Abstract
This chapter considers the sexed reputations of the university—both the notorious prevalence of sexual assaults against college-aged women, but also the reactionary responses to the very fact of women on campus. With discussions of Francine Prose’s Blue Angel (2000), Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), and Julia May Jonas’s Vladímír (2022), this chapter studies the genre’s ambivalence toward sexual assault and sexual harassment, as well as its racialized imagination of sexual predation, all of which combine to corrode the utopian promises discussed in the second and seventh chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
The ethical philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum reviews the “Final Rule” favorably. In Citadels of Pride (2021), she writes that then-U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, despite being “a polarizing figure,” produced Title I.X. reform that is “arguably fair. It seems distinctly superior both to the draft rule and to the standards articulated by the Obama administration” (Nussbaum 2021, 121). DeVos was trounced for these due-process policies, accused of pushing a men’s rights agenda. Perhaps had her chief executive not famously boasted of sexual assaults, DeVos may have received a more even-handed review of her department’s “Final Rule.”
- 2.
In most of the studies that replicate the finding that one in five college women suffer sexual assaults, the figures conflate sexual violence that takes place on- and off-campus (Kaukinen et al. 2017, 21).
- 3.
Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan suggest that this discrepancy may reflect a better standard of affirmative consent among L.G.B.T.Q. students, as well as a more refined vocabulary for assault than that demonstrated by heterosexual, cis-gendered students. “The high rates of assault among L.G.B.T.Q. people,” they argue, “may in part reflect their refusal to accept heterosexual students’ normalization of sexual aggression” (Hirsch and Khan 2020, 134).
- 4.
Rennison, Kaukinen, and Meade trace the one-in-five figure across several studies, but also explicate its details. For instance, their study reaffirms that the one-in-five figure refers not only to completed rape, but also to a range of other sexual assaults (Rennison et al. 2017, 20). And it is not a yearly rate, but a “lifetime college risk” that a student runs across a four-year college career (Rennison et al. 2017, 21). Perhaps most importantly, the one-in-five figure does not determine where the assaults happen; it would be false to assume that these events take place exclusively on college campus, and the data indicate that assaults against college-age women take place slightly more frequently off-campus (Rennison et al. 2017, 21).
- 5.
American universities’ performance in compliance is indeed unworthy of public trust. A Senate inquiry in 2014, for instance, found that 21% of universities offered no sexual assault training for faculty, that 30% of campus security units had no specific training on sexual assault, that 73% of colleges and universities had no formal procedures by which to interface with local police, and most alarmingly that 41% of colleges and universities “had not conducted a single sexual assault investigation in the five years prior to the study” (Eigenberg and Belknap 2017, 187). The “Dear Colleague Letter” that reformed Title I.X. policies in 2011 may have improved this performance: in 2010 there were 11 Title I.X. complaints filed with the Office of Civil Rights, but and there that many complaints filed in February of 2016 alone (Smith 2017, 271). Still, the performance here is sorry indeed.
- 6.
See, for instance, Kaukinen et al. 25.
- 7.
Christopher Findeisen reads Simmons as a campus sports novel. Reading Simmons alongside Owen Johnson’s Stover at Yale (1912) and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2012), Findeisen studies the contrasts between the amateurism of a student-athlete on the lacrosse team, the professional ambitions of star basketball players such as Jojo, and Charlotte’s fulfillment of academic ideals to argue that Simmons demonstrates a dichotomy between business and education that “remains the genre’s fundamental antagonism, an opposition that college athletics either intensifies impedes, or resolves” (2016, 69). This is a worthwhile investigation of Simmons in addition to my focus on the novel’s treatment of sexual assault. I remain somewhat ambivalent about one of the readings therein—that “it would seem that true education cannot take place within institutions subsumed by business interests” (Findeisen 2016, 74), which seems to discount Jojo’s burgeoning, genuine curiosity. But Findeisen’s identification of the campus sports novel frames an important criticism of the genre, discussed in the first chapter: the genre’s fundamental polarity of business and learning sustains a myth for the reader that the university stands apart from the prevailing economic orthodoxies as an engine of democratic access and equality when in fact, in Findeisen’s reading, it is a driving factor of the inequalities of our society.
- 8.
In coining the term “hysterical realism,” the critic James Wood lamented that in novels such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), “The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality—the usual charge against botched realism—but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself.” (2000) Simmons runs adjacent to hysterical realism in its outlandish and overdrawn passages, and similarly strains its claims to sociological verisimilitude.
- 9.
Stephen Metcalf’s review for Slate holds little back: “This is an eminently foolish book, by an old man for whom the life of the young has become a grotesque but tantalizing rumor. It is overdrawn, overlong, underconsidered, and filled with at least one forehead-slapping ay caramba per page. (That adds up to 676, by the way. This is the predictable doorstop, perfectly timed for seasonal gifting.) At one point I wrote in its margins, ‘The stupidity here may actually be boundless’” (2004). Metcalf identified three failures of the novel, each dealing with mimesis: that “Wolfe has somehow run together Harvard with N.C. State, thus producing a complete chimera,” that Wolfe seems to have bought every piece of “sexual folklore” told to him on his tour of universities, that because Wolfe imagines the university as inherently debased, he must imagine his protagonist as completely pure (2004). This latter failure prompts Metcalf to reflect, “The novel hasn’t seen such a tediously guarded virginity since Richardson’s Pamela” (2004).
- 10.
Wolfe translates Charlotte’s father as he welcomes guests in her honor at a dinner during winter break: “‘Charlotte, we’re gonna put you right’—riot—‘here at the head of the table, so’s you can tell everybody’—everbuddy—‘about Dupont. Everybody’s gonna be real interested’—innerested. He looked about at the Thomses, Miss Pennington. ‘Isn’t that right?’ In’at riot?” (2004, 590).
- 11.
Trendel traces this ambiguity to the fundamental tensions created by prohibiting consensual sexual relations between professors and students on university campuses. Drawing from Philip Lee’s “The Curious Life of In Loco Parentis at American Universities,” published in Higher Education in Review in 2011, Trendel notes that the “facilitator model” of pedagogy “tries to find a balance between the students’ responsibilities over their actions and the universities’ involvement in them, contrary to the in loco parentis doctrine in force until the 1960s” (2021, xii). The absolutism of this prohibition, in Trendel’s view, prompts a range of works that explore the ramifications of policing not only sexuality but also the relationships that attend the production and conveyance of knowledge.
- 12.
Trendel offers a different view of the novel—that it is not at all polemical, but that it offers readers an opportunity to see Swenson’s and Angela’s failings in some equal measure. “It may not be productive to ask whose side Francine Prose is on,” Trendel writes, “for she is on the side of literature” (2021, 38). Citing passages from the text that demonstrate concern for the fates of literary fiction, Trendel argues that Prose writes a nuanced master-disciple novel that demonstrates Martha Nussbaum’s argument in Poetic Justice (1995) that literature exercises the reader’s moral imagination. This is a compelling alternative to my reading of Blue Angel, though I remain persuaded that Prose’s polarities of forced rape and “mere” harassment lead to a different conclusion about the text’s moral positions.
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Wood, James. 2000. “Human, All Too Human: On the Formation of a New Genre: Hysterical Realism.” The New Republic, 23 July. https://newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-inhuman.
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Beal, W. (2024). Unauthorized Sex?: Sex, Power, and Privilege in the Campus Novel. In: Campus Fictions. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1_4
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