A REINTERVIEW with Rosa Eberly, text of article.

The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View

with Rosa Eberly  about her  article published in P/T

during February, March, and April of 1995.


Date:         Fri, 10 Feb 1995 00:06:58 -0600 
From:         Victor Vitanza 
Subject:      Announcement (New REINVW)

To:  REINVWers
Re:  new re/inter/view scheduled

On the sublist PTISSUES, we have been discussing a number
of issues related to the Univ of Michigan's expelling of a male student
who posted on a net list (alt.sex) a highly questionable discourse
using the real &  full name of a female classmate.  In the discourse,
he acts out a fantasy of exceptional violence (rape, sodomy, mutilation)
against the classmate.

The debate on PTISSUES has centered on a number of aspects
about these incidents (the expulsion, the discourse itself, violence
against women, first amendment rights, etc.--all too numerous and
complex here for me to summarize).  If anyone is interested in the
discussion, s/he should subscribe to PTISSUES, for it still continues.
Also, the logs for  this sublist are available.

We have, along with our discussion, posted various newstories from
nearby publishers and the campus newspaper.

Since this *incident* has struck a chord and interesting
exchange, I thought it might be of interest to re/inter/view Rosa
A. Eberly (U of TX, Austin) and her forthcoming article on Andrea
Dworkin. (Both MacKinnon and Dworkin have been mentioned
in our discussions on PTISSUES.)

Below is an abstract of the article.  I will be posting a copy of the
full article very soon.

--Victor, moderator
SOPHIST@UTARLG.UTA.EDU

*******************


-----**Eberly's Abstract of article for next re/inter/view**


 Rosa A. Eberly
"Andrea Dworkin's _Mercy:_ Pain, _Ad Personam,_ and Silence
in the 'War Zone.' "  In _PRE/TEXT_ 14.3-4 (1993).

*Abstract*

Unlike _Ulysses_ and _Tropic of Cancer,_ which have become
canonical enough to amass storied accounts of their battles for
publication against state censorship, and even unlike _American
Psycho,_ whose journey to publication received immense publicity
precisely because the book's sexually violent subject matter caused
it to be rejected by one publisher and readily accepted by another two
days later, Andrea Dworkin's _Mercy_ has not received a public account
of its struggle toward U.S. publication. "Andrea Dworkin's _Mercy:_
Pain, _Ad Personam,_ and Silence in the 'War Zone" investigates
why a novel that was published at nearly the same time as _American
Psycho_ and that calls on women to kill men at random in response
to systematic sexual abuse--described graphically in the novel by a
first-person narrator named Andrea--received so little public attention.
The article suggests that Dworkin's conception of literary public spheres
as "war zones" as well as her rhetorical strategies before and in _Mercy_
encourage critics to engage in _ad personam_ argumentation and to
treat her as solely a symbol of radical feminism, thus keeping her books
from reaching the abused women who, Dworkin writes, desperately
need them.  Yet critiques of enlightenment ideologies that linger within
notions of publics and public spheres suggest that Dworkin's guerrilla
tactics are themselves the result of a starting point of unequal power.
Dworkin's work in general and _Mercy_ in particular raise the question
of how to speak one's personal experience in public. In many ways,
_Mercy_ is anecdotal evidence about the effects of pornography on
an individual woman. Whether labeled as fiction or not, such accounts
of the effects of pornography and sexual abuse as
_Mercy_ exemplifies tend not to be discussed on their own terms in
public debate but rather to be addressed in terms of literary merit--a
criterion  that may not apply.

*****
 
====================================
Date:         Sun, 12 Feb 1995 17:07:37 -0600 
From:         Victor Vitanza 
Subject:      correction: Eberly article

To:  REINVWers
from: VJV, moderator 
re: a copy of Eberly's article.

Please read the article and formulate your questions or
points of dicussion.  When we are ready to begin the
re/inter/view, I WILL ANNOUNCE IT.

The format of the re/inter/view will be, as last time with
Geoff Sirc, a forum or roundtable. In other words, questions
may be put to anyone, not just the author.

I f I can be of any help, please drop me a note.


=================================


Andrea  Dworkin's *Mercy*: Pain, *Ad Personam,* and Silence
in the "War Zone"

by  Rosa A. Eberly
University of Texas at Austin
PRE/TEXT  Vol. 14.3-4 (1993)


"You try to make them understand that yes something did
happen honest you aren't lying and you say it again, strained,
thick lipped from biting your lips, your chest swollen from
heartbreak, your eyes swollen from tears all salt and bitter,
holding your legs but you don't want them to see and you keep
pretending to be normal and you want to act adult and you can
barely breathe from crying and you say yes something did
happen and try to say things right because adults are so stupid
and you don't know  the right words but you try so hard and you
say exactly how the man sat down and put his arms around you
and started talking to you and you told him to go away but he kept
holding you and kissing you and talking to you in a funny whisper
and he put his hands in your legs and he kept rubbing you and he
had a really deep voice and he whispered in your ear in this funny,
deep voice and he kept saying just to let him . . . but you couldn't
understand what he said because maybe he was mumbling or
maybe he couldn't talk English so you can't tell them what he said
and you say maybe he was a  foreigner because . . . he talked
funny and you tried to get away but he followed you and then
you ran and you didn't scream or cry until you found your momma
because he might hear you and find so you were quiet even though
you were shaking and you ran and then they say thank God
nothing happened."

--from excerpt of*Mercy*, published as sidebar
to review of *Mercy,* *New York Times Book
Review,* 15 Sept. 1991

"Ms. Dworkin's argument, proceeding from pain, may be moving,
but it is also intolerant, simplistic, and often just as brutal as what
it protests.  Ms. Dworkin advocates nothing short of killing men.
The last chapter ends: 'I went out; at night; to smash a man's face in;
I declared war. My nom de guerre is Andrea One; I am reliably told
there are many more; girls named courage who are ready to kill.'
One cannot argue here, any more than Mr. Rushdie could, that
statements in literature are not equivalent to statements in the
real world."

--Wendy Steiner, review of *Mercy,* *New York Times
Book Review*, 15 Sept. 1991

"The question becomes how to speak about rape--or other self-
destroying experiences--in a way that makes its gravity inescapable
without further erasing the individual selves of those who endure it,
or don't."

--Esther Kaplan, review of *Mercy,*
**Village Voice**,  5 Nov. 1991

"I barely know any words for what happened to me yesterday,
which doesn't make tomorrow something I can conceive of in my
mind; I mean words I say to myself in my own head; not social
words you use to explain something to someone else.  I barely
know anything and if I deviate I am lost; I have to be literal, if I can
remember, which mostly I cannot."

--from excerpt of *Mercy,*
*Michigan Quarterly Review*, Fall 1990


                                #####


Introduction: The "War Zone"

        Unlike Bret Easton Ellis's *American Psycho,* whose journey to
publication received immense publicity precisely because the book's
sexually violent and graphic subject matter caused it to be rejected by
one publisher and readily accepted by another two days later, Andrea
Dworkin's *Mercy* has not received a highly publicized account of its
struggle toward U.S. publication, despite the fact that--while Ellis's novel
was interpreted as an implicit argument for men to rape, kill, and dismember
women--Dworkin's narrator explicitly calls for abused women to kill men at
random.  The absence of a public quest narrative for publication as well as
the dearth of public reaction to the novel--*Mercy* received eleven notices
while *American Psycho* received more than seventy reviews and feature
stories--point to the main issues concerning *Mercy*: the lack of public
attention it received before and after its publication and the relationship
among that lack of attention, the subject matter of the novel--rape specifi-
cally and sexual abuse of women in general--and the argumentative
strategies of Dworkin and her critics.
        This study of public responses to *Mercy* is prompted by a larger
inquiry into alternative ways of studying how fictional texts affect social
practices.  In his early work *The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere,* Jurgen Habermas argues that eighteenth-century "public spheres
in the world of letters" allowed people to discuss cultural products--he
puts special emphasis on the novel--as private people come together
publicly to discuss common interests. These discussions, which fostered
a kind of consciousness which encouraged people to be critical of the
state, were the direct structural predecessor of the bourgeois public sphere;
hence, Habermas's historical argument suggests the primary role of fictional
texts in effecting social change. Habermas's conception of the public
sphere has been addressed by several scholars who, regardless of their
critiques, find the notion a rich starting point for analyzing discourse.1
Nancy Fraser, for example, critiques Habermas's contention that, in the
public sphere, "discussion was to be open and accessible to all, merely
private interests were to be inadmissible, inequalities of status were to be
bracketed, and discussants were to deliberate as peers" (113).  Fraser
has argued that such idyllic conditions never actually existed,2 that society
has always consisted of competing interest groups, most of whom were
silenced by the way "debate about the common good" was perceived.
Social inequalities were not eliminated but only bracketed, Fraser
argues, and

[indent]
discursive interaction within the bourgeois public sphere was
governed by protocols of style and decorum that were themselves
correlates and markers of status inequality. These functioned
informally  to marginalize women and members of the plebian
classes and to prevent them from participating as peers. (119)
[close indent]

Thus, Fraser has theorized the existence of what she calls subaltern
counterpublics, which she defines as "parallel discursive arenas where
members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-
discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpre-
tations of their identities, interests, and needs" (123). These counter-
publics serve two roles: first, to support the subordinated groups among
themselves; and, second, to train members of these groups to engage
in "activities directed toward wider publics" (124).
        Given the continual failure of literary criticism to come to terms
with actual readers rather than highly theorized "ideal" readers, concep-
tions of publics and public spheres--especially given Habermas's historical
account--offer a different means of studying how fictional texts might
foster social change.  Before fictional texts become canonized, rhetori-
cal analyses of public acts of interpretation can reveal the very unsettled
and polyphonic nature of texts as well as the widely divergent judgments
of actual readers.  By studying the publicly articulated interpretive acts
of private people connected through their public discourses, this study
constructs an empirical basis from which to theorize about how cultural
works--both literary texts and critical texts written in response to them
and to each other--affect social practices.3 In what follows, I suggest
 that Dworkin's *Mercy*--like other controversial cultural texts--fostered a
type of literary public sphere.  In this literary public sphere, interpretive
arguments were made and, at least temporarily, lost or won by private
people who came together through writing and reading in a discursively
constructed public space.  These people came together because, in
John Dewey's terms, they recognized--through the cultural work which
united them--that they had common interests; these individuals en-
deavored to persuade others by writing publicly about the work of literature
because they felt they would share with others certain consequences
of its publication and interpretations of that publication.
        Dworkin's ninth book and second novel, *Mercy* was first published
in England in September 1990 by Secker & Warburg. Though a few
reviewers refer to the fact that Dworkin had a difficult time finding a U.S.
publisher for *Mercy*, the only published account this difficulty was written
by Dworkin herself, in an author's note published with a short excerpt
from *Mercy* in the Winter 1990 American Voice: "The following is an excerpt
from *Mercy*, a novel that was published in England this fall but has no
Amerikan publisher. I have been working on it for over two years; it has
had a publisher in England for most of that time.  I think it is fair to say th
in the U.S.A., it is suppressed writing" (24).  Dworkin has written repeat-
edly about the difficulties she has endured getting most of her books
published, a fact she views as a constant battle with publishers to get
her books into the hands of women who need them; this battle for pub-
lication and publicity is one of the recurring themes of Dworkin's non-
fictional *Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1989.*  Ultimately, the
relative silence about a novel that so unabashedly addresses a contro-
versial social and political issue raises questions about the relationship
among fiction, politics, and social change as well as about the nature and
function of literary public spheres in late twentieth-century U.S. culture.
After providing background on Dworkin's other work and on *Mercy*, this
article will analyze the public discourses and lack of same about *Mercy*
and Dworkin's other writings during the period after *Mercy* was published.
It will suggest that Dworkin's argumentative strategies prior to *Mercy*,
her rhetorical choices in *Mercy*, and her critics' insistence on responding
to her as a symbol of radical feminism severely limit the possibility of
critics and other readers being able to construct a common discursive
space in which to discuss Dworkin's ideas on their own merits; in this
literary public sphere the issue is Andrea Dworkin and the argumentative
structure is ad personam.4 I conclude by suggesting that Dworkin's
rhetorical choices in *Mercy* and her critics' representations of her as
writing solely out of personal pain and victimization--and these rhetorical
strategies as paradigmatic of public discussions about issues that
concern what have long been thought to be "private" issues--raise
troubling questions about the possibilities of public discourse and argu-
mentation when it is seen to require a dispassionate, impartial, or disinter-
ested point of view for productive argumentation to ensue (Habermas
25-26, 161-62; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 14, 61).  Ultimately, this
study raises the question of the status and the discursive consequences
of personal experience in a literary public sphere, especially when that
sphere is conceived of as a "War Zone."
        Andrea Dworkin is an appropriate subject for the study of
literary public spheres in part because she states explicitly in her writing
and implies through certain aspects of her writing practice that she
believes fictional discourse can play an important role in public debate;
in addition, as she tells it, her publication history suggests that her work
has been suppressed by the very institutions that have the power to get
people talking with one another about literature and the issues it raises.
 In *Letters from a War Zone*, a collection of essays, speeches, interviews,
and book reviews she wrote between 1976 and 1987, Dworkin introduced
each selection with information about its rhetorical situation and reception
and argued that the press refused to publish or review the great majority
of her work precisely because the issues her writing raises threaten the
power of the press as an institution and threaten to expose connections
among the publishing industry, pornographers, and organized crime:

[indent]
These essays and speeches present a political point of view, an
analysis, information, arguments, that are censored out of the
Amerikan press by  the Amerikan press to protect the porno-
graphers and to punish me for getting way out of line.  I am, of
course, a politically dissident writer but by virtue of gender I am
a second-class politically dissident writer.  That means that I can
be erased, maligned, ridiculed in violent and abusive language,
and kept from speaking in my own voice by people pretending
to stand for freedom of speech.  It also means that every  misogynist
stereotype can be invoked to justify the exclusion, the financial
punishment, the contempt, the forced exile from published
debate. (6)5
[close indent]

While Dworkin's definition of "censorship" is clearly not the legal defini-
tion--indeed, she has published nine books in two decades without
any government interference--it is the kind of reception her books have
received as well as her inability to publish articles in those periodicals
most likely to foster public debate about political issues that prompt
her to talk about her work in terms of censorship.  Even when her work
is discussed in the press, asserts Dworkin, making a claim similar to Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak's in "Can the Subaltern Speak?", she is not given
the chance to speak in her own voice; instead, others misrepresent
her by speaking for her.
        The work that Dworkin has gotten published concerns, primarily,
pornography and sexual abuse. She is the author of the nonfiction
works Woman Hating (1974), *Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses
on Sexual Politics* (1976), *Pornography: Men Possessing Women*
(1981), *Right-Wing Women* (1983), and *Intercourse* (1987), as well
as coauthor with Catherine A. MacKinnon of *Pornography and Civil
Rights* (1988) and ordinances which define pornography as a civil rights
violation against women.6  In addition, she has published a collection
of short stories, *the new woman's broken heart* (1986), and the novel
*Ice and Fire* (1985).7 Despite this record of publication, Dworkin
devotes much of *Letters from a War Zone* to her failure to get most
of what she has written published and much of what she has published
discussed or reviewed publicly. Early in *Letters from a War Zone*, for
instance, Dworkin chronicles what in the collection has and has not
been published before: four of the pieces in Letters were "published
in mainstream magazines with decent, not wonderful, circulations,"
three in *Ms.*, one in *Mother Jones*. "Most of these essays and speeches
were published in tiny, ephemeral newspapers, most of which are no
longer publishing," Dworkin writes. "Seven of these pieces have
never been published at all; four have been published in English but
have never been published in the United States; one, 'Letter from a
War Zone,' has been published in German and Norwegian but never
in English" (5). Dworkin is especially bitter that large-circulation,
relatively liberal U.S. magazines will not publish her work and will not
give her space to respond to the criticisms of her work which they
have published repeatedly:

[indent]
None of these pieces, despite repeated efforts over years, were
published in *The Nation*, *The New Republic*, *The Progressive*,
The *Village Voice*, *Inquiry*, left-liberal periodicals that pretend to
be freewheeling forums for radical debate and all of which have
published vicious articles with nasty, purposeful misrepresenta-
tions of what I believe or advocate. . . .  I have never been given
any right of response. And none of these pieces, despite re-
peated efforts over years, have been published in the magazines
 that presume to intellectual independence: for instance, The
*Atlantic* or *Harper's*. And I have never been able to publish anything
on the op-ed page of *The New York Times*, even though I have
been attacked by name and my politics and my work have been
denounced editorially so many times over the last decade that I
am dizzy from it. And I have never been able to publish in, say,
*Esquire* or *Vogue*, two magazines that publish essays on political
issues, including pornography, and also pay writers real money.
(5-6)
[close indent]


Indeed, after *Letters from a War Zone* was published, the work
of antipornography feminists was criticized in a lead essay by
novelist John Irving in the *New York Times Book Review*. Though
the *Times* published a nearly full-page response by Dworkin,
because it was run as the first and longest letter among others
responding to Irving rather than as an article, the Times did not
have to pay Dworkin for her work.  Hence, intimately connected
to the questions of publication and publicity is, for Dworkin, the
material issue of being able to make a living from writing.8
        In addition to her concerns about publicity and making a
living as a writer, Dworkin is concerned that her difficulty getting
published and reviewed keeps her work from reaching the
women who need it: she is unapologetic about the fact that she
is writing for a particular audience and with a specific purpose.
Indeed, while she is skeptical about society's ability to accept writers,
she is unequivocal in her belief that writers are primary agents of
social change; Dworkin believes not only in the importance of the
individual vision of the individual writer but also in the power of
public debate about that vision.  "Writers get underneath the agreed-
on amenities, the lies a society depends on to maintain the status
quo, by becoming ruthless, pursuing the truth in the face of intimi-
dation, not by being compliant or solicitous," Dworkin writes.  Clearly,
her purpose in writing is to change society: "I wrote [the selections
in *Letters from a War Zone*] because people are being hurt and
the injury has to stop.  I wrote them because I believe in writing, in
its power to right wrongs, to change how people see and think, to
change how and what people know, to change how and why
people act. . . .  I don't know why I believe these things; only that
I do believe them and act on them" (5).  Yet at the same time that
Dworkin articulates a belief in "people," she seems distrustful of
"society" and its reaction to the writer.  No society is grateful for the
writer, she writes: "We think that contemporary western democracies
are different but we are wrong.  The society will mobilize to destroy
the writer who opposes or threatens its favorite cruelties: in this
case, the dominance of men over women" (4).  A particular section
of "society," critics, comes under fire in some of Dworkin's writings.
Dworkin's assertion that "every misogynist stereotype can be
invoked" (War Zone 6) to keep her work from being published and
reviewed suggests that misogyny is most likely the reason that her
work is sometimes not published or reviewed; in addition, such
assertions cause critics to become defensive when they do review
her work.  This assertion of misogyny and consequent defensive-
ness seems to have occurred after Dworkin published Intercourse.
Because of the nature of her argument in Intercourse, "that getting
fucked and being owned are inseparably the same; together, being
one and the same, they are sex for women under male dominance
as a social system" (66)--critics who did not review the book positive-
ly could be seen as in collaboration with male dominance--as, in
Dworkin's words, "participat[ing] in the fuck, giving it its power as
possession" (79).  Critics who did not review Dworkin's work positive-
ly were, in Dworkin's view, simply not interrogating their own sexual
practices adequately.  Thus, Dworkin's beliefs--articulated in as well
as performed through her writing--suggest two distinct views of
those who might read her books: first, that society in general (and
critics in particular) cannot be trusted to appreciate the writer's ability
to tell the truth and, second, that women can nonetheless wage a
war against misogyny and silence and win. The quantity and quality
of the public reception of her books, however, casts a long shadow
on whatever optimism Dworkin maintains about the power of her
fiction to promote social change and raises questions about whether
viewing public spheres as "war zones" can ever foster the kind of
readership, public discussion, and change she says she believes
in and wants to effect in women's lives.


                                #####

*Mercy*  in Public

        *Mercy* was published in the United States in August 1991
by Four Walls Eight Windows press. Though very short excerpts
of the novel were published as sidebars to a few reviews, the only
other substantive appearances of any part of *Mercy* were publication
of half of Chapter Nine in the Fall 1990 *Michigan Quarterly Review*9
and of a short excerpt from Chapter Eleven in the Winter 1990
*American Voice*10 As with *American Psycho,* I searched for reviews
and other discussions of *Mercy* in *Newspaper Abstracts on Disc*,
*Periodical Abstracts on Disc*, *Book Review Digest*, and *Book Review
Index*.  Compared to Ellis's book, *Mercy* received very few notices
or reviews; more significantly, *Mercy* was not the subject of feature
stories in the newsweeklies. Even *Ms.* played down the book; the
very short, unbylined review was tucked into the magazine's "Book-
watch" section, perhaps because of Dworkin's unpopularity among
many liberal feminists.
        Indeed, *Mercy* received substantive discussion in only the
*Women's Review of Books*, a publication geared to what Fraser
would call a subaltern counterpublic. Even there, however, no letters
to the editor followed the review.  Also unlike what followed publi-
cation of the Ellis book, media coverage of *Mercy*--or in this case,
the lack of media attention--did not become a public issue; the U.S.
media's failure to come to terms with or, with very few exceptions,
even to mention a book that not only described rape graphically
but also called for women to kill men did not itself get any attention
in the major media.  In addition, even in publications which reviewed
the book and in which editors explicitly and regularly solicit reader
correspondence, I could find no letters to the editor either about
*Mercy* or about the reviews it received.  The dearth of public re-
sponse to *Mercy*--especially compared to the intense publicity
garnered by Ellis's *American Psycho*--suggests that access to publicity
and perhaps public debate of any kind are a consequence of social
power more than any other factor. Even before *Mercy* was published
in its entirety in the United States, Laurence Goldstein, editor of the
*Michigan Quarterly Review*, stressed the intense publicity surround-
ing the issue of women's bodies in his introduction to the special
issue of *MQR* in which an excerpt of *Mercy* appeared.

[indent]
The female body is, as Margaret Atwood writes, "a hot topic" being
scrutinized in a multitude of recent books, in college courses and
conferences, and with increasing sophistication in feminist publica-
tions in every professional field.  Social issues like abortion, porno-
graphy, rape, and new technologies of reproduction have guaran-
teed a continuing, perhaps eternal, controversy about the rights
and violations of the female body, not to mention the no less politi-
cal matter of medical treatments related to anorexia, hysterectomy,
PMS, mortal illnesses, and other conditions surveyed in this issue.
 (485)
[close indent]

Given the "hot topic" that *Mercy* addresses, why did the fact of its
publication not attract more attention and public discussion? While
*Ms.* did not give the book much attention, the unbylined review
dubbed it controversial and praised it highly: "So controversial
that it appeared abroad before finding a courageous publisher
in the U.S., Dworkin's new novel is her best yet: brilliant, provo-
cative, relentless, hypnotic, and powerful. A must for those who
read Dworkin--and a must for those who haven't yet"  (76).  On
the whole, treatment of *Mercy* can be characterized by this review
in *Library Journal*:

[indent]
In this work, the well-known author of numerous books
on women, feminism, and pornography has created an unusual,
highly charged, and formally provocative account of one woman's
life of increasingly horrific violence and sexual abuse by men.
The book begins when the protagonist, Andrea, is nine years old
and has just been the victim of a sexual assault by a stranger in a
movie theater. From that point on, the reader is carried at a dizzying
pace through chapters in Andrea's progressively darker and more
disturbing life until Andrea, at 27, comes to the decision that the
only response to the kind of violence she's suffered all her life at
the hands of men is simply to start killing them. Unfortunately, the
compelling, stream-of-consciousness pacing of the narrative begins
to break down early in the book, becoming a harsh diatribe that,
ultimately, Dworkin's skill as a writer is not sufficient to carry.11
[close indent]

Rather than dealing with the social issues raised by the book,
reviewers are on the whole more likely either to make "the person"
coexistent with "the act" (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 293-321)
and write about Dworkin rather than the novel, or to change stasis
by attributing the novel's failure to Dworkin's lack of writing skill or
by redefining the novel as a "diatribe," "manifesto," or "polemic"
(see Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca on association and dissociation
of concepts, 415-444). In studying the reviews of *Mercy* and five
other articles about Dworkin in U.S. print media after *Mercy*'s publi-
cation, I found these were the major issues critics raised: the genre
of *Mercy*; associations and dissociations of Andrea Dworkin and
Andrea the main character/narrator; redefinitions of the novel and its
purpose; representations of Dworkin; and language and style in the
book.  Especially given the outcry over *American Psycho*and the
striking similarities between the political and social issues the two
novels raised, the public reactions *Mercy* did and did not receive
deserve study.
        In early autumn 1990, *Mercy* made its first public appearance
in the United States when approximately half of what would be
Chapter 9 appeared in the *Michigan Quarterly Review* in the first
half of a special issue titled "The Female Body."  The issue included
poetry and fiction as well as essays, and Dworkin's chapter, "In
October 1973 (age 27)," was marked as fiction despite the fact that
the narrator's name is Andrea and that (though this is not mentioned
in *MQR*) many of the scenes in the novel closely parallel events in
Dworkin's life. Unlike with *American Psycho*, no extended excerpts
from *Mercy* appeared in general-circulation magazines before or after
 the novel was published; hence, I have chosen to offer a long
excerpt from *Mercy* at this point for three reasons: first, this part of the
novel appeared first in public (though admittedly to very few readers);
second an excerpt provides a sense of the novel for those who have
not read it; and third, this excerpt introduces an issue which became
one of the major themes in public discourses about the novel:
distinctions between autobiography and fiction and the public con-
sequences of adamantly blurring the two.12

[long indent]
I am writing a certain very serious book about life itself. . . .  My book
is a very big book about existence but I can't find any plot for it. It's
going to be a very big book once I get past the initial slow beginning.
I want to get it published but you get afraid you will die before it's
finished, not after when it can be found and it's testimony and then
they say you were a great one; you don't want to die before you wrote
it so you have to learn to sustain your writing, you take it serious, you
do it every day and you don't fail to write words down and to think
sentences.  It's hard to find words.  It's about some woman but I can't
think of what happens.  I can say where she is.  It's pretty barren.  I
always see a woman on a rock, calling out.  But that's not a story per se.
You could have someone dying of tuberculosis like Mann or someone
who is suffering--for instance, someone who is lovesick like Mann.
Or there's best-sellers, all these stories where women do all these
things and say all these things but I don't think I can write about that
because I only seen it in the movies.  There's marriage stories but it's
so boring, a couple in the suburbs and the man on the train becoming
unfaithful and how bored she is because she's too intelligent or some-
thing about how angry she is but I can't remember why.  A love story's
so stupid in these modern times.  I can't have it be about my life because
number one I don't remember very much and number two it's against
the rules, you're supposed to make things up.  The best thing that
ever happened to me is these walls and I don't think you could turn
that into a story per se or even a novel of ideas that people would
grasp as philosophical: for instance, that you can just sit and they
provide a framework of dignity because no one's watching and I have
had too many see too much, they see you when they do things to
you that you don't want, they look, and the problem is there's no
walls keeping you sacred. . . . There's nothing imaginary about walls,
or eating, nothing fictive as it were, but more especially there's nothing
imaginary about them when they're missing. . . .  You're supposed to
make things up, not just write down true things, or sincere things, or
some things that happened.  My mother who you can't make up either
because there's nothing so real as one named me Andrea as if I was
someone: distinct, in particular.  She made a fiction.  I'm her book, a
made-up story written down on a birth certificate.  You could also say
she's a liar on such a deep level she should be shot by all that's fair;
deep justice.  If I was famous and my name was published all over the
world, in Italy and in Israel and in Africa and in India, on continents and
subcontinents, in deserts, in ancient cities, it would still be cunt to every
fucking asshole drunk on every street in the world; and to them that's
not drunk too, the sober ones who say it to you like they're calling a
dog; fetch, cunt. If I won the Nobel Prize and walked to the corner for
milk it would still be cunt.  And when you got someone inside you
who is loving you it's still cunt and the ones who'd die if they wasn't
in you, you, you in particular, at least that night, at least then, that
time, that place, to them it's still cunt and they whisper it up close
and chill the blood that's burning in you; and if you love them it's still
cunt and you can love them so strong you'd die for them and it's still
cunt; and your heartbeat and his heartbeat can be the same heart-
beat and it's still cunt.  It's behind your back and it's to your face; the
ones you know, the ones you don't.  It's like as if nigger was a term
of intimate endearment, not just used in lynching and insult but
whispered in lovemaking, the truth under the truth, the name under
the name, love's name for you and it's the same as what hate calls you;
he's in you whispering nigger.  It's thugs, it's citizens, it's cops, it's
strangers, it's the ones you want and the ones you deplore, you ain't
allowed indifference, you have to decide on a relationship then and
there on the spot because each one that passes pisses on you to let
you know he's there.  There's some few you made love with and you're
still breathing tight with them, you can still feel their muscles swelling
through their skin and bearing down on you and you can still feel their
weight on you, an urgent concentration of blood and bone, hot muscle,
spread over you, the burden of it sinking into you, a stone cliff into a
wet shore, and you're still tangled up in them, good judgment aside,
and it's physical, it's a physical memory, in the body, not just in the brain,
 barely in the brain at all, you got their sweat on you as part of your sweat
and their smell's part of your smell and you have an ache for them that's
deep and gnawing and hurtful in more than your heart and you still feel
as if it's real and current, now: how his body moves against you in convul-
sions that are awesome like mountains moving, slow, burdensome, big,
and how you move against him as if you could move through him, he's
the ocean, you're the tide, and it's still cunt, he says cunt.  He's indelibly
 in you and you don't want redemption so much as you want him and
still it's cunt.  It's what's true; Andrea's the lie.  It's a lie we got to tel
Jane and Judith and Ellen and whomever.  It's ourmost desperate lie.
My mother named me Andrea.  It means manhood or courage.  It means
not-cunt.  She specifically said: not-cunt.  This one ain't cunt, she
 declared,after blood spilled and there was the pain of labor so intense that
 God
couldn't live through it and wouldn't which is why all the pain's with us
and still she brought herself to a point of concentration and she said:
not-cunt.  This one's someone, she probably had in mind; a wish; a hope;
let her, let her, something.  Something.  Let her something.  Don't, not
with this one.  Just let this one through.  Just don't do it to this one.  She
 wrote: not-cunt, a fiction, and it failed, and the failure defeated her and
turned her cold to me, because before I was even ten some man had
wrote "this one's cunt," he took his fingers and he wrote it down on me
and inside me, his fingers carved it in me with a pain that stayed half
buried and there wasn't words I had for what he did, he wrote I was cunt,
this sweet little one who was what's called a child but a female one which
changes it all.  My mama showed that fiction was delusion, hallucination,
it was a long, deranged lie designed to last past your own lifetime.  The
man, on the other hand, was a pragmatist, a maker of reality, a shaper of
history, an orchestrator of events.  He used life, not paper, bodies, not
ink. (221-26)
[close indent]

        A novel written by a person named Andrea in which the main
character and narrator is named Andrea (Dworkin nowhere gives the
narrator a last name) can be seen to problematize the concepts of fiction
and genre.  Because Dworkin uses her own first name for the main
character of the book and because the main character's biography has
much in common with Dworkin's, many reviewers made the question of
genre and, consequently, the author herself part of their analysis of the
novel.  One of the earliest commentaries on the question of whether
*Mercy* is autobiography or fiction came in a short review in Publishers
Weekly's "Forecasts" section in July 1991. Without attributing its claim
that Dworkin "admitted" the novel was autobiographical, PW wrote that
Dworkin "gives her own name to the protagonist/narrator of this powerful,
almost frenzied, admittedly autobiographical novel that chronicles her life
and sexual victimization" (36).13
        Of much more consequence to public discussion than the theo-
retical question of genre, however, reviewers took Dworkin's conflation
of fact and fiction as an opportunity to write about the person--Andrea
Dworkin--rather than the act--her novel, *Mercy*.  By its status as a novel,
*Mercy* makes operative claims that it is fiction. Yet critics consistently
 re-fused to deal with it as fiction, using what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca
refer to as strategies of association and dissociation of concepts (415)--
in this case fact and fiction--to attempt to come to terms with Dworkin's
incommensurable claims: this book is and is not "true."  In a Los Angeles
Times review of *Mercy*, Constance Casey opened with an excerpt from
the first page of the book--"'I wasn't raped until I was almost 10, which is
pretty good it seems when I ask around because many have been touched
but are afraid to say'"--and then goes on to make connections between
the main character and Dworkin: "This is the beginning of the story from
age 10 to 27 of a woman named Andrea, born in 1946 in Camden, N.J.
Andrea is a character in a work of fiction by a prominent American feminist
also named Andrea, also born in 1946 in Camden" (E10). Casey at times
synthesizes Andrea and Dworkin: she refers to them at one point as "the
two of them."  Cindy Jenefsky makes a similar move in the Women's Review
of Books , using "Andrea and Dworkin" as the subject of many sentences
and finally calling *Mercy* "Andrea/Dworkin's story" (7).*Chicago Tribune*
reviewer Madison Smartt Bell, picking up on Dworkin's references to
Malcolm X in *Mercy*, wrote that "If Andrea Dworkin is the Malcolm X of
feminism, then this novel is her version of his 'Autobiography' " (5).
        Yet other reviewers were less likely to accept the novel as auto-
biography without pausing to question the implications of that definitional
argument and the incommensurable nature of "fact" and "fiction." The
critic who most adamantly questioned Dworkin's blurring of Andrea and
Dworkin was the *New York Times Book Review*'s Wendy Steiner, who
wrote that *Mercy* "denies the difference between the metaphorical and the
literal. In '*Mercy*,' women's experience is the ovens; women are the mass
suicides of Massada. Andrea is not a persona or a character but Ms.
Dworkin herself; art is life." What Steiner reacts to most strongly in
 Dworkin'erasure of the distinction between fact and fiction, literal and
 figurative,
centers on the suggestion by Dworkin that women kill men.  While "Ms.
Dworkin's argument, proceeding from pain, may be moving, it is also
intolerant, simplistic and often just as brutal as what it protests," Steiner
writes.  She continues:


[indent]
Ms. Dworkin advocates nothing short of killing men. The last chapter
ends: "I went out; at night; to smash a man's face in; I declared war. My
nom de guerre is Andrea One; I am reliably told there are many more;
girls named courage who are ready to kill." One cannot argue here, any
more than Mr. Rushdie could, that statements in literature are not equi-
valent to statements in the real world. Ms. Dworkin's pain erases the
boundary between the two spheres, declaring the distinction a male
trick to justify pornography and rape.  Either her book must be absolved
of murderous intent through special pleading--the invocation of that
very magic circle around art that she has worked so hard to deny--or else
we must accept that we are reading a political manifesto justifying and
inciting illegal acts. Either way, we are caught in a bind. We must either
deplore Ms. Dworkin's duplicity, which would be unfeeling, or have
her arrested, which would mean we were assenting to the literalism
that is our own undoing.  (11)
[close indent]

In taking Dworkin at her word, Steiner articulates the dilemma of inter-
preting Dworkin's rhetorical choice of naming her character Andrea and
having her confess to killing men: the critic must either be relentlessly
literal-minded--as were some of the readers of American Psycho14--or
the critic must "deplore" Dworkin's rhetorical maneuverings in the text,
a move that would be "unfeeling."  Steiner thus suggests the high
degree of difficulty of reviewing Dworkin; by using the word "unfeeling,"
she also points to the difficulty of responding to narratives of personal
pain in literary public spheres. Besides declaring the book "manifesto,"
Steiner also dubs the book a monologue, again suggesting the difficulty
critics have of responding to--entering into dialogue with--discourse
that comes from personal experience: " '*Mercy*' is a monologue that
almost makes [Andrea's] deviance seem normal; its voice speaks in
extremis out of a pain so compelling that patience and reason appear
to be obscenely insensitive responses."
        Steiner's charge of "manifesto" was echoed by other critics,
most notably Madison Smartt Bell in the *Chicago Tribune*.  Bell focused
on how *Mercy* deviated from accepted novelistic convention and con-
cluded that it was, therefore, more polemic than novel: "There's hardly
any plot in the conventional sense and not really any characters, except
Andrea; the others are just more heads on the hydra that's out to crush
and devour her," Bell writes.  "All the men are rapists and all the women
let her down somehow. . . . Her only real friend is her dog."  Bell con-
cludes that, "The book carries too heavy a polemical burden to work
very well as a novel. . . .  But very likely Dworkin is more interested in
producing a politically effective text than an esthetic object" (5).  Another
reviewer claimed that Dworkin's purpose in writing *Mercy* was more to
raise controversy and, thus, publicity than to write serious and "honest"
literature.  Writing in the *Los Angeles Times*, Constance Casey argued
that, "If '*Mercy*' has value, it is not as fiction, but as an event.
 Dworkin'sbook doesn't want to teach or touch or entertain. It wants to kick out
 a
window. Someone will come along later, someone mercifully skilled
and subtle, and the existence of '*Mercy*' may free her--or him--to write
honestly about rape" (E10).
        Yet another definitional strategy emerged in public responses
to *Mercy*: arguing that the novel itself is pornography and thus accusing
Dworkin of reproducing the very social artifact her entire life's work is
intended to critique.  Given that definitions of pornography are still legally
 and socially up-for-grabs, this definitional argument in the literary public
sphere takes on special importance.15 Because of *Mercy*'s stylistic
strategies, Steiner argues, the book is a kind of supraprurient anti-
pornography-pornography:

[Indent]
"*Mercy*" itself is meant to provide a new representational strategy.
Andrea's language is lyrical and passionate--a cross between the
repetition of the early Gertrude Stein and, ironically, the unfettered
flights of Henry  Miller. She describes sexual violence in graphic
terms, risking the prurience of the pornography she deplores. But
unlike any antipornography text that I know, "*Mercy*" defeats
prurience. It is to pornography what aversion therapy is to rape.
The titillating language of violation--"one hand's holding my neck
from behind and the other's pulling off my T-shirt, pulling it half
off, ripping it"--becomes noxious with Andrea's terror and pain
and the inhuman viciousness and betrayal of the men she has
trusted. Her stylistic breathlessness--repetition, rhythm, loss of
control--conveys not rising passion but the desperate need to
have the violence end.
[Close indent]

Other critics struggled in similar ways to define and represent *Mercy*,
in particular regarding its connection to pornography.  Writing in the Los
Angeles Times, Constance Casey asserts but does not argue that *Mercy*
is pornography: "The novel, which repeats some of the same violent
sexual incidents Dworkin included in her first novel, 'Ice and Fire,' is
essentially pornography. This is noteworthy because Dworkin is best
known as a crusader for the abolition of pornography."  Whether Casey's
criterion for pornography is "violent sexual incidents" is left up to the
reader to decide.
        A more developed discussion of *Mercy* as a kind of pornography
came from Esther Kaplan, writing in the **Village Voice**.  "Andrea Dworkin's
new novel, *Mercy*, is the sexual coming of age story of a young woman,
meaning it's a book about rape," Kaplan writes.  Kaplan sees Dworkin using
the novel itself to make a definitional argument about rape: "The novel is
a serious attempt to describe rape, in all its emotional brutality and
 destruc-tion of the self, not as an exceptional circumstance, but as part of a
 culture-wide continuum of threat and violence."  However, because of the way
Dworkin represents Andrea in the novel, Kaplan sees *Mercy* as voyeurism
rather than as politically effective fiction:

[indent]
The question becomes how to speak about rape--or other self-
destroying experiences--in a way that makes its gravity inescapable
without further erasing the individual selves of those who endure it,
or don't. While battling the onslaught that constitutes this culture
of misogyny, we need to be able to see ourselves not as caged
animals, but as people capable of resistance, solidarity, and self-
hood. I want to be a sister to Andrea, not a voyeur, but Dworkin won't
let me. (76)
[close indent]

Kaplan concludes that because Dworkin leaves Andrea isolated from
other women, a point I will return to below, the novel's effect on the
reader is tantamount to pornography: "The world of this novel is that
of an isolated, mutilated woman surrounded by her rapists, familiar as the
terror of horror movies in which a woman has no recourse, either to
rationality or to friends, and in which her hysteria is more likely to give
pornographic pleasure than to provoke rage."
        Taking a very different view of how to represent Dworkin's novel,
Cindy Jenefsky defined *Mercy* as an attempt to confront and come to
terms with the pain of sexual abuse. Writing in the Women's Review of
Books, Jenefsky situated her discussion of the novel within bell hooks'
call to "remember the pain."  Jenefsky explains:

[indent]
In contrast to the notion, popularly advocated by academic feminists,
that focusing on women's pain accentuates our victimization and power-
lessness and thereby denies our agency, hooks claims that speaking
from that place of pain is transformative--that it is the necessary location
from which one learns about oppression and learns what is necessary to
overthrow it.
[Close indent]

Jenefsky argues that *Mercy* is written from inside "that place of pain" and
that the novel's purpose is to illustrate "how male domination is maintained
through 'ordinary' sexual practices."  The book, Jenefsky writes, is meant
to be transformative for the reader as much as for the writer.  In light of
that, Jenefsky writes, it is important not to define *Mercy* as entertaining
reading:


[indent]
*Mercy* is not a book to pick up if you're looking for light, weekend
leisure reading; in the manner of Toni Morrison's Beloved, this book
compels the reader to experience the pain the protagonist suffers.
Even if you don't like Andrea--either her behavior or her ways of
thinking--you still cannot escape feeling her pain; the agony, confu-
sion, terror, humiliation and anguish are built into the form of Dworkin's
writing and, therefore, built into the experience of reading the work.  (6)
[close indent]

Yet, as both Steiner and Kaplan point out, the question of how to
represent pain in fiction depends largely on one's audience and purpose.
Steiner ends her review by musing on the difficulties of a novel that
defines itself as a conduit for the expression of pain:

[indent]
The question is how we can deal with pain, conviction, compul-
sions that we do not share. Or alternately, the question is whom
Ms. Dworkin thinks she is speaking to. By reading "*Mercy*" we
are meant to experience her pain, to know it as our own. Will we
take the next step--as women, becoming Andrea Two or Three
or Ten, or as men, bending to the task of describing the blood
that has stained us? Or is the matter put in terms too crude, too
intellectually violent, to offer us the possibility of action?
If all women are either victims or collaborators and all men are rapists,
can the cry for *Mercy* fall on any but deaf ears? (11)
[close indent]

Given Dworkin's incommensurate views of the power of writing, the
question of whom she is writing to in *Mercy* takes on special resonance.
If *Mercy* was written just for women who have been sexually abused, it
is unlikely that the book can be productively discussed among the
diversity of opinions in the literary public sphere that formed around it.
Further, Dworkin's rhetorical choices represent the issue in such
extreme terms that the possibility of action or change appears unlikely.
        While defining and representing Dworkin's novel was an issue in
reviews of *Mercy*, representing Dworkin herself was also a site of struggle
for those writing about the novel. Closely connected to the issue of
representing *Mercy* is the issue of representation in general.  In most
public discourses about *Mercy*, Dworkin's work as an antipornography
activist as well as her reputation among feminists and the larger public
received as much if not more attention than did the novel in question.
What each publication or reviewer chose to emphasize about Dworkin
reflects how each wanted to represent her to their readers.  Hence, how
different writers and reviewers defined the writer of *Mercy* reveals the
grounds of much of the public discourses about the book itself.
        Perhaps most obvious to issues of representation is physical
appearance, and Dworkin's body was mentioned in a few of the public
discourses written after the publication of *Mercy*. While not making
Dworkin's body either equivalent (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 210)
or coexistent (293) with *Mercy*, writer Joan Frank opened her San
Francisco Review of Books interview with Dworkin with a narrative and
physical description which contrasts Dworkin's physical appearance with
her writing style: "Meeting Andrea Dworkin is a shock," Frank writes,
adding that Dworkin is "quite demure in person" and noting "her large
earth-mother body."  Frank continues: "Frizzy salt-and-pepper hair frames
her face, which wears an expression of sad forbearance.  Her voice is
gentle, her words simple and deliberate" (9).  Frank's opening manifests
a view that not only maintains a connection between the essence of a
writer and the writing but also that it is acceptable to make such con-
nections explicit.
        Frank's characterization of Dworkin differs markedly from Camille
Paglia's in a *Playboy* article on Dworkin and MacKinnon.  In her article,
"The Return of Carry Nation," Paglia makes Dworkin and MacKinnon's
bodies absolutely equivalent and coextensive with their political and
social beliefs and projects. Paglia surmises that Dworkin's "boiling
emotionalism and self-analytic, self-lacerating Jewishness" provide an
antidote to "MacKinnon's pinched, cramped, body-denying Protestant
culture." Dworkin, Paglia writes, "pretends to be a daring truth teller but
never mentions her most obvious problem: food."  Paglia continues,
describing MacKinnon as well as Dworkin in a tone appropriate to the
magazine's subtitle, "Entertainment for Men":

[indent]
Dworkin, wallowing in misery, is a "type" that I recognize after 22 years
of teaching.  I call her The Girl with the Eternal Cold.  This was the
pudgy, clumsy, whiny child at summer camp who was always spilling
her milk, dropping her lollipop in the dirt, getting a cramp on the hike,
a stone in her shoe, a bee in her hair.  In college, this type--pasty,
bilious and frumpy--is constantly sick from fall to spring.  She coughs
and sneezes on everyone, is never prepared with a tissue and sits
sniffling in class with a roll of toilet paper on her lap. (37)
[close indent]

Paglia's demeaning comments are textbook cases of ad personam:
endeavoring to disqualify Dworkin and MacKinnon from the public
debate over pornography by making fun of their bodies, personalities,
and motivations.
        More pertinent than using physical appearance to dismiss
Dworkin's work is the question of how to define the kind of work that
Dworkin does.  In its notes on contributors, the Michigan Quarterly
Review stressed that Dworkin is a writer of fiction as well as nonfiction;
in addition, her work with Catherine MacKinnon was mentioned--
"[Dworkin] and Catherine A. MacKinnon wrote a law for the City of
Minneapolis that recognizes pornography as a violation of the civil rights
of women" (481)--though the fact that the ordinance had been ruled
unconstitutional was not. While it did not review *Mercy*, the San Francisco
Review of Books ran a news story on Dworkin (she read excerpts from
*Mercy* to and addressed the American Psychological Association) and
a brief interview with her in its Fall 1991 issue.  Again, that Dworkin is
both novelist and activist was reflected in the blurb on the magazine's
contents page: "Novelist and anti-pornography campaigner Andrea
Dworkin talks to Joan Frank."
        Much more complex than attempting to give a balanced or un-
biased view of Dworkin as one of several contributors to a journal or one
of several subjects in a magazine is the issue of connecting or not con-
necting Dworkin's fiction with her nonfiction and her activism.  In her Los
Angeles Times (E10) review of *Mercy*, Casey finds it difficult to write
about *Mercy* without immediately putting the novel in the context of
Dworkin's nonfiction work:

[indent]
"*Mercy*" is less a story than a catalog of sexual attacks. (In her
nonfiction book "Intercourse," Dworkin argued that the penis is
a weapon and that every act of heterosexual intercourse is an
attack.) The people are scarcely more than bodies--Andrea, the
victim, and almost every male, the rapist. All that dawns on Andrea
is that she and other  women should kill the men who caused
them pain.
[Close indent]

In a *Chicago Tribune* review, Madison Smartt Bell used a similar paren-
thetical reference to situate and ultimately interpret *Mercy* in light of
Dworkin's nonfiction: "(readers of 'Intercourse' will know that in Dworkin's
larger scheme of things any woman's desire for penetration by  a man
is merely the product and mechanism of her enslaved degradation)" (5).
That reviewers did not separate Dworkin's fiction from her nonfiction and
activism is a recurring theme in public discourses about *Mercy*.
        Besides putting the novel in the context of Dworkin's other work,
past negative reactions to her work provided another context for the
public reception of *Mercy*.  In what was by far the widest-circulation review
of *Mercy*, Wendy Steiner opened her *New York Times Book Review*
article with a narrative:

[indent]
This past spring in London, with an hour to kill in a bookstore,
I decided to read the first few pages of as many new novels as
I could. Among the recent releases was "*Mercy*," a second
novel by the controversial feminist Andrea Dworkin, better
known to me for her nonfiction tirades against pornography,
against intercourse, against men. She was not a writer I would
normally be drawn to, but in the spirit of experimentation I read
through the first chapter.  It was a representation of sexual trauma
through a 9-year-old child's bewilderment, and I found myself
utterly transfixed; I had to keep on reading.  (11)
[close indent]

Steiner's narrative seems to betray discomfort at reading Dworkin; as
such it seems to be an attempt to explain why Steiner would be in the
position of writing about a book which many people would find--by the
very fact of who its author is--embarrassing or distasteful.
        In her **Village Voice** review of *Mercy*, "Rapes of Wrath," Esther
Kaplan makes a similar move to let her readers know she knows about
Dworkin's reputation. "Now, I've always known of Dworkin as a pariah among
feminists, her radical critiques of intercourse, virginity, and the
 valorizatioof sex foundering in the face of her censorious reputation and her
 anti-
porn alliance with the Right," Kaplan writes. Kaplan sees *Mercy* not as a
novel but as "a long autobiographical prequel to her theoretical writings,"
"a defense of her whole project, as if her lifetime of angry essays will at
last make sense in the face of this testimonial about rape and abuse."
Just as it figured into how *Mercy* was represented generically, Dworkin's
reputation as a political activist colored how she was described in public
discussions of the book; in particular, Kaplan's representation of Dworkin
in the **Village Voice** is colored by leftist views of Dworkin's "antiporn
alliance with the Right," a topic I will return to below.
        In addition to deciding how to represent Dworkin and her repu-
tation, reviewers of *Mercy* found themselves having to negotiate battles
between liberal and radical feminists over pornography and free speech,
and thus having to decide how to represent Dworkin's radicalism.  Again,
such negotiation is one of Wendy Steiner's main topics in her New York
Times Book Review article. After initially saying that she picked up *Mercy*
only as an experiment in an airport yet found herself unable to put it
down, Steiner admits that, in hindsight, the novel is quite different from
what she first thought it was: "I now see Ms. Dworkin's book in a larger
context--as another salvo in the war between liberals and radicals. Once
again the noddy head of tolerance is pummeled by the unbrookable
demands of outraged pain." Steiner, along with other critics, is especially
concerned about Dworkin's use of another voice to begin and end
*Mercy*, a voice Dworkin calls "Not Andrea" and who narrates the pro-
logue and epilogue. Steiner writes,

[indent]
[T]he repulsiveness of the Not Andrea voice is the great scandal of
our times--reason's inability to offer an acceptable answer to the pain
that everywhere surrounds us. This weakness is the undoing of
 liberalism . . . the failure of communication between feminists inside
the system and those outside it. (11)
[close indent]

Steiner concludes that the epilogue is "cheap. The issues are
important enough to be raised by a character whose liberalism is not
so obviously corrupt."
        Again reading Dworkin more generously than most critics,
Cindy Jenefsky describes Dworkin's use of the Not Andrea voice
as the "literal framing of the novel within its own critique" and argues
that it "represent[s] both Andrea's and Dworkin's struggles to over-
come others' denial of the destructive nature of sexual abuse in
women's lives. Dworkin, then, accuses critics in advance of colluding
in women's oppression; for, in the context of the narrative, those
who minimize Andrea's words help to perpetuate abuse." Jenefsky
here articulates what has perhaps angered critics who have read
*Mercy* and, given the terrain of feminist politics, felt they were unable
to create an uncharged or unlabeled space from which to write about
it: that to write is automatically to be situated and to be judged. Com-
plicating this, Jenefsky writes, is the fact that any woman who writes
about *Mercy* has to do so from a site of particular experience with
issues of gender and sexual abuse:


[indent]
What is probably going to anger Dworkin's critics the most, however,
is her implicit claim that the root of feminists' denial of Andrea/Dworkin's
story is women's resistance to recognizing sexual victimization in their
own lives."Not Andrea" concludes the epilogue: "I have been hurt
but it was a long time ago. I'm not the same girl."  Dworkin implies that
academic feminists in particular have adopted an intellectual analysis
of sex at the expense of their (or other women's) concrete experiences
with sex. Accordingly, both the prologue and epilogue are written in
an analytic style, borrowing vocabulary from feminist theoretical
debates on sexuality. (7)
[close indent]

Dworkin's politics come in for other criticisms as well.  Madison Smartt
Bell, writing in the *Chicago Tribune*, dislikes Dworkin's "uncompro-
mising demonization of all members of the enemy group," that is, men,
and argues that the analogy Dworkin makes between race and gender
does not fit.  "For irony, compare the fictional Andrea's murders of
winos with Eldridge Cleaver's rape of white girls," Bell writes.  "The
real catch is that while black separation is at least theoretically possible,
female separatism is not" (5).
        The most scathing critique of Dworkin's location among
debates about race and class as well as gender--and the only one to
suggest that Dworkin's radicalism is not nearly radical enough--was
from Esther Kaplan in her **Village Voice** review.  Kaplan writes that while
what happens to Andrea in the book is "nauseating and terrifying," the
events are "unfortunately . . . submerged in doltish musings about God,
Poetry, Freedom, and the War that become progressively more bitter,
but never develop politically."  In short, Kaplan writes, Dworkin's
politics are inconsistent at best and, at worst, have no practical results:

[indent]
Andrea's geopolitics: she's against the bomb and for peace. Her class
analysis: "He's been low; he knows." She goes from idealizing the
famed men of Western literature ("I would have enjoyed a cup of coffee
with Camus in my younger days") to seeing all writings by men as based
on rape ("I've got enough semen dripping in me for a literary renais-
sance"), but she never seems to read any women writers.
[Close indent]

What concerns Kaplan most about what Dworkin has Andrea do in the
course of the novel is that she never allows Andrea to join forces with
other people; Andrea, Kaplan writes, is never allowed any human
connection as a source of regeneration:

[indent]
The book--for all its attempts to be down with the black man (a figure
Dworkin tosses in to signify the sorrows of the downtrodden) and
the broke, and to inspire empathy with women who are raped--views
those who experience oppression as being utterly without pride,
absolutely debased. Dworkin's character ends up serving as a testi-
monial to the total efficacy of misogynist practice in the destruction of
human beings, playing out as she does the kind of animalistic vision of
women found mostly in certain men's fantasies. The only rebellions in
the novel are solitary and violent. Andrea has visions of mass resistance--
"I think one day they will gather, the women, outside where he lives.
I think there will be thousands of them. I think it will be a crowd, a mob,
a riot, a revolution"--but she never organizes other women or even
maintains connections with any (female characters, in fact, are few and
minor). She strikes out alone.
[Close indent]

It is Dworkin's "antiporn alliance with the Right" and her refusal to write
about the potential of women acting collectively rather than individually
that color Kaplan's critique of Dworkin's radicalism.  Again, *Mercy* is
criticized for what it does not do rather than for what it does.
        Finally, Camille Paglia locates Dworkin and MacKinnon among
positions within feminism in her *Playboy* article. Calling to mind a scene
 from *Mercy* in which Andrea is throat-raped soon after the movie
"Deep Throat" was released (the novel refers to Linda Marchiano in
several places), Paglia disagrees with Dworkin and MacKinnon's claims
that pornography can cause incidents of sexual abuse.  "MacKinnon
and Dworkin, like most feminists today, lack a general knowledge of crimi-
nology or psychopathology and hence have no perspective on or insight
into the bloody, lurid human record, with its disasters and triumphs,"
Paglia writes. She argues that, led by sympathizers of Dworkin and Mac-
Kinnon, feminism has degenerated into "a catch-all vegetable drawer
where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses. . . .
Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers,
anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims and incest survivors."  The
consequences of such feminism, Paglia writes, keep women alienated
from their own bodies. "The demons are within us," Paglia concludes:
"MacKinnon and Dworkin, peddling their diseased rhetoric, are in denial,
and what they are blocking is life itself, in all is grandeur and messiness.
Let's send a message to the Mad Hatter and her dumpy dormouse to
stop trying to run other people's tea parties."  Paglia's "the demons are
within us" argument is less obviously ad personam when it is directed,
for example, against the Report of the Special Committee on Human
Sexuality of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. ("The Joy of Presbyterian
Sex") or even when it is part of a larger causal argument against academic
feminism ("It's a Jungle Out There, So Get Used to It!"). But because
the level of discussion in her *Playboy* article has descended to "enter-
tainment for men," no productive discussion can ensue about the
grounds social science uses to ascertain harm from pornography.  Indeed,
if and when a space opens up for such a discussion, one response to
Paglia might be, "I don't need studies and statistics to tell me that there
is a relationship between pornography and real violence against women.
My body remembers" (Russell 120).
        Closely related to representations of *Mercy* as a kind of novel
or autobiography are attempts by critics to come to terms with the kind
of language Dworkin uses in the book. Critics consistently commented
on the rough language of *Mercy* yet less consistently endeavored to
explain why she might use such language. Dworkin was criticized for
being repetitive to the extent that she risked numbing readers to the
horrors of sexual assault. Constance Casey wrote in the Los Angeles
Times that while other feminist writers, notably Marge Piercy, use
language that is "raw and rough" they also write novels in which "you
turn the page because you care what happens next."  Casey continues:

[indent]
Turn the pages of '*Mercy*' and you get the equivalent of a slap in the
face. Dworkin believes only violent language can communicate violent
events; the ironic effect of violent language numbingly repeated,
however, is to make the reader say: "What happens to this character
doesn't matter." (E10)
[close indent]

Casey responds to comments Andrea makes in *Mercy* about Holocaust
literature, that it is "almost funny" in the way it attempts to represent
atrocities clearly and precisely.  "Andrea may be right that no amount
of clarity and precision can describe pain," Casey writes.  "But more
people would read '*Mercy*' past the first three pages if it had more clarity
and precision. And if you believe Holocaust and other horrors can't be
described in words, perhaps you have no business writing and publish-
ing a book."
        Other critics saw Dworkin's stylistic choices differently.  For
instance, Madison Smartt Bell, writing in the *Chicago Tribune*, character-
ized the novel in its entirety as an attempt to "sustain a scream for over 300
 pages."  Bell thus argues that Dworkin's "long tumbling run-on sentences
 . . . achieve a powerful effect."  The *Village Voice*'s Esther Kaplan saw
Dworkin's "swampy prose" as communicating yet another message:
"The narrator is consistently overwhelmed: her language is obsessive
and repetitive; she has no steady alliances or sources of comfort; her
destruction as an adult is well under way in childhood" (76).
        What is most interesting about public discussions of Dworkin's
style, however, is that it led to antithetical interpretations of the book
as a whole. On the one hand, the writer of the unbylined review in Pub-
lishers Weekly decided that the style mirrored Andrea's disintegration
over the course of the book:

[indent]
The novel's unparagraphed prose--like Andrea, intense, jumpy, impas-
sioned--brilliantly captures the narrator's mental and physical degra-
dation. As her life disintegrates, she repeats three facts--her name, her
place of birth and the poet Walt Whitman's address in Camden, N.J., on
a street where she was born--as a mantra anchoring her to reality. (36)
[close indent]

On the other hand, Cindy Jenefsky, writing in the Women's Review of
Books, argued that Dworkin's style has two objectives.  First, it reflects
"Andrea's gradual empowerment," her "shift from self-annihilation to
self-defense."  Second, it communicates Andrea's constant battle for
language and for the power to tell her story.  After an excerpt from early
in the book (similar to the one which opened this article) Jenefsky
explains Dworkin's use of language:

[indent]
As Andrea's parents continue to ask questions and make comments
that minimize and trivialize her feelings, the young girl's story becomes
progressively more convoluted. Each time her parents minimize the
abuse, her confusion and panic intensify, culminating at the end of the
chapter in a breathless sentence that spans three pages. The form of the
text thus compels the reader to feel some of the panic the child experi-
ences. Unlike everyone else in Andrea's life who hears her story, the
reader is not encouraged to collaborate in denying the pain.
[Close indent]

Jenefsky argues that Dworkin's style in the novel is a contrast to the
highly intellectualized style of the prologue and epilogue, and that the
intellectualized style used by academic feminists allows people to ignore
the experiences of suffering women.  Jenefsky writes, "The artistic form
of *Mercy* fulfills its own political directives. It does what it says needs
to be done to stop the cycle of violence against women: it confronts
the pain of sexual abuse" (7).
        Indeed, the battle for language, for the power to tell, is another
of Dworkin's major themes in *Mercy*.  "The formal writing problem,
frankly, is that the bait can't write the story," Andrea writes at one point
in the book.  "The bait ain't even barely alive" (634).  In another part of
the book excerpted in the *Michigan Quarterly Review*, Dworkin
described this search for language and struggle for the power to tell:

[long indent]
You're supposed to make things up for books but I am afraid to make
things up because in life everything evaporates, it's gone in mist, just
disappears, there's no sign left, except on you, and you are a fucking
invisible ghost, they look right through you, you can have bruises so
bad the skin's pulled off you and they don't see nothing; you bet women
had the vapors, still fucking do, it means it all goes away in the air, what-
ever happened, whatever he did and however he did it, and you're left
feeling sick and weak and no one's going to say why. . . .  No one else
ever did anything, certainly no one now in this fine world we have here;
certainly not the things I think happened, although I don't know what to
call them in any serious way.  You just crawl into a cave of silence and die;
why are there no great women artists?  Some people got nerve.  Blood
on cement, which is all we got in my experience, ain't esthetic, although I
think boys some day will do very well with it; they'll put it in museums and
get a fine price.  Won't be their blood.  It would be some cunt's they
whispered to the night before; a girl; and then it'd be art, you see; or you
could put it on walls, make murals, be political, a democratic art outside
the museums for the people, Diego Rivera without any conscience what-
soever instead of the very tenuous one he had with respect to women,
and then it'd be extremely major for all the radicals who would discover
the expressive value of someone else's blood and I want to tell you
they'd stop making paint but such things do not happen and such things
cannot occur, any more than the rape so-called can happen or occur or
the being beaten so bad can happen or occur and there are no words
for what cannot happen or occur and if you think some thing happened
or occurred and there are no words for it you are at a dead end. . . .  So
it doesn't feel right to make things up, as you must do to write fiction, to
lie, to elaborate, to elongate, to exaggerate, to distort, to get tangled
up in moderations or modifications or deviations or compromises of
mixing this with that or combining this one with that one because the
problem is finding words for the truth, especially if no one will believe it,
and they will not.  I can't make things up because I wouldn't know after
a while what's blood, what's ink.  I barely know any words for what
happened to me yesterday, which doesn't make tomorrow something
I can conceive of in my mind; I mean words I say to myself in my own
head; not social words you use to explain something to someone else.
I barely know anything and if I deviate I am lost; I have to be literal, if I
can remember, which mostly I cannot.  No one will acknowledge that
some things happen and probably at this point in time there is no way to
say they do in a broad sweep; you describe the man forcing you but you
can't say he forced you.  If I was a man I could probably say it; I could say
I did it and everyone would think I made it up even though I'd just be
remembering what I did last night or twenty minutes ago or once, long
ago, but it probably wouldn't matter.  The rapist has words, even though
there's no rapist, he just keeps inventing rape; in his mind; sure.  He re-
members, even though it never happened; it's fine fiction when he writes
it down.  Whereas my mind is getting worn away, carried out to sea, layer
by layer, fine grains washed away, a thin surface washed away, then some
more, washed away.  I am fairly worn away in my mind, washed out to sea.
It probably doesn't matter anyway.  People lead their little lives.  There's
not much dignity to go around.  There's lies in abundance, and silence
for girls who don't tell them.  I don't want to tell them.  A lie's for when
he on top of you and you got to survive him being there until he goes;
Malcolm X tried to stop saying a certain lie, and maybe I should change
from Andrea because it's a lie.  It's just that it's a precious thing from my
mother that she tried to give me; she didn't want it to be such an awful lie,
I don't think.  So I have to be the writer she tried to be--Andrea; not-cunt--
only I have to do it so it ain't a lie.  I ain't fabricating stories, I'm makin
different kind of story.  I'm writing as truthful as the man with his fingers,
 if only I can remember and say; but I ain't on his side.  I'm on some
different side.  I'm telling the truth but from a different angle.  I'm the
one he done it to. (229-232)
[close indent]

        Again, nowhere but in the *Women's Review of Books* does
public discourse about *Mercy* attempt to explain within the context of
the novel itself why Dworkin would write the way she does: "Much of
this novel concerns Andrea's struggle with the inadequacy of words,"
Jenefsky writes, focusing not only on Andrea's assault in a movie
theater when she was nine but also on her rape by prison doctors with
a steel speculum while she was jailed for civil disobedience during the
Vietnam War.  Andrea, Jenefsky writes, "is unable to comprehend the
experience as rape because 'no one said rape'; 'it wasn't rape,' explains
Andrea, 'because it wasn't a penis and it was doctors'; and since she
'had never heard of any such thing happening before . . . it didn't
seem possible to [her] that it had happened at all.' "  Even when Andrea
begins to understand what is happening to her--when she is being
repeatedly beaten and raped by her husband, for example--"she wants
to stand up in a public theater and scream out his abuses, but she refrains
because she knows she will not be taken seriously," Jenefsky writes.
She concludes:

[indent]
While the inadequacy of Andrea's language keeps her isolated and
hinders her from obtaining help from others, her poverty and pro-
gressive self-annihilation increasingly erode her capacity for meaningful
speech: the success of one's words in *Mercy* corresponds to the degree
of social, economic and political power one already possesses. (6)
[close indent]


                                #####


Conclusion: Private Experience in Public

        Jenefsky's words point to one conclusion about the different
receptions of *American Psycho*and *Mercy*: Simon & Schuster's last-
minute refusal to publish *American Psycho*garnered Ellis and his
novel a lot of publicity and social power, power that Andrea Dworkin
does not have, in part because she is seen as a "pariah" (Kaplan)
and in part because of her rhetorical strategies before and in *Mercy*.
This article suggests that defining the literary public spheres that form
around her work as "war zones" has consequences for the quality and
quantity of public discussion of Dworkin's work: guerrilla rhetorical tactics
--judging critics in advance and seeing all men and anyone else who
does not agree with her as partly responsible for individual and systemic
sexual abuses of women--do not foster open debate or a common
space for productive discussion, for "creating meaning together"
 (Hauser and Blair 142).
        Another factor complicating the reactions to both American
Psycho and to *Mercy* has to do with the first-person narrators and the
novels' close connections to actual events--whether, in the case of
American Psycho, actual serial killings and femicide, or, in the case
of *Mercy*, Dworkin's autobiography and increasing publicity about
violence against women.  In his account of the structural changes in
the public sphere in the world of letters, Habermas argues that one
of the distinguishing characteristics of a moribund public sphere and
a politicized social sphere is a move to narrative in news coverage and
an erasure of "the line between fiction and report" (170).  As a result
of this conflation, according to Habermas, "the public sphere itself
becomes privatized in the consciousness of the consuming public:
indeed, the public sphere becomes the sphere for the publicizing of
private biographies, so that the accidental fate of the so-called man in
the street or that of systematically managed stars attain publicity, while
publicly relevant developments and decisions are garbed in private
dress and through personalization distorted to the point of unrecogniz-
ability" (171-72).  Habermas's account of structural transformation dele-
gitimates personal accounts as expressed in public in a way that raises
questions about how individuals might ever gain a voice in public as well
as about narrativity as a means to political legitimation.
        Still, critiques of enlightenment ideologies that linger within
notions of publics and public spheres suggest that Dworkin's guerrilla
tactics might themselves be the result of a starting point of unequal power.
Dworkin's work in general and *Mercy* in particular raise the question of how
to speak one's personal experience in public.  In many ways *Mercy* is
anecdotal evidence about the effects of pornography on the lives of an
individual woman.  As such, it has much in common with testimony before
the Meese Commission on pornography and during hearings on "The
Ordinance to Add Pornography as Discrimination Against Women" in
Minneapolis. Given critiques of the credibility of such reports in public
which ask for more objective analysis (Hauser) and models of public
discourse and argumentation which call for disinterestedness (Habermas,
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca), this article raises serious questions
about whether and how issues usually considered "private" can be
discussed credibly and productively in literary public spheres. As this
article has suggested, whether labeled as fiction or not, such accounts
of the effects of pornography and sexual abuse as *Mercy* exemplifies
tend not to be discussed on their own terms in public debate but rather
to be addressed in terms of aesthetics or literary merit--categories and
criteria that may not apply.


Notes

        1.  Much of the voluminous criticism of Habermas focuses on
his theories of human social action and universal pragmatics, which
are not of concern to me here.

        2. Habermas himself views the bourgeois public sphere as
counter-factual, thus combining empirical investigation and theorizing
in a way that makes *The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere* methodologically hybrid.  See McCarthy on Habermas's view
that critical social theory should be situated between philosophy and
science (vii-xvi).

        3. This article is part of a larger project arguing that a combi-
nation of publics and rhetorical theories offers a means of studying
the discursive processes through which fictional texts affect society.
Other chapters focus on responses to Joyce's Ulysses, Miller's
Tropic of Cancer, and Ellis's American Psycho.

        4. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca distinguish between ad
hominem arguments, "arguments which the speaker knows would
be without weight for the universal audience, as he conceives it"
(111) , and ad personam arguments, which are personal attacks that
aim at disqualifying the opponent from debate (111, 318).

        5. Dworkin is more explicit about organized crime-publishing
industry connections in Dworkin and MacKinnon (26, 83-84).

        6. "The Ordinance to Add Pornography as Discrimination
Against Women" was passed twice in Minneapolis by two different
city councils and was vetoed both times by the mayor.  In Indianapolis,
the ordinance passed and became law.  Within one hour, the city was
sued for passing the law, which was later ruled unconstitutional by
the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.  That decision was sum-
marily affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.  See Dworkin and Mac-
Kinnon (63-65, 95) and Stoltenberg (72-75).

        7. Dworkin includes the following among the front matter
of Ice and Fire: "This book is fiction and no resemblance to actual
events, persons or locations is intended or should be inferred."
*Mercy* includes no such disclaimer.

        8.  Neither Dworkin (through the Markson Agency) nor
Dworkin's individual publishers would release Dworkin's sales figures
or earnings (personal correspondence with Stephanie Hawkins,
Elaine Markson's assistant).

        9. Pages 214-32 of the Four Walls Eight Windows edition
of *Mercy* were published as part of a special issue, "The Female
Body," of the *Michigan Quarterly Review*, a 1,800-circulation literary
review. Permission to quote at length from Dworkin's *Mercy* has
been granted by Four Walls Eight Windows.

        10. Pages 316-24 of the Four Walls Eight Windows edition
of *Mercy* were published as part of a special issue, "Silencing,"
of American Voice.  The literary review, founded in 1985 and
published by the Kentucky Foundation for Women, has a circu-
lation of 2,000.

        11. The shift of argumentative focus from the issues *Mercy*
raised to the alleged quality of Dworkin's writing--a shift from politics
to aesthetics--is in no way unique in this case; indeed, the shape of
public arguments across this century about novels that raised social
and political issues suggests that, ultimately, the criterion of literary
merit has often had the effect of calming the waters, removing books
from the literary public sphere and inserting them into the sphere
of expert critics, where judgments about the quality of writing were
made but rarely supported in a way that nonexperts could, in turn,
judge those arguments.

        12. These lengthy excerpts appear courtesy of Four Walls
Eight Windows.

        13. The only published comments of Dworkin's about *Mercy*
that I could find were, again, from the author's note before the
American Voice excerpt: "It is a book about multiple rape, its effects
on women's freedom and consciousness.  The book is set up such
that each chapter represents a rape experience of some sort.  I have
written two endings for it, my plan from the beginning, which will be
published sequentially, the first a suicide, the second where the
woman responds with physical aggression against men.  This is an
excerpt from the second ending.  It is certainly taboo material" (24).

        14. Steiner seems to have in mind here those who read
speech qua action, an approach similar to the one Dworkin and
MacKinnon take on pornography (Pornography and Civil Rights
58-65).

        15. For discussions of the issues involved in legal and
social definitions of pornography see Hauser "Final Report" (3-4)
and Dworkin and MacKinnon (24-32, 36-41, 67-70); for disagree-
ments among antipornography feminists about definitions of porno-
graphy see Russell (2-7).


Works Cited

Bell, Madison Smartt.  "Sustaining a Scream: Andrea Dworkin's Novel
Depicts a Life of Politics, Poverty, and Rape."  Rev. of *Mercy*.  Chicago
Tribune 15 Sept. 1991:  14:5.

---.  Rev. of *Mercy*.  *Chicago Tribune* 1 Nov. 1992: 14:8.

"Bookwatch."  Rev. of *Mercy*.  Ms. 2 (1991): 76.

Casey, Constance.  "A Catalogue of Violence Against Women."  Rev.
of  *Mercy*.  *Los Angeles Times* 27 Aug. 1991: E10.

"Current Books and Their Rights."  *Publishers Weekly* 23 Aug. 1991:
S15.

Dworkin, Andrea.  "In October 1973 (Age 27)."  Excerpt from *Mercy*.
*Michigan Quarterly Review* 29 (Fall 1990): 623-36.

---.  *Letters from a War Zone*: Writings 1976-1989.  New York: Dutton,
1989.

---.  *Mercy*. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991.

---.  "Pornography and the New Puritans: Letters from Andrea Dworkin
and Others."  *New York Times Book Review* 3 May 1992: 15.

---, and Catherine MacKinnon.  Pornography and Civil Rights: A New
Day for Women's Equality.  Minneapolis: Organizing
Against Pornography, 1988.

Frank, Joan.  "Sketch."  *San Francisco Review of Books* 16 (Fall 1991):
9-10.

Fraser, Nancy.  "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the
Critique of Actually Existing Democracy."  Habermas and the Public
Sphere.  Ed. Craig Calhoun.  Cambridge: MIT P, 1992.  109-42.

Goldstein, Laurence.  Introduction.  Spec. issue of Michigan Quarterly
Review 29 (Fall 1990): 485-89.

Grim, Jessica.  Rev. of *Mercy*.  Library Journal 15 Nov. 1991: 106-7.

Hauser, Gerard A. "Constituting Publics and Reconstructing Public
Spheres: The Meese Commission's Report on Pornography." War-
ranting Assent: Case Studies in Argument Evaluation. Albany: SU
of New York P, 1995.

---, and Carole Blair. "Rhetorical Antecedents to the Public." PRE/TEXT
3 (1982): 139-67.

Irving, John.  "Pornography and the New Puritans."  New York Times
Book Review 29 March 1992: 1+.

Jenefsky, Cindy.  "To Remember the Pain."  Rev. of *Mercy*.  Women's
Review of Books Feb. 1992: 6-7.

Kaplan, Esther.  "Rapes of Wrath."  Rev. of *Mercy*.  *Village Voice* 5
Nov 1991: 76.

McCarthy, Thomas. Introduction. Communication and the Evolution
of Society. By J rgen Habermas. Boston: Beacon,1979. vii-xxiv.

Paglia, Camille.  "Guest Opinion: The Return of Carry Nation."  *Playboy*
Oct. 1992: 36-38.

---.  "The Joy of Presbyterian Sex."  *New Republic* 2 Dec. 1991: 24-27.

---.  "It's a Jungle Out There, So Get Used to It!: Women Need to
Realize Men Are Testosterone-Driven   Animals."  Excerpt from
Sex, Art and American Culture.  1992.  Utne Reader Jan. 1993:
61-65.

Perelman, Ch., and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise
on Argumentation. Notre Dame, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1969.

Ryan, Mary P.  "Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in
Nineteenth-Century America."  Habermas and the Public Sphere.  Ed.
Craig Calhoun.  Cambridge: MIT P, 1992.  259-88.

Russell, Diana E. H.  Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Porno-
graphy. Athene Series.  New York: Teachers College, 1993.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?"  Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture.  Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg.  Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988.

Steinberg, Sybil.  Rev. of *Mercy*.  *Publishers Weekly* 25 July 1991: 36.

Steiner, Wendy.  "Declaring War on Men."  Rev. of *Mercy*.  New York
Times Book Review 15 Sept. 1991: 11.

Stoltenberg, John.  "Pornography and Freedom."  Making Violence
Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography.  Ed. Diana E. H. Russell. Athene
Series.  New York: Teachers College, 1993. 



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