Fatal Eyeballing: Sex, Violence, and Intimate Voyeurism in Richard Wright’s Native Son

The plots of US crime ctions often turn on the fate of the body of a woman who has suffered male violence. The resurfacing of a female corpse and the upsetting evidence it brings to light prove crucial to the conviction of the main criminal in James Ellroy’s Clandestine (1982) and James Lee Burke’s Cimarron Rose (1997), for example. Elsewhere, in William Faulkner’s potboiler Sanctuary (1931) and Patricia Highsmith’s A Game for the Living (1958), central female gures survive their ordeal and go on to describe their physical degradation in the cause of prosecution. The bodies of most female victims, however, testify after death. The detection of their blood or the traces of their DNA remind the living that they were once the focus of an annihilating passion: that the sexual consumption of their bodies itself turned them into potential courtroom proof and that this then led their attackers to try to hide or wipe them from view. Many US crime stories can still be charted by the appalling, yet revealing, descents undergone by the female bodies at their heart. Sources of desire and victims of violence, silenced objects that still sometimes voice and sometimes become damning evidence, these bodies are in every way central, and to track their transformations is often to retell nothing less than the story itself.