SOURCE: "To Remember the Pain," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. IX, No. 5, February, 1992, pp. 6-7.

[In the following review, Jenefsky offers a favorable evaluation of Mercy. According to Jenefsky, "The result is a work of artistic integrity that, in the manner of Dworkin's body of writing generally, synthesizes form and content, art and politics."]

In an interview with herself in Yearning (1990), bell hooks asks "Why remember the pain?" and responds:

Because I am sometimes awed, as in finding something terrifying, when I see how many of the people who are writing about domination and oppression are distanced from the pain, the woundedness, the ugliness. That it's so much of the time just a subject—a "discourse."… I say remember the pain because I believe true resistance begins with people confronting pain, whether it's theirs or somebody else's, and wanting to do something to change it.

In contrast to the notion, popularly advocated by academic feminists, that focusing on women's pain accentuates our victimization and powerlessness and thereby denies our agency, hooks claims that speaking from that place of pain is transformative—that it is the necessary location from which one learns about oppression and learns what is necessary to overthrow it.

Andrea Dworkin's most recent novel, Mercy, is written from that place of pain. Like all of Dworkin's works, this novel shows how male domination is maintained through "ordinary" sexual practices. In particular, Mercy picks up where Intercourse (1987), her last work of feminist theory, ends. Both books articulate the lack of clear distinction between sex and sexual abuse in contemporary sexual practices; both are written in a poetic style that fosters intellectual as well as visceral engagement with the ideas instead of a strictly academic apprehension of Dworkin's controversial analysis of sex. But where Intercourse centers on articulating the normative nature of abuse in sex, Mercy centers on illustrating the destructiveness of denying the abusive nature of sex.

Mercy is the story of one woman's survival of repeated sexual abuse and her struggle to overcome the denial of the pain it has caused her. Initially, the protagonist, Andrea, must contend with the denial of others: their denial of the fact that she has been sexually abused and of the extent of its injury. Then, in a pattern mimicking the lives of many survivors of sexual abuse, this external invalidation is joined by her own denial. In Andrea's case, this denial is manifested by self-doubt, loss of memory, the numbing use of drugs and alcohol, and her refusal to admit that she lacks self-determination in her sexual practices. While denial enables Andrea to survive the pain of poverty and multiple assaults, it also prevents her from making changes in her life; for denial—both her own and that of others—stops her from taking her abuse seriously and from actively rebelling against her perpetrators.

In the revolutionary spirit that hooks suggests, Dworkin attempts to get both Andrea and the reader to confront the pain that everyone in Andrea's life denies is real. Mercy is not a book to pick up if you're looking for light, weekend leisure reading; in the manner of Toni Morrison's Beloved, this book compels the reader to experience the pain the protagonist suffers. Even if you don't like Andrea—either her behaviour or her ways of thinking—you still cannot escape feeling her pain; the agony, confusion, terror, humiliation and anguish are built into the form of Dworkin's writing and, therefore, built into the experience of reading the work.

At the age of nine, Andrea is molested in a movie theater, and her parents fail to recognize her fear and sense of violation. Their denial exacerbates the child's confusion and makes her begin to doubt her memory. Dworkin conveys the child's breathless panic by intensifying the pace of her words: she elongates the structure of her sentences and gives the reader no space to pause for breath:

You get asked if anything happened and you say well yes he put his hand here and he rubbed me and he put his arm around my shoulder and he scared me and he followed me and he whispered something to me and then someone says but did anything happen. And you say, well, yes, he sat down next to me, it was in this movie theater and I didn't mean to do anything wrong and there wasn't anyone else around and it was dark and he put his arm around me and he started talking to me and saying weird things in a weird voice and then he put his hand in my legs and he started rubbing and he kept saying just let me … and someone says did anything happen and you say well yes he scared me and he followed me and he put his hand or hands there and you don't know how many hands he had, not really, and you don't want to tell them you don't know because then they will think you are crazy or stupid but maybe there are creatures from Mars and they have more than two hands but you know this is stupid to say and so you don't know how to say what happened and if you don't know how many hands he had you don't know anything and no one needs to believe you about anything because you are stupid or crazy and so you don't know how to say what happened and you say he kept saying just let me … and I tried to get away and he followed me and he … followed me and he … and then they say, thank God nothing happened.

(author's ellipses)

As Andrea's parents continue to ask questions and make comments that minimize and trivialize her feelings, the young girl's story becomes progressively more convoluted. Each time her parents minimize the abuse, her confusion and panic intensify, culminating at the end of the chapter in a breathless sentence that spans three pages. The form of the text thus compels the reader to feel some of the panic the child experiences. Unlike everyone else in Andrea's life who hears her story, the reader is not encouraged to collaborate in denying the pain.

This first episode creates the foundation for the progressive annihilation of self caused by repeated assaults. All the ingredients are present: the invalidation, the shame, the disbelief, the trivialization, the self-doubt, the self-blame, the alienation. With each incident, Andrea continues to encounter barriers that prevent her from being able to comprehend and communicate the harm she experiences.

Most of these barriers are manifested as failures in language, and much of this novel concerns Andrea's struggle with the inadequacy of words. First, she is unable to comprehend fully the violence she experiences because she has no words to describe it. Jailed for civil disobedience during the Vietnam War and repeatedly raped with a steel speculum, she is unable to comprehend the experience as rape because "no one said rape"; "it wasn't rape," explains Andrea, "because it wasn't a penis and it was doctors"; and since she "had never heard of any such thing happening before … it didn't seem possible to [her] that it had happened at all."

Even when she knows the words to describe her pain, language still fails her, for no one understands the meaning of her words: "When I feel something," she says, "no right words come or no one would know what they mean. It would be like throwing a ball that could never be caught." When she is beaten and raped by her husband, she wants to stand up in a public theatre and scream out his abuses, but she refrains because she knows she will not be taken seriously. While the inadequacy of Andrea's language keeps her isolated and hinders her from obtaining help from others, her poverty and progressive self-annihilation increasingly erode her capacity for meaningful speech: the success of one's words in Mercy corresponds to the degree of social, economic and political power one already possesses.

Ironically, this novel's most valuable contribution to feminist discussions of sexual abuse is precisely what makes the reader less sympathetic to Andrea's story: the lack of a clear distinction between Andrea's sexual pursuits and her sexual victimization. Andrea insistently seeks and relishes the raw intensity of sex and the fusion of self and other that is made possible by sexual intimacy; in fact, the intensity of her passion for sex reflects her passion of self-determination and for defiance of all the rules that are supposed to govern women in sexuality. Yet her sexual pursuits often end in sexual abuse, and it is very difficult to figure out where Andrea's sexual desire stops and the man's abuse begins.

This obfuscation in the boundary between sex and abuse sustains Andrea's own denial about the fact that she is sexually abused, for she believes that she is doing what she wants:

I do what I want, I go where I want, in bed with anyone who catches my eye, a glimmer of light or a soupçon of romance. I'm not inside time or language or rules or society…. In my mind I am doing what I want and it is private … what I feel is the only society I have or know … I think I am alone living my life as I want. I think that when I am with someone I am with him.

What it takes her most of the novel to realize is that the experience in her mind and body is circumscribed by the social reality of male domination. No matter how hard Andrea tries throughout her young adulthood to design sex to fit her desires, her repeated experiences with sexual assault force her—after a decade of resistance—to relinquish her illusion of self-determination:

… I used to say I wanted to do it, what they wanted, whatever it was, I used to say it was me, I was deciding, I wanted, I was ready, it was my idea, I did the taking, I decided, I initiated, hey I was as tough as them; but it was fuck before they get mad—it was lower the risk of making them mad; you use your will to make less pain for yourself; you say I am as if there is an I and then you do what pleases them, girl, what they like, what you already learned they like, and there ain't no I, because if there was it wouldn't have accepted the destruction or annihilation … you say it's me. I chose it, I want it, it's fine—you say it for pride….

Andrea's gradual recognition of the fact that she is denied self-determination in her sexual practices marks the shift in her life from self-annihilation to self-defense. But this recognition does not occur as a moment of epiphany that changes her life for the better from that point forward; rather, as in the life of most survivors of sexual abuse, the shift is painfully slow and intermittent. Even after finding the will to escape her abusive husband, she still lapses into moments of denial in which she refuses to believe that men want to hurt her. Each time she maintains this illusion, she is sexually victimized. Only when she allows herself to comprehend the magnitude of male violence against women—not just against her—does Andrea become resolutely defiant about defending herself and avenging the many lives that men have destroyed in the name of sex.

The fact that Andrea's gradual empowerment emerges from the recognition of her own sexual victimization is bound to generate hostility toward this book from those who have tired of a feminist emphasis on sexual victimization and who believe that empowerment is to be found in the discovery of female sexual agency. In fact, the structure of this novel anticipates just such criticism: Andrea's chronological autobiography (from "August 1956" to "April 30, 1974") is sandwiched between a prologue and an epilogue, both entitled "Not Andrea," which articulate hypothetical feminist objections to the novel.

The prologue warns Andrea and Dworkin not to indulge is hyperbole and "not to be simple-minded" about the nature of women's oppression; the epilogue uses hyperbole to explicate Andrea and Dworkin's simple-mindedness about sexual abuse. These parts that are "Not Andrea" circumscribe Andrea/Dworkin's story by invalidating or minimizing their words. This literal framing of the novel within its own critique represents both Andrea's and Dworkin's struggles to overcome others' denial of the destructive nature of sexual abuse in women's lives. Dworkin, then, accuses critics in advance of colluding in women's oppression; for, in the context of the narrative, those who minimize Andrea's words help to perpetuate abuse.

What is probably going to anger Dworkin's critics the most, however, is her implicit claim that the root of feminists' denial of Andrea/Dworkin's story is women's resistance to recognizing sexual victimization in their own lives. "Not Andrea" concludes the epilogue: "I have been hurt but it was a long time ago. I'm not the same girl." Dworkin implies that academic feminists in particular have adopted an intellectual analysis of sex at the expense of their (or other women's) concrete experiences with sex. Accordingly, both the prologue and epilogue are written in an analytic style, borrowing vocabulary from feminist theoretical debates on sexuality:

There is no victim. There is perhaps an insufficiency of signs, an obdurate appearance of conformity that simply masks the deeper level on which choice occurs…. To their reductive minds prostitution is exploitation without more while those of us who thrive on adventure and complexity understand that prostitution is only an apparent oppression that permits some women to be sexually active without bourgeois restraints.

In contrast, Dworkin's poetic style in Andrea's autobiography is a formal effort to minimize the reader's intellectualization of sex and sexual abuse. The result is a work of artistic integrity that, in the manner of Dworkin's body of writing generally, synthesizes form and content, art and politics. The artistic form of Mercy fulfills its own political directives. It does what it says needs to be done to stop the cycle of violence against women: it confronts the pain of sexual abuse.