Synopsis: After Silence: Rape & My Journey Back

Synopsis: After Silence: Rape & My Journey Back
	After Silence weaves together two types of literary discourses. One is Nancy Venable Raine's memoir of rape and its impact on her life over a decade. The other is a discussion that provides the reader with a context for her story. As she tells her story Nancy also examines the long-term physiological and psychological aftereffects of rape, its tangled sexual confusions, the treatment of rape by the media and the legal and medical professions, contemporary cultural attitudes toward rape and its victims, and the ways that these attitudes reinforce survivor silence and shame.
To My Reader
	In this introduction Nancy, who was 39 years old when she was raped in her home in Boston in 1985, discusses the events leading up to her decision to break her silence. Her essay about the haunting seventh anniversary of her rape, "Returns of the Day," was published in The New York Times Magazine on October 2,1994. She describes how letters she received from other survivors encouraged her to explore the source of society's resistance to rape survivors becoming witnesses to their own experiences.
Chapter One: The Bird
		A stranger who slipped into her new apartment while she was taking out the trash attacks Nancy. She is blindfolded, beaten, raped, suffocated almost to the point of unconsciousness and repeatedly threatened with death. As the rapist's rage escalates, Nancy describes a state of detached indifference, a sense of a calming presence in which she is a spectator. After several hours the rapist leaves and her terror returns. In shock, she is unable even to remember the number, "911."
Chapter Two: Shadow Dance
		Nancy describes her experience in the hospital emergency room. "My body was still not my own. It was evidence. I was not a patient whose wounds could be sutured. I was the scene of a crime."
Chapter Three: Boxes
		The practical problems Nancy faced in the twelve days immediately following her rape are described in a list of tasks. Nancy then retreats to her parents' home in Virginia where, despite the loving support of her parents and her brother, she experiences an intense fear of being alone, sleeplessness, depression, self-doubt and self-blame, emotional numbness and feelings of helplessness described in journal entries. With her father, Nancy makes wooden boxes for the friends who helped her in Boston and finds a small measure of comfort.
Chapter Four: Adrift
		The chapter opens with a description of a "flashback" six years after her rape. Nancy examines current research in order to shed light on the lingering aftereffects of her trauma. She presents information on Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and referencing Dr. Judith Herman's important book, Trauma and Recovery, examines the history of the study of PTSD. She presents statistics on the incidence of rape in America. Returning to her narrative, Nancy describes continuing anxiety and fear as she returns to Boston to pick up the pieces of her life.
Chapter Five: Under the Eaves
		Nancy rents the attic of a home in Concord, Massachusetts where she struggles to regain a sense of safety and control. She describes how her experience of the world of rape "formed my entire conception of reality." Her fragile sense of safety is shattered when her privacy is invaded by her landlord's young son. She discovers missing evidence from the crime scene and rages at her rapist as she destroys it. In the context of a discussion of a rape case involving the use of DNA evidence, Nancy looks at the issue of privacy in rape cases and why the need for it is "proof, if ever one was needed, that there is still a widespread stigma for victims of rape, a stigma that is reinforced by the accumulation of unnamed names in our newspapers."
Chapter Six: Patch Work
		Nancy fears she is having a mental breakdown and seeks help, eventually finding a therapist who guides her as she regains a sense of control over her life, one small step at the time. Seven months after her rape she applies for financial assistance with the Victims Compensation Program, a process that again brings to the surface her anger and shame. She is still suffering from nightmares and other conditions associated with rape trauma. These feelings lift at last when she paints the floors in her attic retreat. "The woman who had been raped could submerge for a time, forget for a time. Pretend, as she swam beneath the surface, that she need never come up for air again."
Chapter Seven: Memory
		Nancy examines the nature of memory and the unique injury that traumatic experience inflicts on a survivor's ability to create a personal narrative. Drawing on the journals she kept while living in her attic in Concord, she "reconstructs" her story. She explores the way her rape "distorted not only what came after it, but all that went before it as well." To understand the way trauma affects memory she analyzes Pat Conroy's novel, The Prince of Tides, and provides an example of trauma's impact on memory from the work of a leading researcher, Dr. Bessel A. van der Kolk.
Chapter Eight: The Woman in the Amber Necklace
		After "Returns of the Day" is published Nancy attends a luncheon in Berkeley, California where she is told that "no one wants to hear about such terrible things." She describes how this remark both shamed and silenced her and devotes this chapter to exploring her response to it. Drawing upon Dr. Judith Herman's analysis of the dialectic of psychological trauma in Trauma and Recovery, Nancy explores the conflict between the "will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them out loud." She looks for clues to her shame about disclosure in her own family background. She discusses Susan Brownmiller's book, Against Our Will, and examines the silencing nature of the emotion of shame. She touches on Freudian theory about rape and explores the origins of society's failure to acknowledge the impact of rape on individuals and society.
Chapter Nine: Victoria
		Nancy is approaching the first anniversary of her rape. She describes her reunion with a long lost friend, Victoria, a rape survivor who comes back into her life, offering support. As Nancy's first anniversary nears, she finds herself re-experiencing the intense fear she felt during her rape. Discouraged and full of self-hatred, Nancy looks to research by Dr. Lenore Terr in Too Scared to Cry to try to understand this phenomenon. With her friend's understanding, Nancy is able to overcome her fear and attend Victoria's wedding.
Chapter Ten: The Good Ground
		Nancy attends Victoria's wedding and meets Steve. In the context of their love story, she examines the way her rape destroyed her confidence in her intuition and the psychological reasons for her feeling that she was responsible for her rape. She marries Steve seven months after Victoria's wedding and moves to San Francisco, where she embraces a new life and the role of stepmother to Steve's children. For two years memories of the rape submerge, but then Nancy begins to experience troubling dreams and feelings of isolation and depression that she cannot explain.
Chapter Eleven: A Fall from Grace
		Nancy and Steve move to Sausalito. Nancy describes how her trauma continues to resurface, disguised as over-involvement and over-achievement. When Nancy is shopping in San Francisco's Chinatown a few days after the fourth anniversary of her rape, she experiences a sudden and inexplicable emotional collapse.
Chapter Twelve: A New World
		Nancy describes a year of trying to deny the possibility that her rape may be troubling her. "Denial is a presence disguised as an absence," she writes. She finds that everyday, once pleasurable demands have a debilitating effect. Her world is "shaken" by the Loma Prieta earthquake, creative failure, the death of a pet and problems in her marriage that send her and Steve to couples counseling. Nancy's depression increases and she finds herself on the verge of suicide. In this context she cites literature about PTSD and explores the research on traumatic injury and the nature and cause of "intrusion phenomenon" such as reenactments, flashbacks and nightmares.
Chapter Thirteen: Blackberries
		In this chapter Nancy puts her story aside to examine the cultural confusion between rape and sex. She illustrates this problem with examples from newspaper accounts, movies and the media, surveys of student attitudes toward rape, and her own experience with friends and colleagues as she is writing her book. She explores the source of other people's embarrassment with her choice to write about her experience and the impact of these reactions on her feelings about herself. In a complex analysis of the confusion between rape and sex and its role in supporting rape stigma, Nancy concludes that rapists are "sexual impostors" and that "rape is the only crime of violence that masquerades as sex."
Chapter Fourteen: Turning Point
		It is late 1990. Nancy describes the return of feelings she experienced during the rape and her hatred for the rapist. She finally confides in a friend, Helen, who had endured years of sexual abuse from her father. To Nancy's shock, her friend tells her it is time to get past the rape.
Chapter Fifteen: Starting Through
		In this short chapter Nancy describes her first meeting with Dr. Deborah Rose, a psychiatrist, who will guide her on the long journey to healing.
Chapter Sixteen: Ancient Anniversaries
		Wanting to understand Helen's response and seeking insight, Nancy looks for a story that can guide her through the process of transforming the "victim" into someone who can bridge both the darkness and the light. She finds comfort in the Greek myth of Persephone and Demeter, a story of rape, rage and reconciliation.
Chapter Seventeen: In the House of Gathering
		Nancy describes her experience with Eye Movement Desentization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a treatment that helps her deal with a painful image from her rape. She describes the two-year course of therapy with Dr. Rose, a specialist in the treatment of rape trauma. She cites research by Dr. Rose on the nature of rape trauma and the ways it differs from other traumatic experiences, exploring projective identification and counter transference. She touches on the history of the psychiatric treatment of rape and makes a case for the need for therapists to be properly trained. She describes a dream that showed her the way back to vitality.
Epilogue
		It is 1993 and Nancy has painted a picture of the image unlocked during her treatment with EMDR. It and a picture by her friend, Helen, are being exhibited in an art show in Santa Cruz, California. Nancy relates her feelings on the tenth anniversary of her rape, when she mailed the first chapters of her book to her agent, and her final discovery more than two years later, when she had finished writing After Silence. Go Back to Top