Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond: Flirtation, Passive Aggression, Domestic Violence

Abstract

With theflare-up of #MeToo in 2017 (amovement created byTaranaBurkemore than ten years earlier to support young Black women and girls from economically disadvantaged communities who had experienced sexual violence), the delusions of postfeminism were replaced by a new awareness—unprecedented in its social reachas well as its judicial and economiceffect—of thepervasive violenceofmisogyny.1 In herotherwise rather uninspired contribution to aneditorial on the#MeToo campaign for theEuropean Journal of Women’s Studies,KathyDavis asks that wedirect our attention “to themurky and complicated ambivalences in which sexual harassment . . . [is] embedded” (Zarkov and Davis 8). Davis draws upon an astute argument in favor of “cultivating ambivalence” as an anthropological method by Ciara Kierans and Kirsten Bell, who suggest that “an analytic of ambivalence . . . teaches usmore about the character of social relations than prefigured moral stances can” (23). Barbara N. Nagel has responded to this call in the field of literary studies with a daringly original, elegantly written, rigorous, and witty book. After only two years of the surge of #MeToo, which brought the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and gender violence to the fore, Nagel offers a historical and literary account of how we arrived at the current “rape culture.” The phrase itself is ambiguous (I have learned to attend to such things from the present study), coupling amarkerof creativity and sophistication(culture)with aphenomenon as brutal and destructive as rape.How better to face this ambiguity than to return toGerman realism, Nagel suggests, because in and through this literature the perfidious ambiguity of intimate violence came to be developed and socially condoned. While Davis and her reference are concernedwith the oppressors and themurky ambiguities and complicated ambivalences that they experience, Nagel cultivates ambiguity on both and, evenmore important, on asmany sides as possible. Of perhaps foremost interest to our field is the ambiguity of literature or, rather, the ambiguity of literary ambiguity. Literary ambiguity is often celebrated as an aesthetic and epistemological virtue singularly suited to representing complex issues and empowering the reader’s autonomy of thought. Nagel shows that it also masks aggression and allows violence to develop and perpetuate under the radar. She alerts us to the literary canon’s complicity in social violence and exposes a “poetics of unaccountability” (16). The book “explores small social forms of ordinary life,” namely, flirtation, amorous and conjugal correspondence, and family life (2). The lives might be deemed trivial, but the fact that aggression and violence rank among the ordinary is no small matter. Nagel’s slim book is a power tool with a broad range of applications.