Sex, Violence, and Gender Theme Analysis

Sex often, though not always, goes hand in hand with violence in the novel. This violence is almost always, if not always, committed by men against women. The summer before the events of the novel, Bucky Duvalle, with the help of his friends, attempts to rape Patrice. She eventually gets away by swimming to Thomas’s boat in the middle of the lake, but not before she suffers scratches, bruises, and a bite mark on her shoulder, along with deep psychological wounds. When Patrice goes to Betty Pye as a trusted confidante to talk about sex, one of the main topics of their conversation is how to get away from men who they don’t like. And when Patrice is considering how her relationship with Wood Mountain might progress, she remembers something her mother told her, which she believes to be absolutely true: you don’t truly know a man until you reject him, and then “his true ugliness, submerged to charm you, might surface.” When Valentine spurns Barnes’s advances, he doesn’t react with physical violence, but he does think to himself, in a threatening way, “a man is a man,” intimating his belief that men have needs that women are obligated to satisfy. More shockingly, Vera is brutalized by men, who commit unspeakable acts of violence against her so that they can use her body for sex. She finds herself in the hold of a ship where, while going through withdrawal, she feels her insides being “pulled out” and her brain “heaving in her skull,” and she comes home bearing scars of the violence committed against her. In the city, Patrice finds collars fixed to chains attached to the walls of an abandoned house, where it’s suggested that women were held captive. 

It’s worth noting that sex and violence do not always go together in the novel. Betty Pye enthusiastically enjoys much of the sex she has with her boyfriend, and Patrice goes to her when she is curious about sex. But by presenting various women’s relationships with different men, and by showing the internalization of gender norms and the violent actions of those different men, the novel suggests that gender norms at this time tended to affirm and perpetuate gender-based violence.