| Chapter 2: | “Desire and Its Disastrous Results” |
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said, have made a misunderstanding. Frannie’s practiced submission, she claims, is no more than a pleasurable “part of the dance that can occur between a man and a woman … the woman’s resistance is erotic, it gives her power … it is a kind of play-acting, a replication of the relationship between men and women that is going on every second of the day” (personal interview, 2009). I wanted to agree wholeheartedly, but I could not resist some sense of hesitation. What level of responsibility do writers have to women and to feminism in their writing and understanding of femininity in fiction? As stated by Merri Lisa Johnson, “the familiar connection of sex and violence provokes in me two responses: there’s the proper feminist critique (violence is bad, connecting sex and death devalues the erotic, condones and fetishises the brutalized female body) and then there’s my real response…” (42).
In the Cut is undeniably a novel about women, literature, sexuality, and violence. Frannie Avery is a divorcee living in New York and a creative writing teacher and literature professor who is researching a book on regional slang. Because of her occupation, Frannie’s frequent musings on the mutability of words, and her articulate reflections on modern women’s sexual expression, find an appropriate context:
Words themselves in their wit, exuberance, mistakenness and violence are thrilling to me: Virginia, n., vagina (as in “he penetrated her Virginia with a hammer”). (85)
I have new words for the dictionary … to do, v., to fuck, to do, v., to kill. (149)
The novel recollects a few months in the life of Frannie and her friend, Pauline, as they are drawn into the investigation of a serial killer who is terrorizing the women of their neighbourhood. There is an array of suspects: Frannie’s student, Cornelius, who is obsessed with serial killer John Wayne Gacy; her disgruntled ex-boyfriend, Curtis; and, most importantly, the smouldering Detective Malloy, with whom Frannie becomes drawn into a volatile sexual liaison. Their first meeting occurs