"Dear Father, Do What You Want to Me"

This week, I’m writing about two books that involve paternal rape: Deerskin by Robin McKinley and Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan. If you haven’t read either, you might want to do so before you read this. They are affecting books and I value the strange, private experience of having read them with little advance knowledge. I’ve tried to talk about them here in a way that cloaks or omits many plot points, though the spell of a book consists of much more than story.

Deerskin starts with a love story. A prince seeks the hand of a princess whose father, the king, sets him to an impossible challenge, one that would take many lifetimes to complete. But the connection between the princess and her suitor is so great that he accomplishes the tasks with ease. After he produces evidence of his success, he throws the precious proof into a fire. He needs nothing more than his bride.

The nameless prince becomes king and his nameless wife becomes queen. They have a daughter, Lissar, the book’s heroine, but they have no relationship with her. They care only for one another and the adoration of their people. The isolated and forgotten Lissar is tended to by a single nurse and doesn’t know her parents. She barely knows anybody.

The queen falls ill and dies, and her passing infects her husband and citizens like it is its own disease. Lissar, as usual, is an outlier, and the two years after her mother’s death are the happiest of her life thanks to a puppy, sent by another kingdom’s ruler as condolence for her mother’s death. While Lissar is collecting her gift from the throne room, she sees her father, who is a stranger. They don’t speak but she looks into his eyes and his gaze makes her “cold all over, suddenly, so cold that the sweat of terror broke out on her body.” She moves from her secluded tower room into a bedroom on the ground floor, so that her dog, Ash, can have access to the enclosed outdoors, a walled garden.

Lissar’s 17th birthday occasions a ball during which she’s supposed to meet potential husbands. But her father won’t let her dance with anyone except himself. The next morning, she’s summoned to the throne room. There, in front of the court, her father announces that he will marry her in three days. The crowd is horrified but they don’t object or defend the princess. Instead, they despise her, a mysterious, foreign girl to whom they have no allegiance. She can’t be wronged because the wrongness is from her and in her; her father is her victim. (“How evil the girl must be, to have brought her own father to this pass.”) No one makes eye contact with her as she leaves.

Lissar locks herself in her bedroom from its main door, but she has no key for the door to the garden. For two nights, her father attempts to break into her primary door. On the third night, he comes through the door to the outside. Ash leaps to attack when he enters, but Lissar’s father grabs the dog’s hind legs and hurls her against the wall, where her head hits and shatters a window: “Lissar hears the sickening crack her dog’s body made beneath the shrillness of breaking glass; and she screamed and screamed and screamed.” The dog is a symbol of goodness and brave spirit, but she is also a dog, a real and mortal animal, and she is Lissar’s best friend. Lissar’s father beats Lissar mercilessly until her screaming stops, rapes her, and leaves.

Lissar does die, but she is pulled back to her body by Ash, the sole being with “the right to demand that she return.” And in the fog of returning, Lissar “remembered where she had learned about joy: she had learned from her dog.” Ash’s frantic licking is what wakes her: “lovingly, desperately; she was saying, Come back, please come back, don’t leave me, I love you, don’t die, please don’t die, come back, come back, come back.”

Lissar and Ash flee, slowly and brokenly, through the garden.

A magnanimous magic, I anticipated, was responsible for Ash living through her murder and for Lissar’s ability to wake after her own; there was some force involved with them now that would facilitate the story’s happy turn. But Ash and Lissar have no benevolent assistance as they journey through the woods to a deserted cabin in the snow and attempt to sustain themselves there. They live unwashed in bloody, torn rags, eating small amounts of moldy meat and melted snow. Lissar’s injuries barely mend. She has lasting limitation and pain. She is also pregnant though she doesn’t understand that. She’s dissociated from her body, and starving.

There is no meaningful condensing of time during this stage, no fast-forwarding through their protracted struggles—as with the rape, which is pure violence, you have to endure it with them. It felt like it lasted a very long time, and I wondered how this book found a publisher. I wondered why I was still reading it.

If Lissar were alone, it would be different. But she and Ash persevere for each other. Ash’s capacity for delight, her exuberant physicality, is Lissar’s source of pleasure:

To lose yourself in close study of a beloved animal is to be reassured and it had that effect on me as a reader; it helped me to keep going. I trusted McKinley, who manages to make these awful, arduous passages believable without being entirely degrading. Our heroines save each other from abjection. There is no shame in their being together.

Lissar and Ash eventually do receive a miraculous intervention that eases their suffering, and the second half of the book marks a clear departure from the eerie, intensifying malevolence that came before. But Lissar is changed by what she endures, and it doesn’t feel quite right to say she’s healed, not if “healed” denotes a state that’s permanent or complete. “I am hurt,” she says at the story’s end, “in ways I cannot explain, even to myself.”

McKinley wrote Deerskin—for which she “received some fairly spectacular hate mail” calling her “a vile human being to tackle such a subject at all”—because she so disliked Charles Perrault’s “Donkeyskin,” the tale of a widowed king who wants to marry his daughter. “Donkeyskin” is one of the most suppressed/excluded fairy tales in the Western tradition in part because, in the words of Maria Tartar, it “positions the father as the agent of transgressive sexuality and the daughter as the enforcer of cultural law and order.”

The princess in Perrault’s version outwits and escapes her father in advance of a rape. When she returns home with a partner of her own choosing, the king’s “wicked flame had been transformed into paternal devotion,” and he’s free from his former “lawless desire” though there is no explanation as to why or how. Everyone who witnesses their reunion is “deeply moved by [the king’s] happiness.” Here, too, in the eyes of the people, the father was traumatized by the implicit suggestions of his daughter’s body. Thank god he survived.

The Grimm brothers’ tale “The Maiden Without Hands” hinges upon similar paternal violence and selfishness but is far less notorious; it lacks the overt sexual element and also the daughter’s resistance. When the father in “Maiden” tells his daughter he needs to cut off her hands so the devil can take her, or else the devil will take him away instead, the daughter replies, “dear father, do what you want with me. I am your child.”¹ Her positioning herself as such isn’t intended to confront him with his depravity but to reassure him that she doesn’t belong to herself. Meanwhile, cowardice rather than lust is the father’s impetus toward violence—a tolerable motivation.

“It is when fairy tales coincide with experience that they begin to suffer from censorship, rather than the other way around,” writes Marina Warner.

McKinley’s hate mail is consistent with this refusal to accept, and a similar rebuke is present in public responses to memoirs of paternal incest which are treated as maladaptive and grotesque, more disturbing than the inciting act itself. One review of Katherine Brady’s Father’s Days (1979) opens by wondering whether “publicly exposing dad as Big Bad Wolf serves any purpose besides fueling the fires of the victim’s resentment.”² Fast forward twenty years to “Daddy’s Girl Cashes In,” the headline for The Washington Post’s review of Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, which Pulitzer Prize-winning staff critic Jonathan Yardley calls “slimy, repellent, meretricious [and] cynical” for its “offenses against familiar privacy and ordinary decency.”³ “Remember when it took some digging to unearth secrets?” writes James Wolcott of the same book in The New Republic. “When guilt and repression were still powerful enforcers?” Harrison once “posed in fish net stockings and a tacky dress slit thigh-high” in a photo for Vogue, Wolcott sneers, and the affair with her father began when she was 20 “and old enough to know better.”

I can’t quite imagine The Kiss⁴ receiving such nakedly misogynistic coverage today. (At least by 2018, when The Incest Diary⁵ came out, editors knew enough to have other women do the dirty work—though The Incest Diary is also a very different piece of writing than The Kiss.⁶ ) But silence is still enforced when it comes to father-daughter rape in all contexts, fictional and factual, even if/when the account is veiled. The act cannot be acknowledged in any form or for any reason.

Some angry readers, author Margo Lanagan wrote, come to a book in search of pure escape, and simply “don't want to be upset by fictional material in the way that reality upsets them.” She’s right, of course, and the problem only arises when the otherwise harmless preference expresses itself as a crusade against material they could easily set aside. Lanagan’s acclaimed and maligned Tender Morsels (2008) begins with a child, Liga, miscarrying her father’s baby in ignorance and in the snow, as does Lissar. Like Lissar, Liga waits in vain to die. (“Dying outside in the snow would be less wretched than the indoor life.”) And like McKinley’s, Lanagan’s novel is the adaptation of a fairy tale that nettled her, “Snow White and Rose Red” by the Brothers Grimm: “an unpleasant little sermon about how women will be rewarded for putting up with men's unrelentingly appalling behaviour.”

Lanagan’s treatment of rape in Tender Morsels is influenced by her awareness that the book would be marketed as YA⁷ , and is (in some ways) less brutal than McKinley’s.⁸ But her book on the whole is crueler to its main character, Liga, who is raped by multiple men and eventually bears two daughters from her abuse. In exchange for her protracted suffering, Liga is given a personal heaven in which to raise her girls, Branza and Urdda. But heaven is not inviolable; the occasional stranger stumbles in. And when he does—for the intruder is always a “he”—his presence cuts new questions into the hearts and minds of the three women living there. Eventually, through the curiosity of her younger daughter, Urdda, Liga is pulled back into the real world, where she must live among villagers who assaulted her and villagers who ignored the assaults.

When Lanagan was accused of harming children with Tender Morsels’s “sordid wretchedness⁹ ,” she answered, “How on earth do people imagine we equip children for life, if we never show them the sorts of issues other people encounter?” I don’t think her response is wrong, but it’s worth noting that she’s assumed, as do her critics, that the young people reading her book won’t have encountered assault on their own, that the only way sexual violation enters their lives is if an author puts it there in print.

Tender Morsels has more sex and rape, both, than Deerskin, but I don’t think it’s more steeped in sexual assault than some of the books I read at an early age: Silver by Norma Fox Mazer, Fair Game by Erika Tamar. Tender Morsels is certainly is not more graphic or menacing than what I was exposed to through visual culture (TV, movies, the news.) I don’t think I was out of tween-dom before I knew women were destined to lives of sexual injury. Bodily vulnerability was inextricable from being a girl, at any age. I don’t think I needed books to tell me that, though they did.

What feels adult to me about Tender Morsels (which I don’t think many kids younger than 14 would stick with, anyway) is the layers of sacrifice that Liga endures after the rapes and despite—sometimes, because of—her respite in heaven. It’s after her return that Liga is made to surrender even more of her own fulfillment and happiness for her daughters, when she is tempted with, then deprived of, that which “would make her life in this true world all right and complete.” I don’t mean to be obtuse, but Tender Morsels is a complicated book, with many plot points and characters, so it’s difficult to contextualize this moment without extensive summary. I hope it conveys enough to share Liga’s response to the breaking of the news.

Her humiliation and denial in this moment were, for me, as an adult woman, more devastating than the rapes, but also so devastating because of them, because of what she’s been through and the fact that there is no reward for it, no compensation in the story of her life, no making right. There is not even a villain this time, nor ill intent—only the eternal problem of separate human hearts.

The conclusion of Tender Morsels is one of the saddest endings I’ve ever read, all the sadder because it is as happy as these characters can get, and there is happiness and hope among them while there are also colossal absences that can never be filled. It closes with a reunion, and a goodbye, between Branza, the eldest daughter, and her best friend from heaven, a wolf, which is so moving, I can’t read a fragment of it without crying.¹⁰

In the weeks I’ve spent thinking about Deerskin, I realized Ash and Lissar are revived, that first time, by a magic—the ordinary, barbed magic of love, which doesn’t deliver us from suffering but in fact amplifies it, because there is no world in which love has meaning that isn’t also a world of change, the dissembler’s name for loss. The memory of Wolf, Branza thinks, is unbearable, “too powerful a gift—a piece of her soul,” something she needs to leave behind in order to move forward and that’s the bargain we make, sometimes, to save ourselves grief: we try to forget love.

Lissar does not make that bargain. She was to be released from struggle until Ash called her back. She had no choice but to answer because true love is obligation, and if you can’t live without the beloved, perhaps you can’t die without them either. Lissar returns for love, she returns for joy, and she returns for even more suffering. Come back, please come back, don’t leave me, I love you, don’t die, please don’t die, come back, come back, come back.

1  To reiterate, the deal is not that the father chops off his daughter’s hands and then no one is taken away by the devil. His daughter must be mutilated and go with the devil in order to save himself.

2  Brady’s father admitted what he did, so the reviewer can’t openly doubt the abuse, but they manage to rail against Brady for badgering (their word) her dad into counseling and for being unappeased by his apologies “though, admittedly, some were polluted by rationalization.”

3  In the rape apologist’s classic cake-eating style, Yardley simultaneously (and repeatedly) implies it’s all made up. He goes on to gripe that Harrison evinces “a revolting mixture of self-pity and narcissism” and is (annoyingly, it seems?) “coy” rather than “graphic” when it comes to sex. He closes with a lament that he doesn’t have more space in which to keep “piling one abusive paragraph upon another.”

4  I’ve read The Kiss twice (with at least 10 years in between) and both times found it to be tedious and inert. I didn’t care for Exposure or Envy either, so I probably have some fundamental incompatibility with Harrison’s style. But it’s hard not to be on her side with reviews this foul.

5  I think The Incest Diary is incredible, have read it multiple times, and will surely read it again. Amia Srinivasan’s take is comprehensive and in line with my own.

6  In The Telegraph, Allison Pearson went on and on about how the book’s target audience must be pedophiles, and got mad about the author’s anonymity: “If you are making claims as explosive as these, you deserve to be challenged.” Why? Because the violence the author describes in the book never happens to any child? Even Pearson wouldn’t assert something so easily disproved. If the author is lying about those things happening to her, she has identified no man by name. Who, then, is being harmed, and why must there be a public reckoning?

7  Lanagan took issue with this chacterization, saying “It wasn’t so much the YA audience that made Tender Morsels take the form it did. If I’d made all the rape and incest explicit, it would have become a rape-and-incest book; those events would have overwhelmed the story that I wanted to tell, which was about Liga hiding from the world in her personal heaven, and the effect that had on herself and her daughters. Suggesting that she had been through hell was enough; I didn’t need to put the audience through hell with her, whatever age they were.” But elsewhere she cites the YA designation as a factor. (How could it not be?)

8  McKinley, who’d been designated a YA author with her previous books, remained adamant that Deerskin was for adults and some teenagers but not appropriate for preteens, “however precocious their reading skills.”

9  The full descriptor is “sordid wretchedness usually only on offer in the stack of misery memoirs.” So we know where Danuta Kean would have stood on The Kiss and The Incest Diary. I love the headline: “Rape, abortion, incest. Is this what CHILDREN should read?” CHILDREN!

10  And I do not mean delicate, just spilling over tears but face-crumpling, throat-aching, I-hope-my-husband-doesn’t-walk-in-on-me crying.