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

My skirt was heavy with blood, pooled between my thighs … it tickled when it dripped onto my skin, into my pubic hair, over the labia. I was not wearing any underwear. You remember …. I am bleeding. I am bleeding to death. And I will be lucky if I die … Give me my Scallop shell of quiet. (265–267)

What is found in Frannie’s voice is an example of a female character speaking from, what Barbara Freeman terms “a domain of experience that resists categorization, in which the subject enters into a relation with an otherness—social, aesthetic, political, ethical, erotic—that is excessive and [almost] unrepresentable” (2–3). Moore’s juxtaposition of meditative description with an account of dismemberment importantly prioritizes the aesthetic and transgressive aspects of her narrative. The representation of sexual mutilation through the language of poetry also renders the scene more pleasurable to read and therefore potentially more troubling.

Frannie’s dying voice, both in its femininity and its erotic otherness, embodies all that is often unrepresented in fiction by women who take female sexuality as their topic. In its disturbing allure, this closing scene simultaneously opens a questioning of all that has been found problematic by literary theorists who have argued for some level of feminist responsibility in novels by and about women. As one response to Moore’s text queries, how can presumed feminists justify producing an “erotic story involving the matter-of-fact mutilation of women” (Fuller and Francke, 16)? Moore’s work and reactions to it beg the consideration of what is ethically at stake for readers, writers, and theorists in works of fiction and how social and theoretical movements shape the study and interpretation of literature on a more general scale. Should the feminist critique of literature necessarily posit a feminist utopia as its cause or indeed presume and seek an affirmative feminist narrative in female-authored texts? Is it dangerous to women and to the achievements and progress of the feminist movement for a woman to write such an image of femininity into fiction? As Janice Radway suggests: