Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “To sleep! To forget!” he said to himself with the serene confidence of a healthy man that if he is tired and sleepy, he will go to sleep at once. And the same instant his head did begin to feel drowsy and he began to drop off into forgetfulness. The waves of the sea of unconsciousness had begun to meet over his head, when all at once—it was as though a violent shock of electricity had passed over him. He started so that he leaped up on the springs of the sofa, and leaning on his arms got in a panic onto his knees. His eyes were wide open as though he had never been asleep. The heaviness in his head and the weariness in his limbs that he had felt a minute before had suddenly gone. “You may trample me in the mud,” he heard Alexey Alexandrovitch’s words and saw him standing before him, and saw Anna’s face with its burning flush and glittering eyes, gazing with love and tenderness not at him but at Alexey Alexandrovitch; he saw his own, as he fancied, foolish and ludicrous figure when Alexey Alexandrovitch took his hands away from his face. He stretched out his legs again and flung himself on the sofa in the same position and shut his eyes. “To sleep! To forget!” he repeated to himself. But with his eyes shut he saw more distinctly than ever Anna’s face as it had been on the memorable evening before the races. “That is not and will not be, and she wants to wipe it out of her memory. But I cannot live without it. How can we be reconciled? how can we be reconciled?” he said aloud, and unconsciously began to repeat these words. This repetition checked the rising up of fresh images and memories, which he felt were thronging in his brain. But repeating words did not check his imagination for long. Again in extraordinarily rapid succession his best moments rose before his mind, and then his recent humiliation. “Take away his hands,” Anna’s voice says. He takes away his hands and feels the shamestruck and idiotic expression of his face. He still lay down, trying to sleep, though he felt there was not the smallest hope of it, and kept repeating stray words from some chain of thought, trying by this to check the rising flood of fresh images. He listened, and heard in a strange, mad whisper words repeated: “I did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it. I did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees, and holding his breath from the strain of thought, he pondered. But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact—that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it was awful, but it was so. “But I am alive still. Now what’s to be done? what’s to be done?” he said in despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously and went to the looking-glass, and began looking at his face and hair. Yes, there were gray hairs about his temples. He opened his mouth. His back teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, there was strength in them. But Nikolay, who lay there breathing with what was left of lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too. And suddenly he recalled how they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only waited till Fyodor Bogdanitch was out of the room to fling pillows at each other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fyodor Bogdanitch could not check the effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness. “And now that bent, hollow chest ... and I, not knowing what will become of me, or wherefore....” “K...ha! K...ha! Damnation! Why do you keep fidgeting, why don’t you go to sleep?” his brother’s voice called to him. “Oh, I don’t know, I’m not sleepy.” “I have had a good sleep, I’m not in a sweat now. Just see, feel my shirt; it’s not wet, is it?” Levin felt, withdrew behind the screen, and put out the candle, but for a long while he could not sleep. The question how to live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new, insoluble question presented itself—death. “Why, he’s dying—yes, he’ll die in the spring, and how help him? What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I’d even forgotten that it was at all.” Chapter 32 Levin had long before made the observation that when one is uncomfortable with people from their being excessively amenable and meek, one is apt very soon after to find things intolerable from their touchiness and irritability. He felt that this was how it would be with his brother. And his brother Nikolay’s gentleness did in fact not last out for long. The very next morning he began to be irritable, and seemed doing his best to find fault with his brother, attacking him on his tenderest points.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Not a bit: in Russia there can be no labor question. In Russia the question is that of the relation of the working people to the land; though the question exists there too—but there it’s a matter of repairing what’s been ruined, while with us....” Stepan Arkadyevitch listened attentively to Levin. “Yes, yes!” he said, “it’s very possible you’re right. But I’m glad you’re in good spirits, and are hunting bears, and working, and interested. Shtcherbatsky told me another story—he met you—that you were in such a depressed state, talking of nothing but death....” “Well, what of it? I’ve not given up thinking of death,” said Levin. “It’s true that it’s high time I was dead; and that all this is nonsense. It’s the truth I’m telling you. I do value my idea and my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great—ideas, work—it’s all dust and ashes.” “But all that’s as old as the hills, my boy!” “It is old; but do you know, when you grasp this fully, then somehow everything becomes of no consequence. When you understand that you will die tomorrow, if not today, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant! And I consider my idea very important, but it turns out really to be as unimportant too, even if it were carried out, as doing for that bear. So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work—anything so as not to think of death!” Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled a subtle affectionate smile as he listened to Levin. “Well, of course! Here you’ve come round to my point. Do you remember you attacked me for seeking enjoyment in life? Don’t be so severe, O moralist!” “No; all the same, what’s fine in life is....” Levin hesitated—“oh, I don’t know. All I know is that we shall soon be dead.” “Why so soon?” “And do you know, there’s less charm in life, when one thinks of death, but there’s more peace.” “On the contrary, the finish is always the best. But I must be going,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting up for the tenth time. “Oh, no, stay a bit!” said Levin, keeping him. “Now, when shall we see each other again? I’m going tomorrow.” “I’m a nice person! Why, that’s just what I came for! You simply must come to dinner with us today. Your brother’s coming, and Karenin, my brother-in-law.” “You don’t mean to say he’s here?” said Levin, and he wanted to inquire about Kitty. He had heard at the beginning of the winter that she was at Petersburg with her sister, the wife of the diplomat, and he did not know whether she had come back or not; but he changed his mind and did not ask. “Whether she’s coming or not, I don’t care,” he said to himself.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  I felt terror to feel myself hanging from the chain above me. They did not bind my ankles to my arms; they merely held them up, in place, as she brought her blows up from under, as hard as before, and then covering my balls with her left hand, paddled me from the front as hard as she could as I struggled and moaned now uncontrollably. "Meantime the other girls were feasting their eyes on me, touching me still, and enjoying my misery immensely. They even kissed the backs of my legs, my calves, my shoulders. "But the blows came harder and faster. She had me set down again, spread wide again, and went to work in earnest. I think she meant to break the skin if she could, but I was now broken down and wept uncontrollably. "This was what she wanted, and as I gave in, she applauded it. 'Very good, Prince Alexi, very good, let all of that spiteful pride go, you know very well you deserve it. That's better, that is exactly what I want to see,' she said almost affectionately, 'delicious tears,' as she touched them with her fingers, her paddle never stopping. "Then she had my hands released. I was forced down on all fours. And she drove me about the room telling me that I must move in a circle. Of course she drove me faster and faster. I didn't even realize now that I was no longer restrained. That is, I did not even realize that I might have broken and run. I had been defeated. And finally, it was as always when the punishment works, I could think of nothing but escaping each blow of her paddle. And how could I do that? Merely twist, squirm, try to avoid it. She was meantime very worked up with her commands, driving me faster. I rushed past the naked feet of the other Princesses. I saw them step aside for me. "And now she told me that crawling was indeed too good for me, that I must place my arms on the ground, and my chin, and must inch along in that manner, my buttocks high in the air where she might paddle them. 'Arch your back,' she said, 'down, I want your chest pressed to the ground,' and as skillfully as any Page or mistress, she forced me along as the others praised her and marveled at her skill and stamina. I had never been in such a position. It was so ignominious I didn't want to picture it, my knees scraping along, my back painfully arched, my buttocks thrust as high as before. And she commanding me always to move with greater speed as my buttocks grew ever more raw.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I pray you, desist. Ah—very painful, very painful, indeed … God! Hah! This is abominable, you should really not—” His voice trailed off as he reached the landing, but he steadily walked on despite all the lead I had lodged in his bloated body—and in distress, in dismay, I understood that far from killing him I was injecting spurts of energy into the poor fellow, as if the bullets had been capsules wherein a heady elixir danced. I reloaded the thing with hands that were black and bloody—I had touched something he had anointed with his thick gore. Then I rejoined him upstairs, the keys jangling in my pockets like gold. He was trudging from room to room, bleeding majestically, trying to find an open window, shaking his head, and still trying to talk me out of murder. I took aim at his head, and he retired to the master bedroom with a burst of royal purple where his ear had been. “Get out, get out of here,” he said coughing and spitting; and in a nightmare of wonder, I saw this blood-spattered but still buoyant person get into his bed and wrap himself up in the chaotic bedclothes. I hit him at very close range through the blankets, and then he lay back, and a big pink bubble with juvenile connotations formed on his lips, grew to the size of a toy balloon, and vanished. I may have lost contact with reality for a second or two—oh, nothing of the I-just-blacked-out sort that your common criminal enacts; on the contrary, I want to stress the fact that I was responsible for every shed drop of his bubbleblood; but a kind of momentary shift occurred as if I were in the connubial bedroom, and Charlotte were sick in bed. Quilty was a very sick man. I held one of his slippers instead of the pistol—I was sitting on the pistol. Then I made myself a little more comfortable in the chair near the bed, and consulted my wrist watch. The crystal was gone but it ticked. The whole sad business had taken more than an hour. He was quiet at last. Far from feeling any relief, a burden even weightier than the one I had hoped to get rid of was with me, upon me, over me. I could not bring myself to touch him in order to make sure he was really dead. He looked it: a quarter of his face gone, and two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck. My hands were hardly in better condition than his.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  On the Bridle Path there had been much gracelessness when she was running so fast and out of breath...O, but she must not think of anything save what she had to do now. "And on your hands and knees of course, my girl, and be very very quick!" Lady Juliana at once scattered the little pink rosebuds with their waxed stems everywhere. Beauty bent forward and was grasping the nearest in her teeth when she realized that Lady Juliana was right behind her. The handle of the oval paddle was so long, Lady Juliana did not even bend over as she spanked Beauty and with a start, Beauty dropped the flower. "Pick it up at once!" Lady Juliana cried out, and Beauty's lips scraped the carpet before she had it. The paddle came down with a fearful zinging sound, smacking her sore welts as she rushed on her hands and knees to the Queen, and Lady Juliana managed some seven or eight good blows before Beauty had dropped the flower in the Queen's lap obediently. "Now turn around at once," commanded the Lady, "and off you go." But she was already spanking Beauty fiercely as Beauty ran in search of another flower. As soon as she had it in her lips, she ran to the Queen, but the blows followed her. And Beauty wanted to cry out for patience as she went for another. She gathered a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, depositing each in the Queen's lap, yet there was no escape from the paddle, from its persistence, nor Lady Juliana's voice urging her on crossly. "Quickly, my girl, quickly, get it in your lips and back again." It seemed her flaring pink skirt was everywhere in Beauty's eyes, and Beauty was surrounded by the flashing of her little silver-heeled slippers. Beauty's knees burned from the rough wool of the carpet, yet she went breathlessly on in her search seeing the tiny pink roses everywhere. And yet no matter how she gasped for breath, no matter how moist were her face and her limbs, she could not blot from her mind the thought of what she was doing. She could see her own buttocks splotched with white welts, her reddened thighs, and her breasts dangling between her arms as she rushed across the floor like a pitiable animal. There was no mercy for her, and the worst of it was that she could not please Lady Juliana, Lady Juliana goaded her, even kicked her now with the toe of her slipper. Beauty's cries were wordless pleas, but Lady Juliana's tone was angry, unsatisfied. It was dreadful to be struck in anger. "Hurry! Do you hear me!" Lady Juliana sounded almost contemptuous, spanking Beauty all the harder, and making little tisks now of impatience.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  The statue's right arm was upraised, the stone fingers of the hand forming a circle as if they had once clasped a knife or some other instrument. And now the Squire carefully positioned Prince Alexi's head on the shoulder of the statue beneath that hand. And through the clasped hand, he placed a leather phallus, anchoring it so that it fit into Prince Alexi's mouth. It seemed now that the statue raped him both through his anus and through his mouth, and he was bound to it. And his organ, as stiff as before, lay thrust forward as the phallus of the statue was inside of him. "Now, you are perhaps a little more used to your Prince Alexi," said the Prince softly. "But this is so terrible," Beauty thought, "that he must spend the night in this misery." Prince Alexi's back was painfully arched, his legs bound wide apart, and the moonlight from the window behind him made a long line down his throat, his smooth chest and his flat belly. The Prince tugged gently on Beauty's hair which he held wrapped around his right hand and leading her back to bed, he laid her down and told her to sleep, as he would soon be doing beside her. PRINCE ALEXI AND FELIX IT WAS almost dawn. The Prince lay deep asleep. And Beauty who had been waiting for his heavy sleeping breaths, slipped out of the bed, and on all fours, out of stealth, not obedience, crept into the corridor. She had lain for a long time looking at the door, seeing that it had never been really shut, and she might make her small escape without noise if she only had the courage. She crept to the top of the steps. The light fell full on Prince Alexi, and she could see that his organ was rigid as before, and Squire Felix was talking to him, softly. She could not hear what the Squire said, but she was furious to see him awake. She had hoped that he too would now be sleeping. And as she watched, quite unknown to Squire Felix, she saw him come round in front of Prince Alexi, and torment the organ again with a volley of slaps that sounded very loud in the empty stairwell. The captive Price gave a little moan, and Beauty could see his chest heave with his breath. Squire Felix walked back and forth restlessly. Then he looked at the Prince, and it seemed he turned his head from left to right as though listening. Beauty held her breath. She was terrified she might be discovered. Squire Felix drew near to Prince Alexi and putting his arms around his hips, he covered Prince Alexi's organ with his mouth and began sucking it.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  He had taken a soft little broom which was used to sweep out the inside of the oven. And with this he began to brush and stroke my penis. The more he stroked the more miserable I became, but each time it was almost too much for me he would withdraw the broom a quarter of an inch from my penis so that I struggled after it. It was more than I could bear, yet he would not allow me to move my feet, and paddled me immediately if I disobeyed him. I soon saw his game. I must thrust my hips forward as much as I could to keep my hungry penis in contact with the soft stroking bristles of the broom, and so I did, crying all the while as the girl gazed on with obvious delight. Finally, she begged to be allowed to touch me. I was so grateful for this I could not stop my sobs. The stable boy then put his broom under my chin and lifted my face. He said he wished to see me satisfy the young maid's curiosity. She had never really seen a young man spend his passion. And as he held me and scrutinized me and looked at my tear-stained face, she stroked my penis, and without pride or dignity, I felt my passion erupt into her hand, my face flushing with heat and blood as a shudder went through my loins relieving all of the days of frustration. "I was weak when it was finished. I had no pride, nor thoughts of past and future. I made no resistance when I was manacled. I wished only that the stable boy would come again soon, and I was drowsy and afraid when all the cooks and kitchen boys returned and commenced their inevitable idle sport with me. "The next few days were filled with the same terrible kitchen torments. I was paddled, chased, ridiculed and otherwise treated contemptuously. But I dreamed of the stable boy. Surely he would return. I don't think I even thought of her Highness. I felt only despair when I envisioned her. "Finally one afternoon, the stable boy came in and he was finely dressed in rose-colored velvet trimmed in gold. I was aghast. He ordered me washed and scrubbed. I was too excited to fear the rough hands of the kitchen boys, though they were merciless as ever. "My penis was rigid already at the mere sight of my stable boy Lord, but he told me quickly that it must be brought to perfect attention, and that I was to keep it thus, or be severely punished. "I nodded all to vigorously. Then he took the gag bit out of my mouth and replaced it with an ornate one. "How can I describe what I felt then? I didn't dare dream of the Queen. I was so bereft that any respite was wondrous to me.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  V. If I were trying to convince you of a legal position, this is where I would conclude. I would summarize my arguments, allude to the case law, and propose a workable solution. But a conclusion seems out of reach when we are still stuck debating the facts, deciding whom to trust and what is true. We are trapped in a legal system that has never favored women and has never believed survivors. And we are mired in a circuitous and damning dialogue, so powerful that it invalidates our experiences, our traumas, our truths—a dialogue so powerful that we begin to doubt whether our experience was ever there at all. Bodies Against BordersMichelle ChenSEXUAL VIOLENCE IS A GLOBAL EPIDEMIC THAT IS ALL around us, yet it is nowhere, precisely because it permeates every facet of our presence in the world, echoing throughout our political and popular cultures, ricocheting off the cement walls that define our boundaries. My exposure to the concept of rape as a global mass phenomenon, and the violation of women’s bodies at the borders of nation-states, came the way it does, sadly, for many Americans: through news articles, the antiseptic analyses of humanitarian field reports, sociological studies. And while my journalistic work often takes a critical look at issues of sexual- and gender-based violence, it’s often from a distance—perhaps the price media workers have to pay to get “close” to a story learning how to emotionally detach from the subject. The subject is what I wanted to revisit in this essay. The flip side of treating “victims” or “survivors” as subjects of a narrative is that the process of intellectualizing the issue also requires neatly transmuting the subject into the object. And objectifying people who have lived through sexual violence is not a good place to begin, or end, any story—not our own, and not theirs. I know I can never “restore the dignity” of victims I’ve never really known, I don’t seek to “give voice” to (or ventriloquize on behalf of) people rendered silent by politics and projections of our collective social anxieties. When exploring the experience of sexual violation at the border, I do bring my own experiences with gender oppression to my lens, but I don’t dare claim the telling of their stories as an exclusive right, when, in many cases, the stories are all they’re able to carry with them. I’m just trying to explore the territories that are supposed to be fixed, hard, official—and to peer beyond the wall. Maybe then as storytellers we can reveal real people behind those “enemy lines,” reveal our families in the gaze of the “alien,” and witness the wars being waged within, as nations trade bodies for political power and rob people of the right to own themselves.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  I felt their hands all over me, feeling my skin, slapping my cock, and touching my balls as they squealed and laughed. Never had some of them seen a man so closely, save for their Lords who had complete power over them. "I was trembling violently. I had not given way to tears and was most afraid that I would turn and try to escape, and receive only some worse punishment. I tried desperately to remain coldly indifferent. But their round naked breasts were maddening me. I could feel their thighs brush me, even their most pubic hair as they crowded about examining me. "And I was their complete slave, whom they scorned and admired. When I felt their fingers touching my balls, weighing them, stroking my penis, I was maddened. "It was infinitely worse than my time with the Princes, because I could already hear their voices turning to mock contempt with the wish to discipline me, to return me to the Queen as obedient as they were. 'O, so you're a bad little Prince, are you?' said one of them in my ear, she a lovely raven-haired one with pierced ears adorned with gold. Her hair was tickling my neck, and when her fingers twisted the nipples of my chest, I felt myself losing my control. "I feared I would break and try to flee. Lord Gregory meantime withdrew to the corner of the room. The grooms could aid them as they wished, he said, and he urged them to do their work well for the Queen's sake. This brought loud cries of delight. I was immediately slapped by several hard little hands. My buttocks were pulled open. I felt tiny fingers pushing into them. "I squirmed, twisted, trying to hold still, trying not to look at them. "And when I was pulled up and my hands were tied over my head from a ceiling chain, I was immensely relieved that I could no longer try to escape if I weakened. "The grooms gave them what paddles they wanted. A number of them chose long leather straps which they tried first across their hands. In the Special Punishment Hall they had no need to stay on their knees and could stand around me as they liked. At once the round handle of a paddle was thrust in my anus. My legs were dragged wide apart. I was shuddering, and when the paddle handle proceeded to rape me with back and forth thrusts as roughly as any cock I'd ever received, I knew my face was red, and that my tears were threatening. Now and then in the midst of all this, I'd feel cool little lips pressed to my ear, my face pinched, my chin stroked, and then they would assault my nipples again.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  There are scores of directors and executives and producers who have not spoken up because they are complicit and behave in just that Weinstein way. They don’t want to be called out. This isn’t about naming names. I don’t have enough for a lawsuit, but I do have enough for a broken heart/spirit. Nothing will change in Hollywood. Some men will get careful. Some men will pretend they never behaved like predators and wait this out. What’s so disheartening is knowing Harvey Weinstein’s sick actions will be addressed (finally) and yet the entire culture and context for his sick shit will remain in place. I hope I’m wrong. I hope it changes. I’m not holding my breath. The Ways We Are Taught to Be a GirlxTxLATER, YOU WILL TURN IT INTO A POINTS SYSTEM. YOU won’t call it a points system and there won’t be any actual points, but regardless, you will keep score. You imagine other girls have their own ways of keeping score; in diaries, in shiny-smooth scars, in how they raise their daughters, in the ways they are lost. It’s an odd tallying; the girls who have the most points are not the winners and the girls who have the lowest points do not win either. Nobody wins. Ever. I am a girl with low points. The ways we are taught to be a girl start when you are very young. When you are being taught, you don’t know about the points. When you are being taught to be a girl, the lessons are simply accepted—the price you pay for your curves, your holes. It’s only later, when you are older, after you’ve been taught, that you find out about the score sheet. Prior to that, it’s just what happens when you are a girl. Lesson One We had a place in the country we’d go each summer, an old place on a half acre on the outskirts of a one-stoplight, white-trash town. Woods, river, and railroad tracks; free-range roaming, sunburn, snakes, tadpoles, crayfish, filth, mosquito bites. I had made a same-age friend who lived with no father, two older brothers, and three sisters in a house too small for its captors inhabitants. It was a six-minute walk from our place, the length of a neighboring horse pasture. The girls’ room had pink, spray-painted dots on the walls. The mom kept a giant jar of homemade pickles in the kitchen that my friend and I would eat from, wrapping the dripping, tangy green meat in paper towels and chewing them down to stubs. We walked barefoot a lot. We swam in the river. We climbed trees. We made up adventures. We played dolls sometimes. We were tomboys but we were girls first. Her oldest brother liked to give me hugs.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Title : Not That Bad Author: Gay, Roxane [image file=image_rsrc2T0.jpg] DedicationFor every person who has been scarred by rape culture and survives, nonetheless. ContentsCover Title Page Dedication Introduction: Roxane Gay Fragments: Aubrey Hirsch Slaughterhouse Island: Jill Christman & the Truth Is, I Have No Story: Claire Schwartz The Luckiest MILF in Brooklyn: Lynn Melnick Spectator: My Family, My Rapist, and Mourning Online: Brandon Taylor The Sun: Emma Smith-Stevens Sixty-Three Days: AJ McKenna Only the Lonely: Lisa Mecham What I Told Myself: Vanessa Mártir Stasis: Ally Sheedy The Ways We Are Taught to Be a Girl: xTx Floccinaucinihilipilification: So Mayer The Life Ruiner: Nora Salem All the Angry Women: Lyz Lenz Good Girls: Amy Jo Burns Utmost Resistance: Law and the Queer Woman or How I Sat in a Classroom and Listened to My Male Classmates Debate How to Define Force and Consent: V. L. Seek Bodies Against Borders: Michelle Chen Wiping the Stain Clean: Gabrielle Union What We Didn’t Say: Liz Rosema I Said Yes: Anthony Frame Knowing Better: Samhita Mukhopadhyay Not That Loud: Quiet Encounters with Rape Culture: Miriam Zoila Pérez Why I Stopped: Zoë Medeiros Picture Perfect: Sharisse Tracey To Get Out from Under It: Stacey May Fowles Reaping What Rape Culture Sows: Live from the Killing Fields of Growing Up Female in America: Elisabeth Fairfield Stokes Invisible Light Waves: Meredith Talusan Getting Home: Nicole Boyce Why I Didn’t Say No: Elissa Bassist Contributors Acknowledgments Also by Roxane Gay Copyright About the Publisher IntroductionWHEN I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD, I WAS GANG-RAPED IN the woods behind my neighborhood by a group of boys with the dangerous intentions of bad men. It was a terrible, life-changing experience. Before that, I had been naive, sheltered. I believed people were inherently good and that the meek should inherit. I was faithful and believed in God. And then I didn’t. I was broken. I was changed. I will never know who I would have been had I not become the girl in the woods. As I got older, I met countless women who had endured all manner of violence, harassment, sexual assault, and rape. I heard their painful stories and started to think, What I went through was bad, but it wasn’t that bad. Most of my scars have faded. I have learned to live with my trauma. Those boys killed the girl I was, but they didn’t kill all of me. They didn’t hold a gun to my head or a blade to my throat and threaten my life. I survived. I taught myself to be grateful I survived even if survival didn’t look like much. It was comforting, perhaps, to tell myself that what I went through “wasn’t that bad.” Allowing myself to believe that being gang-raped wasn’t “that bad” allowed me to break down my trauma into something more manageable, into something I could carry with me instead of allowing the magnitude of it to destroy me.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She recalled another sentence in the letter. “Our life must go on as it has done in the past....” “That life was miserable enough in the old days; it has been awful of late. What will it be now? And he knows all that; he knows that I can’t repent that I breathe, that I love; he knows that it can lead to nothing but lying and deceit; but he wants to go on torturing me. I know him; I know that he’s at home and is happy in deceit, like a fish swimming in the water. No, I won’t give him that happiness. I’ll break through the spiderweb of lies in which he wants to catch me, come what may. Anything’s better than lying and deceit.” “But how? My God! my God! Was ever a woman so miserable as I am?...” “No; I will break through it, I will break through it!” she cried, jumping up and keeping back her tears. And she went to the writing-table to write him another letter. But at the bottom of her heart she felt that she was not strong enough to break through anything, that she was not strong enough to get out of her old position, however false and dishonorable it might be. She sat down at the writing-table, but instead of writing she clasped her hands on the table, and, laying her head on them, burst into tears, with sobs and heaving breast like a child crying. She was weeping that her dream of her position being made clear and definite had been annihilated forever. She knew beforehand that everything would go on in the old way, and far worse, indeed, than in the old way. She felt that the position in the world that she enjoyed, and that had seemed to her of so little consequence in the morning, that this position was precious to her, that she would not have the strength to exchange it for the shameful position of a woman who has abandoned husband and child to join her lover; that however much she might struggle, she could not be stronger than herself. She would never know freedom in love, but would remain forever a guilty wife, with the menace of detection hanging over her at every instant; deceiving her husband for the sake of a shameful connection with a man living apart and away from her, whose life she could never share. She knew that this was how it would be, and at the same time it was so awful that she could not even conceive what it would end in. And she cried without restraint, as children cry when they are punished. The sound of the footman’s steps forced her to rouse herself, and, hiding her face from him, she pretended to be writing. “The courier asks if there’s an answer,” the footman announced. “An answer? Yes,” said Anna. “Let him wait. I’ll ring.”

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "The Queen must tire. The Queen must stop," Beauty thought, but she had thought this only moments before and it went on, so that Beauty's hips were rising and falling, and she found herself squirming to the side only to be rewarded with sounder blows, more rapid blows, as if the Queen were growing ever more violent. It was as when the Prince had beaten her with the strap. It was becoming more frenzied. Now the Queen worked on the very bottom of her buttocks, that portion which Lady Juliana had so deliberately lifted on her paddle, and she spanked hard and long on either side before moving up again and to the side, and then to Beauty's thighs and back again. Beauty clenched her teeth to stifle her cries. She opened her eyes in frantic silent please seeing only the Queen's hard profile in the mirror. The Queen's eyes were narrowed, her mouth twisted, and then suddenly she gazed through the mirror at Beauty though she never ceased punishing her. Beauty's hands broke their firm clasp and struggled to cover her buttocks, but the Queen at once moved them aside. "You dare!" she whispered, and Beauty clasped them tight again, sobbing into the coverlet as the spanking continued. Then the Queen's hand lay on the burning flesh without motion. It seemed the fingers were still cold, yet they burned. And Beauty could not control her racing breath or her tears, and she would not open her eyes again. "You shall tender me your apology for that little slip of decorum," said the Queen. "I...I..." Beauty stammered. "'I am sorry, my Queen.'" "I am sorry, my Queen." Beauty whispered frantically. "'I deserve only your punishment for it, my Queen.'" "I deserve only your punishment for it, my Queen." "Yes," the Queen whispered. "And you shall have it. But all and all..." The Queen sighed. "Was she not good, Prince Alexi?" "Very well behaved, your Highness, I should think, but I await your judgment." The Queen laughed. She pulled Beauty up roughly. "Turn around and sit in my lap," she said. Beauty was astonished. She at once obeyed and realized she was facing Prince Alexi. But he did not matter to her in these moments. Shaken, sore, she sat shivering on the Queen's thighs, the silk of the Queen's gown cool under her burning buttocks, the Queen's left arm cradling her. The Queen's right hand examined her nipples, and Beauty looked down through her tears to see those white fingers again pulling the nipples. "I had not thought to find you so obedient," said the Queen, pressing Beauty to her ample breasts, Beauty's hip against the Queen's smooth stomach. Beauty felt tiny as well as helpless, as if she were nothing in this woman's arms, nothing but something small, a child perhaps, no, not even a child. The Queen's voice grew caressing.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  For the first two days after his wife’s departure Alexey Alexandrovitch received applicants for assistance and his chief secretary, drove to the committee, and went down to dinner in the dining-room as usual. Without giving himself a reason for what he was doing, he strained every nerve of his being for those two days, simply to preserve an appearance of composure, and even of indifference. Answering inquiries about the disposition of Anna Arkadyevna’s rooms and belongings, he had exercised immense self-control to appear like a man in whose eyes what had occurred was not unforeseen nor out of the ordinary course of events, and he attained his aim: no one could have detected in him signs of despair. But on the second day after her departure, when Korney gave him a bill from a fashionable draper’s shop, which Anna had forgotten to pay, and announced that the clerk from the shop was waiting, Alexey Alexandrovitch told him to show the clerk up. “Excuse me, your excellency, for venturing to trouble you. But if you direct us to apply to her excellency, would you graciously oblige us with her address?” Alexey Alexandrovitch pondered, as it seemed to the clerk, and all at once, turning round, he sat down at the table. Letting his head sink into his hands, he sat for a long while in that position, several times attempted to speak and stopped short. Korney, perceiving his master’s emotion, asked the clerk to call another time. Left alone, Alexey Alexandrovitch recognized that he had not the strength to keep up the line of firmness and composure any longer. He gave orders for the carriage that was awaiting him to be taken back, and for no one to be admitted, and he did not go down to dinner. He felt that he could not endure the weight of universal contempt and exasperation, which he had distinctly seen in the face of the clerk and of Korney, and of everyone, without exception, whom he had met during those two days. He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them, and instinctively he tried to do this for two days, but now he felt incapable of keeping up the unequal struggle.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  But she knew only that she was a naked slave of the Court and anything might be done to her. Hundreds of Lords and Ladies watched her with amusement. It was nothing to them, as she was only one of many, and it had all been done a thousand times, and would be done again, and she must do her best or take her place tethered to that beam in the Hall of Punishments suffering for the amusement of no one. "Lift your knees, my precious darling," Lady Juliana said to her as they were moving slowly now. "And O, if you could only see how exquisite you are, you have done splendidly." Beauty tossed her head. She felt the heavy braids fall against her back, and suddenly when the paddle struck her she felt herself move so languidly with it. It was as if this strange relaxation were softening her all over. Is that what they had meant when they said that the pain would soften her? Yet she feared this relaxation, this despair...was it despair? She did not know. She had no dignity in this moment. She saw herself as Lady Juliana must surely have seen her, and it seemed she almost preened as she imagined this, tossing her read again, pushing her breasts out proudly. "That's it, lovely, lovely," Lady Juliana called out. The other rider had disappeared. The horse picked up its pace; the paddle struck Beauty violently again and drove her through the clustered tables as the crowd grew thicker, the castle coming closer, and suddenly they had stopped before the pavilion. Lady Juliana turned her mount to the side, and with small prodding spanks brought Beauty beside her to attention. Beauty did not look up but she could see the long garlands of flowers, the dim white vision of the canopy ballooning gently in the breeze, and a host of figures seated behind the festooned railing of the pavilion. Her body seemed consumed with fire. She could not catch her breath, and then she could hear the conversation above, the Queen's pure icy voice and the others laughing. Her throat was raw, her buttocks pulsing with pain, and now Lady Juliana whispered: "She's pleased with you, Beauty, now kiss my boot quickly and drop down on your knees and kiss the grass before the pavilion. Do it with spirit, my girl." Beauty obeyed without hesitation, and as if it were water washing through her, she felt again that calm, that sense of what was it? Release? Resignation? "Nothing can save me," she thought. All the sounds about her mingled in a din. Her buttocks seemed to glow with pain, and she imagined a great light emanating from them.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Yes; what was the last thing I thought of so clearly?” she tried to recall it. “‘_Tiutkin, coiffeur?_’—no, not that. Yes, of what Yashvin says, the struggle for existence and hatred is the one thing that holds men together. No, it’s a useless journey you’re making,” she said, mentally addressing a party in a coach and four, evidently going for an excursion into the country. “And the dog you’re taking with you will be no help to you. You can’t get away from yourselves.” Turning her eyes in the direction Pyotr had turned to look, she saw a factory-hand almost dead-drunk, with hanging head, being led away by a policeman. “Come, he’s found a quicker way,” she thought. “Count Vronsky and I did not find that happiness either, though we expected so much from it.” And now for the first time Anna turned that glaring light in which she was seeing everything on to her relations with him, which she had hitherto avoided thinking about. “What was it he sought in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of vanity.” She remembered his words, the expression of his face, that recalled an abject setter-dog, in the early days of their connection. And everything now confirmed this. “Yes, there was the triumph of success in him. Of course there was love too, but the chief element was the pride of success. He boasted of me. Now that’s over. There’s nothing to be proud of. Not to be proud of, but to be ashamed of. He has taken from me all he could, and now I am no use to him. He is weary of me and is trying not to be dishonorable in his behavior to me. He let that out yesterday—he wants divorce and marriage so as to burn his ships. He loves me, but how? The zest is gone, as the English say. That fellow wants everyone to admire him and is very much pleased with himself,” she thought, looking at a red-faced clerk, riding on a riding-school horse. “Yes, there’s not the same flavor about me for him now. If I go away from him, at the bottom of his heart he will be glad.” This was not mere supposition, she saw it distinctly in the piercing light, which revealed to her now the meaning of life and human relations.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “What’s this? Am I going out of my mind?” he said to himself. “Perhaps. What makes men go out of their minds; what makes men shoot themselves?” he answered himself, and opening his eyes, he saw with wonder an embroidered cushion beside him, worked by Varya, his brother’s wife. He touched the tassel of the cushion, and tried to think of Varya, of when he had seen her last. But to think of anything extraneous was an agonizing effort. “No, I must sleep!” He moved the cushion up, and pressed his head into it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes shut. He jumped up and sat down. “That’s all over for me,” he said to himself. “I must think what to do. What is left?” His mind rapidly ran through his life apart from his love of Anna. “Ambition? Serpuhovskoy? Society? The court?” He could not come to a pause anywhere. All of it had had meaning before, but now there was no reality in it. He got up from the sofa, took off his coat, undid his belt, and uncovering his hairy chest to breathe more freely, walked up and down the room. “This is how people go mad,” he repeated, “and how they shoot themselves ... to escape humiliation,” he added slowly. He went to the door and closed it, then with fixed eyes and clenched teeth he went up to the table, took a revolver, looked round him, turned it to a loaded barrel, and sank into thought. For two minutes, his head bent forward with an expression of an intense effort of thought, he stood with the revolver in his hand, motionless, thinking. “Of course,” he said to himself, as though a logical, continuous, and clear chain of reasoning had brought him to an indubitable conclusion. In reality this “of course,” that seemed convincing to him, was simply the result of exactly the same circle of memories and images through which he had passed ten times already during the last hour—memories of happiness lost forever. There was the same conception of the senselessness of everything to come in life, the same consciousness of humiliation. Even the sequence of these images and emotions was the same.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is waning and waning, and that’s why we’re drifting apart.” She went on musing. “And there’s no help for it. He is everything for me, and I want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants more and more to get away from me. We walked to meet each other up to the time of our love, and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions. And there’s no altering that. He tells me I’m insanely jealous, and I have told myself that I am insanely jealous; but it’s not true. I’m not jealous, but I’m unsatisfied. But....” she opened her lips, and shifted her place in the carriage in the excitement, aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. “If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but his caresses; but I can’t and I don’t care to be anything else. And by that desire I rouse aversion in him, and he rouses fury in me, and it cannot be different. Don’t I know that he wouldn’t deceive me, that he has no schemes about Princess Sorokina, that he’s not in love with Kitty, that he won’t desert me! I know all that, but it makes it no better for me. If without loving me, from _duty_ he’ll be good and kind to me, without what I want, that’s a thousand times worse than unkindness! That’s—hell! And that’s just how it is. For a long while now he hasn’t loved me. And where love ends, hate begins. I don’t know these streets at all. Hills it seems, and still houses, and houses.... And in the houses always people and people.... How many of them, no end, and all hating each other! Come, let me try and think what I want, to make me happy. Well? Suppose I am divorced, and Alexey Alexandrovitch lets me have Seryozha, and I marry Vronsky.” Thinking of Alexey Alexandrovitch, she at once pictured him with extraordinary vividness as though he were alive before her, with his mild, lifeless, dull eyes, the blue veins in his white hands, his intonations and the cracking of his fingers, and remembering the feeling which had existed between them, and which was also called love, she shuddered with loathing. “Well, I’m divorced, and become Vronsky’s wife. Well, will Kitty cease looking at me as she looked at me today? No. And will Seryozha leave off asking and wondering about my two husbands? And is there any new feeling I can awaken between Vronsky and me? Is there possible, if not happiness, some sort of ease from misery? No, no!” she answered now without the slightest hesitation. “Impossible! We are drawn apart by life, and I make his unhappiness, and he mine, and there’s no altering him or me. Every attempt has been made, the screw has come unscrewed. Oh, a beggar woman with a baby. She thinks I’m sorry for her. Aren’t we all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and each other? Schoolboys coming—laughing Seryozha?” she thought. “I thought, too, that I loved him, and used to be touched by my own tenderness. But I have lived without him, I gave him up for another love, and did not regret the exchange till that love was satisfied.” And with loathing she thought of what she meant by that love. And the clearness with which she saw life now, her own and all men’s, was a pleasure to her. “It’s so with me and Pyotr, and the coachman, Fyodor, and that merchant, and all the people living along the Volga, where those placards invite one to go, and everywhere and always,” she thought when she had driven under the low-pitched roof of the Nizhigorod station, and the porters ran to meet her.

• From Querelle (1953)

  He drawled out that affirmative, making it seem a matter so self-evident that it was not worth talking about. At the same time he crossed his legs and took out a cigarette. His whole demeanor seemed an attempt to prove, though it wasn't clear to whom, that the importance of the moment did not lie in his affirmative answer, but in the most trivial gesture. ''Smoke?" "Why not." They lit their cigarettes, took a first puff, and Querelle returned his forcefully through the nose, expressing by those tough smoke-spewing nostrils his sense of victory over himself, a well-kept secret that permitted him to deal so familiarly with a cop-after all, something almost like an officer. The police authorities quickly reached the assumption that both the murders had been comm�tted by Gil. Their belief was confirmed when the other masons saw, and identified, the cigarette lighter found lying in the grass near the assassinated sailor. At first, the police considered a revenge motive; then they thought of the possibility of some love drama; and finally arrived at the notion of sexual aberration plain and simple. All the rooms in the Brest Police Headquarters emanated an effiuvium of despair, yet it was of a peculiarly consoling kind. The walls were decorated with some photographs provided by the Department of Criminal Anthropometry, and with a few "Wanted" notices for unapprehended criminals, specifically those who were suspected of having reached some port town. The tables and desks were laden with dossiers containing statements and important memoranda. From the moment he entered the office, Gil felt like sinking in an ocean of gravity. He 146 I JEAN GENET. knew this feeling from the very moment of his arrest by Mario : when the detective grabbed hold of his sleeve, Gil disengaged himself, but as totally prescient of that reaction Mario repeated, more exactly, simply continued his gesture, squeezing the bicep with such authority that the young mason had to give in to it. It was all there, in the brief moment between the two "apprehensions" -the first one repulsed, the second one decisive-: all the glory of the game, the chase, the irony, the cruelty, the sense of justice that go into building that specific gravity of the police, of the soul of a cop, of the total despair of Gil Turko. He pulled himself together, not to succumb to it, seeing that the Inspector who was with Mario had a very young face, positively radiating a melange of choler and pleasure at the kill. Gil said : "What d'you want from me?" Shaking a little, he added : ". . . Sir . . ." The young Inspector provided the answer: "Don't worry, buddy. We'll show you." From the arrogance of that Gil realized with amazement that this young copper was delighted with Mario's decisive action, that of imprisoning the murderer's hands in a pair of handcuffs.