The Rape of the Mind

Joan Castleman wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

There’s a line in the episode, “Homo Homini Lupis” of Law & Order Criminal Intent in which Detective Bobby Goren, ever champion of women, says to the perp, “You raped her mind, you raped her body, but SHE GOT YOU!” The rape victim, a little girl, was able to draw the creep’s tattoo from memory, “every tiger stripe, every letter, every number.”

As I watched The Wife, I kept hearing that line. Though I did not know the outcome of the story, I could feel the rape of Joan Archer’s young mind. Joan is writing her husband’s books. Why? Because it’s 1968 and we are told, society doesn’t want to read books by female authors. Joan has been able to “sell” her husband, Joe Castleman, to a publisher by promising the waspy house their very own Jewish author. (Literary movies often name the characters after characters in famous fiction and I couldn’t help but hear the name of one of lit’s most famous liberated, feminist characters, Isabel Archer*, a woman who also gets “caught.”) The young Joan is beautifully and delicately played by Glenn Close’s daughter, Annie Starke. As we watch her writing, we can sense the tension slowly building. At least, at least, Joan, young and old, gets to keep her words. One of my favorite scenes is when the elder Joan (played by Oscar! Oscar! Glenn Close) is on the phone extension listening to the Nobel representative congratulating her husband on his work: I could see her mind listening to his praise, taking it all in, as though he were speaking directly to her about her own accomplishment. Of course, unknown to him, he was speaking to her.

Colette etching Willy's name in the glass

Interestingly, also out this year is a similar story, a real life story about the writer, Colette, another female author forced by society’s lack of interest in the female voice, to write under the shadow of her husband’s identity. 

But, was society uninterested in the female voice? Colette wrote a series of novels about the mind of a young girl, Claudine. These were very popular, both when the public thought they were written by Willy and when they thought the books were written by his sensational wife. Eventually, Colette leaves Willy and writes more books under her own name. Her authorship becomes known.

Both these women got to keep their words. The books existed. Women had written them. 

Alice &

But, another movie troubles me. The Girl in the Book (2015). This story is about Alice, a young girl with exciting potential. Her parents are literary; she has every advantage of wealth, education, and social contacts. She has talent, and more importantly, a voice. We hear her words as she writes them down: they are cool, sophisticated, poetic yet precise. But, Alice is extremely lonely. She comes home and ritually calls, “Hello?” to an empty house. One of her father’s authors, a ruggedly handsome much older man, pays attention to her. As Alice cries, later in the story, “You were the only one who ever seemed to see me!” She doesn’t realize until it is too late that his attention was the grooming process of a pedophile. 

He raped her body. He raped her mind. 

He stole her words.

Far worse, he stole her confidence by constantly criticizing and undermining every one of her efforts while he was busy racking up her brilliance for himself. He writes a Lolita/Catcher in the Rye type of novel called "Waking Eyes" that becomes wildly successful with the kind of success every writer desires - the book becomes a classic. In fact, he writes several more books on his own that do not catch fire.

He took her talent. He took her ambition. He took her faith. 

What kind of a man needs to rape the mind of a little girl to get his words?

A very, very small man.

Does Alice “get” him? Does she get her words back? 

I won’t tell you. I will say that it is a long, tortuous journey for Alice. A tenuous effort to grasp that which does not exist yet, that which is forming. 

Colette and Joan Castleman were lucky. They got to keep their words. 

Another favorite scene in The Wife is the very last scene. Joan's husband has passed away from a sudden heart attack and she is flying home from the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. What will Joan do now? we ask ourselves, as Joan looks up at us from the blank page of her notebook. She smiles.

Oh, yeah!

*Isabel Archer, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

©PatriciaGoodwin, 2019

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die: A Historical Novella of Marblehead, Telling of Two Murders Which Happened There, 301 Years Apart (2011), about Marblehead legends and true crime, and its sequel, Dreamwater(2013), about the Salem witch trials. Her novel, Holy Days(2015) is about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her poetry books are  Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse (2018); Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, (2017), illustrated by the author; Atlantis (2006), and Marblehead Moon (1993). All Plum Press. Her poetry has been published in nthposition.com, Pemmican Press, Radius: Poetry from the Center to the Edge and The Potomac, among others. For more work and information, please visit http://patriciagoodwin.com/.