An Untamed StateBy Roxane GayBlack Cat, 2014I saw the film Before Midnight in the theatre. In it, Julie Delpy’s character Celine delivers a line which made the entire audience gasp. The women sensed its truth and the men, I suspect, were shocked. "The only upside of being over 35,” she said, “is that you don't get raped as much." Her husband, played by Ethan Hawke, laughs, as if she’s being silly.As much.Radical feminist activist Andrea Dworkin, famous for her anti-porn and anti-sex work stances, wrote in the New Statesman about being raped at the age of 52 in a Paris hotel room, after something was slipped into her drink. Despite her work in the name of equality, Dworkin’s reputation outside feminist circles (and within some too) was of a joy-killing ghoul. Misogynists turned her into a bogey-woman, a photo of her yelling face an easy icon for anti-feminists to cling to. Yet her hard-core stances, her fierceness, her fight and anger were nothing in the face of her rape: “I know I represent something to you, but really I'm a piece of crap because I just got raped. No, no, you're not a piece of crap when you get raped, but I am.” She wanted to disappear. “I felt overwhelming grief as if I had died,” she wrote.While reading Roxane Gay’s novel An Untamed State, I kept thinking of the way Dworkin wrote about the after-effects of her assault. Gay’s main character Mireille is humiliated, beaten, burned, and raped by seven men for thirteen days. When she has to return to the regular world, she finds she is no longer of it. “I died,” she repeats throughout.An Untamed State is not really the story of a kidnapping, though that takes up a majority of the page count. Mireille is the American-born child of Haitian immigrants. In her adulthood her parents have returned to the land of their birth, with hard-won wealth and prestige they could not have achieved had they stayed. As the novel begins, Mireille and her white American husband Michael are in Haiti visiting her parents, taking a day-trip to the sea side with their infant son, Christophe. Within the first few pages a gang of men strike, taking Mireille for ransom (a common practice in Haiti, it is later explained).Thus begins the first-person tale of her captivity, which is then interspersed with flashbacks of her life leading up to this point. Mireille speaks of “the before” and “the after”: “In the before I took the sanctity of my body for granted. In the after my body was nothing.” The first half of the novel — neither “before” or “after” but during, the part where she endures — should be considered a long though necessary exposition. Gay spares no detail — “What did they do to you?” her mother-in-law asks; “I swallowed hard and looked up. ‘Everything.’” — and this is a choice. The novel is difficult to read, but if it does not induce memories of trauma for the reader — and it very well may — one should not to look away, skip pages, or stop reading. Recounting the horror is, here, necessary for understanding.The chapter headers of An Untamed State are hash marks, looking as if a prisoner was counting the days in a cell on the wall, and they continue this way throughout, even after Mireille is released. This is a visual indication that the after effects of the event, and the trauma that result, are as much a prison as much as any physical incarceration. An early review of the novel ended on a cliff-hanger: will Mireille get out? Spoiler alert — she gets out. They release her, but she feels as if she dies anyway.Part I of An Untamed State is titled “Happily Ever After.” “This is how the fairy tale ends,” Gay writes, long before the book ends. In fact, this part of the narrative unfurls exactly as a fairy tale would, with horror, escape, and reckoning. Raised in America, where fairy tales have been sanitized, Mireille has been indoctrinated with ideas about inevitable happy endings. And this fairy tale does in fact begin with a perfect life, evoking the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus, a tale about overreaching: “we were going to throw [Christophe] toward the sun.” Comfortable and cossetted by her education, wealth, and family, she will soon face thirteen days in a Haiti she never really had to understand. She has always believed that her family’s riches would keep her somewhat safe in a country where kidnapping for ransom is common:

I told [my mother] nothing truly bad happens when someone is kidnapped, that a kidnapping is only a matter of time and money and that she would always have both.

Immediately after she is abducted, Mireille chooses to fight back against her captors. This decision is born from her deep internal strength and sense of justice, though it may not be a practical one. The leader of the group that takes her, called The Commander, says “‘I don’t understand women like you. . . . You could have made things easier for yourself. Would it be so hard to play nice with me?’” “‘I don’t understand men like you. You could have made things easier for me,’” she replies, and she is correct (though the point is moot). Her resistance only seems to spur them to greater cruelty. It’s likely, of course, these men would have hurt her anyway. But by denying them a pantomime of the passive female behavior they want, she angers them, and this anger arouses them. Though she describes the torture as making her feral, “from the Latin fera for wild animal, something menacing, existing in [the titular] untamed state,” her refusal to bow to their demands is also a refusal to be tamed.Stripped of context, the language of men with any sort of power — as nebulous as privilege, as official as caretaker, as forced as criminal: rapist, doctor, or lover — is eerily similar in the novel:

“You are feisty.”“I like you.” “You don’t know me.” “I know you are brave.”“Are you stalking me again?” she asked. [He] grinned. “I’m stubborn. I like you.” … He pushed her into the kitchen and forced her into an empty chair.He treated me as both lover and enemy — the only way he could, I think, understand a woman.“You’re not…rational right now. This is what you need.”“This is for your own good,” [he] said. “You have no choice.”

As a result, even casual language, or Mireille’s memories of ironic mockery, take on a more sinister tinge: “[Michael] was wearing a wifebeater underneath”; “Michael took a picture of me literally barefoot and chained to the kitchen stove.” Until she bore the brunt of male violence, Mireille didn’t see all the micro-aggressions, the flaunting of the slightest power, the ways in which men hate a woman not under their control. But after her days in captivity Mireille “would always calculate the worst possibilities of being alone with any man but my husband.” In the Haitian airport going back to America after she is freed she gets an extra-long, unnecessary pat-down: “The security agent smirked and set his wand down. I could smell his spite. Men like him do well in such positions.” Mireille notes that women often bear the scars of men’s ambitions: “It is often women who pay the price for what menwant,” she says to The Commander, and so it is for her.In her essay for the Rumpus, “What We Hunger For,” Gay writes of the aftermath of her own trauma at the hands of multiple men: “I was a good girl so that’s what my parents saw when I came home a completely different person.” The difference is like a figurative death. “Just because you survive something does not mean you are strong,” Gay writes in the essay. In the novel, Mireille is strong, so she does not die, but in this state she cannot live. She becomes the undead.Relatives show up at her parents’ house, “there to be seen holding vigil” as one does when expecting a death. And a death is what they are delivered. Mireille disassociates, and notes her soul-dead state throughout the novel:

After days of dying, I was dead.I was no one. My death would not matter.I had a name but I could not recall it, either. I was no one.I was loathsome. I was not a person. I was no one. I was nothing.I was no one so nothing happened to me.I was no one. I could do anything.I was a woman without a country or a family or a name. I was no one.I tried to find the words to explain to my sister that I was not alive, that the sister she remembered was dead.I ached even though I was dead.I needed him to understand I was dead. I needed him to bury me, move on.I had no idea what to do with myself, how to move forward from one moment to the next, how to be alive.

Dworkin expressed similar sentiments in the piece she wrote about her sexual assault: “I have been tortured and this drug-rape runs through it, a river of horror. I'm feeling perpetual terror. I stare blankly or I say some words. I'm ready to die.” Gay’s writing about her own experience in the Rumpus also echoes Mireille’s psychic death: “I knew things but I knew nothing about what a group of boys could do to kill a girl.” From their trauma, these women are drawn metaphorically together into a community of the living dead.This imagery is uncannily reminiscent of the most famous story of life in death, or death in life — Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Stoker’s heroine Mina recounts the vampire’s attempt to draw her into the underworld:

With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the —

This scene finds its twin in the last time Mireille suffers at the hands of The Commander, her own chest cut open by his sadistic use of a knife, before he once again demands her sexual service: “I killed myself to save myself. I would not have survived otherwise. . . . my lips to his chest . . . tasted my own blood on his skin. I died.” Again I am reminded of Dworkin:

I couldn't defend myself. I had been helpless. I had decided long ago that no one would ever rape me again; he or they or I would die. But this rape was necrophiliac: they wanted to fuck a dead woman.

Echoes proliferate. “‘You should stay,” The Commander says, “be the boss’s woman. You’re no good to anyone else now. I ruined you for any man but me.’” It is a sick version of a marriage proposal. Some men say a version of this to women they “deflower” — or as Michael says to Mireille when he unknowingly takes her virginity, “’God, I’m going to marry you’”— and Dracula something similar to Mina. “’And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my helper.’ Finding such similar language in such disparate places — a Victorian horror story, a novel about a first-generation American in Haiti, a first-person account by a white radical feminist in Paris — suggests that they draw on something archetypal in the way that trauma, particularly sexual trauma, affects the mind.“I did not want to eat. I did not want anything inside me,” says Mireille, as she semi-unconsciously begins starving to death. For what need do the dead have of food? Pain is their nourishment. In the “after” Mireille seeks out more pain and finds a man in a bar happy to oblige, though she never says a word to him. He likes the look of her; she meekly lets him buy her round after round of drinks, pull her on to the dance floor, then out into the parking lot:

I would let this man with a woman’s name break me again so I might be properly healed. . . . a redneck meatpacker named Shannon, a man with a raw dead stink.

Across time and genre, the undead are drawn to what they themselves are and want more of what got them there. If vampires are born of blood and drink blood for sustenance, then the undead of sexual violence too will repeat this cycle to survive. Mireille dreams of the rapes and there she enjoys it, orgasms again and again as she is attacked. Her psyche is so consumed by violence that her subconscious is convinced she likes it. The undead become the violent thing; they find pleasure in rage and hate.Like a vampire, Andrea Dworkin “hated seeing the sun rise.” She shuffles as though a zombie, she suffers from suicidal ideation. This is a real-life account of very deep trauma — I do not make the comparison to the literature written about the undead lightly. For what are these men, if not the monsters we fear the most?

I couldn't put one foot in front of the other and I wanted to put a butcher's knife into my heart behind my ribs. I was very lonely. I was consumed by grief and sorrow until I was lucky enough to become numb. I thought I could resist by not dying, but that might be too hard and maybe I was too old and too tired and couldn't do it any more. My body was a curse and had betrayed me. I couldn't figure out why they would want to do this and why they would want to do it to me. I don't know why the world didn't stop right then, when the creatures drugged and raped me. I don't know how the earth can still turn. I don't believe that it should be possible. I don't. I think everyone should have stopped everything because I was 52 and this happened to me. I think every person should have been in mourning. I think no one should work or spend money or love anyone ever again.

Dracula has been understood by some as a tale of the anxieties of contagious disease (possibly syphilis), carried through the blood or transmitted through sex. Trauma, too, is a contagion, a soiling: first, through the violent act, then a festering wound that swallows the victim, and finally a pandemic runs through others as the re-enactment of violence or the second-hand pain of watching someone you love become one of the undead. “Unclean, unclean!” Mina exclaims after she drinks Dracula’s blood. “I must touch him or kiss him no more.” “I would never get clean,” thinks Mireille, and later she cannot touch her baby, because she feels so defiled.Early on, Mireille disgustedly describes the way Americans talk about the kidnapping of prosperous Haitians by their less fortunate countrymen, “as if kidnapping were a disease, a contagion that could not be controlled.” Yet her earlier hubris and naivety show here too, since the violence that poverty induces is something of a virus, infecting communities, becoming way of life, then visited upon others. Are her captors, too, part of the undead violent of the streets, inoculated against empathy? Certainly the two main male tormentors, The Commander and TiPierre, seem wildly out of touch with human emotions (either their own, others’, or both). Upon her release, Mireille thinks of The Commander that “maybe we were both broken in similar ways.” (Though she quickly tries to sublimate that thought.) If — to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir — women are not born but made, it is worth carefully considering that the ways in which some men enact violence is also societally coded. Read too fast and you might miss it, but this ability to see nuance in the monsters’ backstory may be the most shocking part of An Untamed State, especially to those of us who are rendered cynical by our own wounds.An Untamed State covers a wide range of themes — immigration, class, racism, family dynamics, and the strength of the human heart. Its tone is set, though, and its themes unified, by the language of trauma and the undead. Gay’s prose is stark, almost journalistic, yet it echoes other narratives that deal with the fear of this trauma in more fantastic ways. It also echoes other first-person accounts of the same. This is not to say An Untamed State is derivative — far from it. Rather, the novel acknowledges, through its own unique story, that there are events that can reduce any of us to a base thing, an undead shell. This is a heart-wrenching book, and an important one.____Heather Cromarty is a Toronto-based reviewer and critic. Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Lemon Hound, and Quill and Quire, among other places.