Sexuality and Contemporary Literature By Joel Gwynne and Angeli ...

Chapter 2

“Desire and Its Disastrous Results”

Re-examining Representations of
Feminine Masochism in Women’s Writing

Maya Linden

The closing scene of Susanna Moore’s In the Cut (1995) remains one of the most shocking and powerfully written episodes of sexual violence by a contemporary female author. As her breasts are sliced from her body, the narrator, Frannie Avery, watches “the nipple resting on the edge of the blade, the razor cutting smoothly, easily, through the taut cloth, through the skin, the delicate blue skein of netted veins in flood, the dark blood running like the dark river, the Indian river, the sycamore, my body so vivid” (261). This violent description later shifts from first to second to third person, transporting the reader from literal descriptions of bodily pain to a disengaged poetic consciousness in which Frannie’s narration dissolves into quotation: