Article Dans Une Revue Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies Année : 2025

Is Love a “pathological condition of the soul”? Joyce Carol Oates's Beasts and Rape: A Love Story

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Beasts (2002) and Rape: a Love Story (2003) were published a year apart and have a similar, sulphureous approach to sexual desire in its anti-social and disrespectful aspects. In both, one could say that love is addressed from the perspective of violent sexual intercourse, which is a criminal practice, leading to the notion that love is pathological indeed. Both novellas, while dealing with the violation of the main protagonists' bodies, are focused on, but not limited to, the traumatic aftermath of a rape recounted some time after the event but not necessarily in hindsight. In that respect, the novellas align with the very contemporary foregrounding of sexual violence in the wake of #MeToo 1 and invite us to consider that what is now presented as unprecedented interest in a subject previously thought as taboo can, and allegedly must in fact, be regarded as having a long history 1 #MeToo is a hashtag that emerged in 2017 to encourage rape and sexual assault victims to speak out so as to raise awareness about a systemic social problem. The hashtag followed a long campaign on various social media, including MySpace as early as 2006, but has gained unprecedented momentum on Twitter (now X) and other such media, spreading globally as a tag to be used by all victims. The movement became so big that it reached many professions and fields and is now a catch-phrase to suggest any form of sexual violence towards women and minorities.

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hal-05512845 , version 1 (16-02-2026)

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Nicolas Pierre Boileau. Is Love a “pathological condition of the soul”? Joyce Carol Oates's Beasts and Rape: A Love Story. Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, 2025, 6, ⟨10.15867/331917.6.6⟩. ⟨hal-05512845⟩
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