness was her fault. If
she had been more forceful, she would have escaped:
“Why do you want to leave?” [I asked after the orgy had
started.]
“Just because,” she replied stubbornly, a violent rage
gradually overcoming her” (Bataille, 7).
She cannot say no exactly because her maker will not give her the words. We do
not delve into her resistance because it does not fit into the paradigm and her
fears do not concern the narrator, nor do they save her.
If she had been stronger, she would have asserted herself and would not
have been dragged into the mess in the first place. She wants to leave and
cannot. The narrator claims she is an active participant and yet she hides in a
wardrobe to escape. He says that she wants to play their games and yet she wets
herself and cries for help as the scene drags on. Her fear makes the others laugh
because her helplessness is the point not her exercise of free will. We have no
history of this girl. We see no mourners when she dies. She only exists as an
important figure as long as she can be abused. Lack of detail makes Marcelle
real for this narrator. He keeps her as a vague form in order to sully her without
regret. He needs perversity in order to escape responsibility and so her death is