The Rabbit Hutch & The Exploitation of Female Pain
Are women only winners when they’re hurt?
Trigger Warnings: Brief mention of rape, sexual assault, pedophilia, eating disorders, self harm, and abuse.
Spoiler Warnings: The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty and The Vegetarian by Han Kang.
“I am so sick…of violence against women disguised as validation.” - Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch
Recently, I read The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty, winner of the 2022 National Book Award. This novel came highly recommended and widely praised, and I wish I enjoyed it more than I did. I was captivated by the prose and Gunty’s mastery of multiple-perspective storytelling. The book was darkly funny and filled with powerful passages about the human condition, reflecting on historical philosophers and the author’s own beliefs about society. Gunty wrote exceptionally vibrant and believable characters and brought each to life fully. While written primarily in the 3rd person, readers can easily discern the characters’ feelings, thoughts, and motivations. With multiple points of view, Gunty crafts a tale of people whose lives are interconnected, whether they realize it or not.
My main contention with The Rabbit Hutch is its centering of truly deplorable men. Largely, this is a novel about a young woman, Blandine, who has endured unimaginable pain, abuse, and betrayal from the men she trusts the most. The men of this novel are deadbeats who torture and ridicule young women to compensate for their own insecurity. I try to avoid books written by male authors to avoid graphic abuse described so flippantly, and I was surprised that a book written by a woman was so degrading to its female protagonist. Much of Blandine’s trauma, both described and implied, was too onerous to read constantly, and she hardly got a happy ending, as the novel ends with her recovering in the hospital after a brutal assault.
A promising teenager with a tumultuous past, Blandine overcomes the systemic inequality of the foster system and wins a scholarship to a private school. Eloquent, smart, and curious, Blandine is widely assumed to go to college after graduation. However, she ends up dropping out her junior year after being coaxed into a relationship with her theater teacher, James Yager. This man absolutely disgusted me. I am well aware of the literary device of morally-gray or unlikeable characters, and I often enjoy works that include such tropes. However, I generally avoid books that contain pedophilia and grooming, and The Rabbit Hutch describes both in sickening detail. What was worse, some portions of the book were told from a point of view sympathetic to James, deemphasizing the moral reprehension of his actions. It was revolting how much he believed himself to be the victim, and how much gaslighting he did to justify his pattern of grooming. In fact, nearly every character in this novel makes themselves out to be a victim, save for Blandine. While indicative of the lived experiences of womanhood and the instinct to downplay our pain, it was a tough read.
This novel reminded me of another novel I read this year and was disappointed by, The Vegetarian by Han Kang. I will admit I was misled by this novel, as the staff recommendation in the book store framed it as a “good for her,” cannibalistic-revenge type of story, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. A novel focused on a female protagonist, but told only from the perspectives of people around her, it was quite severe in the multitude of abuses she endured. The main character endures so much abuse at the hands of men that she develops an intense eating disorder, and spends the latter third of the book forcibly institutionalized while she withers away both physically and mentally. To make matters worse, no one in her life stands up for her, not even her own sister. Her family might pity her, but overall, they seem annoyed by her choices. Her decision to go vegetarian, mainly to exert a small amount of control in her life and build independence from her abusive husband, causes ripples throughout her familial and social life. Perhaps I am misunderstanding a key part of Japanese culture that disparages vegetarianism so intensely, but all the other characters’ reactions to this small lifestyle choice were shocking. Her father tries to force feed her meat at one point, to which she reacts by cutting her wrists. Multiple male characters in the book openly admit to raping her, even when they are well aware of her mental state.
I was let down by this book for many of the same reasons I was let down by The Rabbit Hutch: while both had beautiful prose, the content was alarming. What is also troubling to me is the critical accolade both novels have garnered and the praise they’ve received in spite of (or because of) such content. While one is a National Book Award winner, the other holds a title from the Man Booker International Prize. Although I am happy to see more women win such prestigious writing awards, I am aggrieved by the content that amasses such attention. For female authors, is writing about abuse the only topic that will win over critics? Do women have to suffer in their work in order to be recognized? Why does female pain, adorned with and normalized by dazzling prose, get so highly rewarded?
This phenomenon in two highly acclaimed books disheartened me, so I did some quick research into the recent history of these awards. I analyzed data from user-submitted content warnings on StoryGraph for the past 20 years of awardees for both the National Book Award and the Man Booker Prize. While I am aware that user-submitted content warnings may not correlate to actual book content, and I have not personally read every book on the past winners lists, the picture this data paints is alarming. The Man Booker Prize, one of the highest literary awards in the United Kingdom, has awarded 22 books in the past 20 years. Of these champions, a staggering 50% of them contain some form of violence against women, namely graphic depictions of rape, incest, or pedophilia. Notable titles include The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, a continuation of the renowned novel The Handmaids Tale, and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo, which includes graphic depictions of rape and domestic abuse. Like The Rabbit Hutch and The Vegetarian, both of these novels are written by women, presumably to highlight the horrors we face every day. While I agree that it is important to uplift women’s voices, it’s shocking that our most awarded works are also those in which we suffer.
The National Book Award, a prestigious literary prize in the United States, has recognized 20 novels in the fiction category since 2003. Data from StoryGraph shows that seven of those 20 winners include distressing content such as sexual abuse and domestic violence. While this proportion (35%) is smaller than that of the Man Booker Prize (50%), it is still cause for concern. Now, I recognize that some proportion of awarded novels will undoubtedly contain disturbing content; art is made to provoke, after all. However, when multiple award-winning novels contain gendered violence, one must ask why these are so widely read, and why society is so keen to consume media that exploits female pain. While some novels exhibit such abuse to draw attention to societal ails and educate their audience, others seem to use it purely as a literary device. When consuming media that depicts explicit violence against women, it is important to ask: when is it used to spotlight the ails of a misogynistic society, and when is it used purely for shock value?
In conclusion, I would like to return to the opening quotation I chose from The Rabbit Hutch:
“I am so sick…of violence against women disguised as validation.” - Tess Gunty
I find this excerpt a bit ironic, as the source material does exactly that to its female protagonist. The Rabbit Hutch simultaneously makes reference to how much of a cliche it is for a teacher to “fall in love” with his young student, and underscores the mental turmoil James put Blandine through. However, does the pain she endures by multiple men in her life, men she has come to trust and love, validate similar pain that other women have suffered? Does it serve to make a broader point about the cruelties of our world? Or, is it just an idle fetishization of pain, serving no purpose other than to elicit a strong emotion in the audience? If the latter is the intention, Gunty has succeeded, but not without consequence.