How could we have forgotten Thomas Covenant?
Mentioned five times on the first page.
The Monster in Young Frankenstein has sex with Madeline Kahn’s character, Elizabeth. It started out non-consensual with the kidnapping and all, and ends up with her singing Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life. They end up apparently married.
At that point in the Monster’s development he may not have had the capacity to form mens rea, so maybe it doesn’t count as rape, but he’s a sympathetic character.
Eric Rohmer’s magnificent The Marquise of O is a film few people have seen but is one of the greatest cinematic love stories ever committed to film.
A town is under siege (it’s the 19th century) and a regimental officer bravely and single-handedly risks his life to rescue a widow (and daughter of an aristocrat) against a number of enemy soldiers who’ve spirited her from her house. His motives are unadulteratedly chivalrous. However, when he finds safety in a deserted barn, he notices her beauty and vulnerability (she’s in only a nightgown and has passed out from the shock and trauma of the evening) and rapes her. She has no memory at all of the assault.
Weeks later, he has returned from the front and begins to actively court her. He is doing this, quite simply, because he knows, given the awful sin he has committed, that it’s the honorable thing to do (though he is also in love). However, she is resistant to his advances (despite feeling very similar emotions in return). Why? Because she has discovered that she is mysteriously pregnant, and though she can’t explain how or why, she feels unworthy of the hand of her “hero” and fears bringing shame on his name (the way she already has brought it on her parents, who are traumatized by the events and are disbelieving of their daughter’s protestations of innocence).
The more the suitor actively seeks her hand in marriage (to “right” his wrong), the more she resists, since she continues to put him on a pedestal. He doesn’t know about the pregnancy, but the societal expectations on her within her own family slowly beat her down into a fragile emotional state. I won’t spoil the ending, but it is a thing of genuine beauty and is incredibly moving.
Can a man be defined by a single action? After all, if her “savior” can also be her “devil”, are labels of Hero & Villain ones that ignore infinite complexities of grey? And what is ones true capacity for forgiveness, for compassion, for reassessment when everything you thought you knew or believed about that person is shattered? But also, what if your impressions were correct, and one horrific act proves itself the exception and not the norm? How do you balance disillusionment, suffering, and a renewed acceptance?
The Marquise of O deftly handles all these issues exquisitely (as well as tackling gender roles in society and how ritual formalities can often impede forthright communication), with romance and humor and great emotional catharsis. There are no “good” and “bad” characters so much as exceptionally human ones, with all sorts of virtues and failings mixed up in a way that’s often contradictory but always completely believable. It is a minor masterpiece and the best example I can think of to respond to the OP.
Better question: How could you have missed all the mentions of Thomas Covenant in this thread?
Naturally, Thomas Convenant and Alex (Clockwork Orange) are taken, but I have two more who are a little more obscure/geeky:
In Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun Severian the torturer rapes Jolenta. Er. Probably. We think. Because it’s told from his point of view and he’s a probably unreliable, possibly duplicitous narrator and the scene is rather odd, but yeah, that’s probably a good way to read it.
And in China Mieville’s Peridido Street Station it turns out that Yagharek’s (god help me, I’m spelling that from memory) unforgivable pre-book crime was rape. Of all four of these, I’d say he’s the most unambiguously sympathetic.
Deckard’s an interesting character, and not just because he might be a replicant. This is a fellow whose job is to gun down people in the street, sometimes while they flee, other times while they beg for their lives. You’d have to be a bit “off” to be able to do that, I think.
Well, he grabs her and CARRIES her off to bed. While she swoons in delight. I know, I know, “it isn’t rape if she enjoyed it” is a misogynist cliche. But it isn’t exactly unknown for some women to actually enjoy such things.
OK people, can we stop complaining that Thomas Covenant has not been mentioned and also stop reminding people that Thomas Covenant has already been mentioned a bunch of times? Enough about Thomas Covenant! I never liked those books in the first place!
Sorry, wait. That’s not really what I came in to say. Somerset Maugham’s short story The Unconquered. During World War I a German soldier rapes a young French farm girl. Then later he goes several times by the farm, starts having feelings for the girl, brings her presents. He finds out that the girl is pregnant and becomes quite taken with the idea of becoming a father. The girl’s family is all in favour of this courtship (there being a dearth of young men in France at this time) but the girl will have none of it. At this point you start thinking that the German guy is maybe not so bad.
The dénouement is that the young German soldier shows up right after the baby is born, but the young girl has disappeared from the house and when she comes back reveals that she has drowned the baby in a pond.
In the movie, Scarlett is pounding on Rhett’s back with her fist as he carries her up the stairs. This one doesn’t seem much like a rape, seeing as how Scarlett wound up enjoying it…but she was a pretty fickle broad. I can believe it started out as one.
She never used her safeword.
“Pittypat! Pittypat!” 
:eek: :o
Sex without consent is rape. Enjoyment has nothing to do with it.
I hope that what you mean is you suppose she ended up giving consent at some point in the midst of the act. (The film does not portray this–we only know that the day after the act she was happy about it.) Then I suppose you could argue that what “started out” as a rape “ended up” a rape.
But it would be wrong to think of this as somehow mitigating the fact that she was, indeed, raped.
-FrL-
That’s rape by the Spanish legal definition.
Yep, I think she did.
In Hugh Cook’s high fantasy novel The Walrus and the Warwolf the main characters are a band of pirates and it’s strongly implied that gang rape has been part of their life for quite a while. The protagonist, Drake Dreldragon Douhay, is certainly an attempted rapist, since when he’s a teenager at the start of the book he makes a very poorly planned attempt to abduct and rape a beautiful priestess. Years later the two meet again when a reformed Drake rescues her from a band of slave traders. They are thrown together for a series of wild adventures, and after several more rescues she eventually falls in love with him and they become king and queen of a newly-founded country.
Great book, by the way.
I recall an ep of Cagney and Lacey, where they’re trying to track down a rapist who apparently is an opera singer. They find a possible suspect, and ask about him of the opera director, whom they have questioned before.
INCREDIBLY ARROGANT PRETENTIOUS ASSHOLE OPERA DIRECTOR: Yes, I’ve seen him. I don’t know him. He’s a background singer, for $5 an hour, and I make it a point not to know anyone who works for $5 an hour!
CAGNEY OR LACEY (I FORGET WHICH): Why didn’t you mention him before?!
IAPAOD: I didn’t know you were interested in the ambience! In opera, the rapist is usually a principal singer!
Well lots of woman have rape fanasties. Not to say anywoman wants to be raped. But some of them act out rapes fanasies withis people that,re going to sleep with anyway. Including being a brat and having t be carried of kicking and screaming, Scarlett seemed like a brat to me. And Rett could probably pick up on that.
You could argue de Sade’s "hero’s were sypathetic inasmuch as according to Sade, they were the ones living according to nature and their victicims were idiot prey who didn’t accept their own natrure.
'Couse most people wouldn’t say that.
I kinda started feeling sympathetic to the pedophile in Hard Candy about halfway through the movie:
When his captor performs the castration on the kitchen island.