Picturesque Falsehoods: An examination of Romantic Love,
the Press and Domestic Violence
Loneliness will disappear if you have a husband, even one
you don't love…happiness is loving and being loved by
your husband…
(Mademoiselle Magazine in Meyers 1999, 31)
Several years ago, whilst researching press representations
of domestic violence, I began noticing a pattern emerging on
the periphery of the project that was as curious as it was
persistent. This pattern involved the use of a romantic
discourse within articles dealing with domestic violence. It
seemed increasingly evident that the narratives used to guide
the discourse, whilst all based on 'traditional' notions of
romance, differed considerably according to whether the
protagonist was male or female. As the pattern grew, I began
taking notes to put aside for a more detailed examination at a
later stage. This article is the result.
I shall begin with an examination of the "generalised tyranny
of romance" (Puren 1994: 5) in order to identify the key
elements of popular understandings of "romance". I am
particularly interested in the use of romance as a "practical
ideology" in the sense that Wetherell et al. use this term to
describe "the often contradictory and fragmentary complexes of
notions, norms and models which guide conduct and allow for its
justification and rationalization" (1987: 60). I then look at
how the press draws on this practical ideology in the
discursive choices they make in the coverage of domestic
violence. I do this by utilizing five press articles that I
consider indicative of these particular discursive patterns
used in reporting domestic violence. The articles are drawn
from the research mentioned earlier and were chosen as they
best demonstrate the discursive differences adopted by the
press according to the gender of the perpetrator. Three of the
articles deal with male perpetrators and female victims, two of
which concern domestic murder, and one an attempted murder. The
remaining two articles were the only two articles
published during the six-week research period that dealt with
female perpetrators of non-fatal domestic violence. The
contrasting content of the articles has been used to separate
their discussion into three categories that reveal how the
press utilizes the romance formula to reconcile the ideals of
love, hearth and home with the experience of abuse. I argue
that the concept of romance plays a pivotal role in both the
violence that occurred and in the choice of scripts used to
report the violence.
For the purposes of this paper, qualitative textual (or
discourse) analysis has been used to explore underlying
discursive or representational patterns. This type of
evaluative analysis is considered ideal for phenomena such as
romance and domestic violence, both of which have their roots
in societal values, as discourse analysis is "concerned not
simply with micro-contexts of the effects of words across
sentences or conversational turns but also with the
macro-contexts of larger social patterns" (Mills 1995: 25).
Romance as a formula
The title of this paper, picturesque falsehoods, comes from
the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of romance which
continues as "a mental tendency to be influenced by romantic
tales, which themselves are 'remote from experience, quixotic,
dreamy" (cited in Cozens 1995: 141). The romance formula is one
that is continually and relentlessly reiterated within film,
magazines and books. The basic plot is simple - boy meets girl,
boy behaves in a dominant manner, girl behaves in a passive
manner (although a limited amount of feminine feistiness is
permissible), and, after the requisite obstacles are overcome,
they live happily ever after:
The moral fantasy of the romance is that of love
triumphant and permanent [and] since romance is a fantasy of
the all-sufficiency of love, most romantic formulas center on
the overcoming of some combination of social or psychological
barriers. There seems little doubt that most modern romance
formulas are essentially affirmations of the ideals of
monogamous marriage and feminine domesticity (Cawelti 1976:
41-42).
Indeed, from classic fairy-tales to modern film, the female
characters are largely weak, passive and, sooner or later,
domesticated, whilst the male characters are assertive,
aggressive and larger than life. On the other side of the coin,
the witches, stepmothers and other active, single women are as
discursively contemptible as an effeminate male, and they
usually pay a high price for their pursuit of power. As
McCaughey (1998: 278) argues: "cultural ideals of manhood and
womanhood include a cultural, political, aesthetic, and legal
acceptance of men's aggression and a deep scepticism, fear, and
prohibition of women's." This set of assumptions positions
aggression as a 'primary marker of sex difference' and promotes
a cultural understanding of male violence and female
vulnerability as natural and normal. Women are allowed to be
many things in 'the name of love' provided they remain
'feminine' and, by association, non-aggressive. Therefore,
heterosexuality itself can be widely "conceptualized in terms
of opposites: male aggression, strength, hardness, roughness
and competitiveness as the opposite of female nurture,
weakness, softness, smoothness and co-operativeness" (Dyer
1997: 264). In this way, a film like There's Something
about Mary, which presents a positive plethora of male
stalking, can be critically described as "a romantic comedy
with its heart in the right place" (Rozen in Anderson &
Accomando 1999: 24-28), whilst a movie such as Fatal
Attraction can be held up as a salutary lesson of female
stalking as crazed, family-destroying and punishable by death.
Consequently, the archetypal romance formula contains three
overlapping elements. The first sets up the heterosexual
dominant/subordinate paradigm that provides the parameters
within which the romance operates. The second specifies the
obstacles, social and/or psychological, with which the path to
true love must be strewn; and the third deals with the reward
bestowed upon all those willing to negotiate those obstacles -
the happy ever after.
But what happens when this idealistic script fails and the
promised true love is not uplifting and supportive, but
destructive and abusive? In fact, the more the 'romantic' male
dominance/female passivity script is adhered to, the greater
the chances of this paradox unfolding as the script itself is
both unrealistic and self-defeating. Research has shown that
extreme male dominance is not only a predictor for domestic
violence (Wiesz et al. 2000: 75-90) but that "abuse tends to
gravitate to the relationship of greatest power differential"
(Finkelhor 1983: 18). In this way one of the key elements in
the concept of heterosexual romance, the eroticised power
imbalance (Dyer 1997: 265), is hijacked to legitimize the
foundations for domestic violence that, in turn, becomes an
obstacle to be negotiated. Threadgold argues that romance is,
in reality, actually activated by abusive men as "a technique
of capture" and by abused women as "a technique of agency"
(1997: 12-16). Both concepts operate to convince the woman that
it is her responsibility to ensure change and that this change
is dependent upon her love, her support - and her staying in
the relationship. This is one of the great ironies of the
romance formula. Despite the promotion of male dominance and
female dependence, the script holds the woman responsible for
the preservation of the male-female relationship itself
(Meyers, 1999: 28 & 31) to the extent that women are
socialized into believing that the "love varies and depends on
their own efforts" (Cancian in Jankowiak 1995: 9). Thus romance
becomes more than a pleasant bedtime story, it becomes a
historical force which acts to position both men and woman
within a script that undermines the equality crucial to the
success of their relationship, and then hands the least equal
partner the responsibility for the maintenance of the
relationship. The extent to which this script contributes to
press articles covering domestic violence is the focus of the
next section of this paper.
Single, spurned and suicidal
We exist within a culture that "fetishes the family as the
ideal unit of human community, the perfect container for our
lusts and loves" (Ehrenreich 1994: 62), and the 'happy ever
after' of the romance formula is, more often than not, supposed
to be the family. This situation gives rise to a certain
dilemma when an incident of domestic violence must be covered
within the press, because it is the very arena of this violence
that is elsewhere promoted as the centre of our existence.
However, the dilemma can be solved if the abusive incident is
discursively positioned within the context of "social
constructions and lived realities of women as caretakers,
attention-givers, and the ones responsible for keeping
relationships going" (Seuffert 1999: 211-240) because then the
women can be held accountable for events which transpire after
a separation - especially if they have instigated the break-up.
Furthermore, women are held responsible for finding a suitable
'protector', and, if they fail to do so and/or fail to regulate
their behaviour in ways that minimize the possibility of harm
or abuse, then they are also ultimately blamed for any injuries
they receive (Cahill 2000: 55). In short, a series of
alternative discourses are available that make recourse to the
formula of romantic love and its elements. Each and any of
these can be invoked in order to re-naturalise the violence.
This strategy translates into an undue emphasis within
articles covering domestic violence on who broke up the
relationship rather than why the relationship broke up. Both
the articles discussed in this section deal with men who
murdered their partners after the female had ended the
relationship . In the first article, Soldier stole rifle,
shot wife (The Australian 19/9/98), the estranged husband,
a soldier, stole an army rifle, drove to his wife's house and
killed her. In the second, Gunman left apology note
(Herald-Sun 23/9/98), the accused visited his 16-year old
ex-girlfriend in hospital as she was recuperating from a
horse-riding accident and sprayed five shots around the room
before shooting her in the head. The discursive presentations
of the two articles are very similar, despite the fact that
they are written by different journalists, one male, one
female, and for different newspapers with different target
audiences. Apart from the emphasis on the instigation of the
break-up, both articles also note suicide as the original
intent of the accused and go to considerable lengths to
foreground his state of mind at the expense of that of his
victim.
This is especially apparent in Soldier stole rifle, shot
wife where the article opens with an account of the
perpetrator's emotive state - angry - due to his wife's
'rejection' of him, and ends it with an sympathetic explanation
for his actions:
(First paragraph) ANGRY at being rejected by his wife and
spurred by a cocktail of alcohol and drugs, soldier Brett
John Dean stole an army rifle and, for reasons he still
cannot explain, drove to her home and shot her dead.
(Last paragraph) Dean's defence counsel told the jury he
was distressed and had stolen the gun for the sole purpose of
killing himself and only went to his wife's home to say
goodbye.
The reader is not told why the relationship collapsed nor is
the deceased given a voice, or an occupation, within the
article. The only active roles she is awarded are those of
rejecting her husband and - through the logic of the romance
ideology - failing in her responsibility for ensuring the
continuity of the relationship. In this way, the text of this
article follows a discursive pattern favourable to the
perpetrator, and not the victim, who is indeed barely visible
and yet is still awarded partial responsibility for her own
murder because she can be perceived as precipitating the event.
Even Dean's defence reflects the belief in limited culpability
as his plea of not guilty was based on the grounds of
diminished responsibility.
Gunman left apology note follows the same pattern but
with a specific omission that initially robs the coverage of
context. Whilst the perpetrator's alleged regret is emphasized
by the word 'apology' in the headline, the actual relationship
between him and his victim is obscured within both the headline
and the opening paragraphs. For example, the first paragraph
reads: A GUNMAN shot a 16-year-old schoolgirl dead in her
hospital bed after leaving a note of apology for her parents, a
court heard yesterday. It is, in fact, not until the sixth
paragraph that it finally becomes clear that the victim was his
ex-girlfriend. Both the headline and the introductory
paragraphs work to obscure the intimacy of the murder and rob
the coverage of a context within which readers are readily able
to identify an incident of domestic rather than random
violence. The apparent senselessness of the crime serves as a
warning to all women, reinforces their supposed vulnerability
and begs the question - What did she do wrong? The assumption
is that she has abdicated her responsibilities for
self-protection and self-surveillance (Cahill 2000: 48),
because the dangers of "violating the codes of behaviour are
gender specific, positioning all women as vulnerable to male
violence and in need of protection" (Meyers 1997: 9).
Ironically this protection, according to the romance script, is
afforded by securing, and maintaining, appropriate masculine
guardianship.
Once paragraph six establishes the existence of a
relationship, the text works quickly to provide an elaboration
and justification with the whole of paragraph eight reading:
The two had allegedly broken up only days before the shooting -
at the instigation of Adele Smith. Thus, like Janine Dean in
Soldier stole rifle, shot wife, Adele Smith, despite
her youth, is granted an active role only in that she set the
tragic events in motion with her repudiation of her partner.
According to the logic of the romance script, each woman failed
to commit herself to the relationship and to tackle the
obstacles that are mandatory to the script. However, the
obstacles themselves are not presented as an issue, and are in
fact not mentioned in either article. Rather it is the failure
to commit and to stay committed that is the focal point. One
can only imagine the horror the 16-year-old went through in the
moments before her death as her former boyfriend sprayed
bullets around her hospital room, but this is given no space
within the script used. Instead, as with Brett John Dean, the
perpetrator's positioning as a 'rejected lover' guarantees his
emotions a discursive space that his victim is denied. This
automatically places the murder in the 'crime of passion' genre
and, once again, grants the transforming power of a failed
romance as a defence for the accused.
Another tendency evident within the articles is that of heavy
journalistic reliance on statements from the defence when the
perpetrator is male. In Soldier stole rifle, shot
wife, no statements from the prosecution are included, and
neither are comments from the judge, although it is reasonable
to suppose he was fairly critical of Dean's actions, given the
fact he sentenced him to 12 years jail. Gunman left apology
note is slightly more balanced, with five prosecutorial
statements and six defence, however only two of the
prosecutorial statements read as condemnatory, whilst all of
the defence statements work to both explain and excuse the
perpetrator's part in the crime.
In Soldier stole rifle, shot wife the focal point is
the mitigating circumstances surrounding Dean's actions -
anger, alcohol, drugs, distress. Ironically, earlier in the
month The Age published an article titled How drink spurs
men to fight (7/9/98), which detailed a survey of violent
behavior by men whilst 'under the influence'. Terminology such
as 'under the influence' and 'spurs' holds an external agency
responsible for dictating individual actions and, with the
reader informed that Brett John Dean was 'spurred by a cocktail
of alcohol and drugs', the privileged interpretation is that of
a loss of control, not specific intent. In this way, the first
paragraph mitigates Dean's active role by bringing in two
outside agencies - his wife and his alcohol/drug consumption -
to share the blame and establish a loss of personal agency
highlighted by his inability to explain his actions.
For both articles, the inclusion of a claimed intention to
commit suicide by the accused also invokes the despair of a
failed romance and buys into a discourse of loss of control.
The suggestion that the perpetrator actually meant to harm
himself but, in the heat of the moment, 'accidentally' killed
the one he loved conjures up images of tragic or consuming
love, misery, desperation and, inevitably, diminished
responsibility. However, a closer examination of Soldier
stole rifle, shot wife reveals discursive contradictions
within the text with the participants - Dean, his defence and
the journalist - seemingly trying to have it both ways. Can
Dean really be simultaneously both angry/murderous, according
to the first paragraph, and distressed/suicidal, as detailed in
the last paragraph? And, with both these options available, how
can someone not be able to explain why he drove to his
ex-wife's home, the woman the script claims he loved to the
point of distraction, and shot her dead?
Love will find a way
The two articles discussed in this section, Man accused of
love trap (Herald-Sun 22/8/98) and Love conquers even
stab in back (The Age 28/8/98) both contain the word
'love' within the headline, immediately proclaiming the
intention of the journalist to utilize a romantic scenario to
portray the crime. Man accused of love trap is yet another
article dealing with a spurned lover (this one actually using
the term 'spurned lover'), but which did not, this time, end in
death. In this case, the accused went to considerable lengths
to set a trap for his 16 year-old ex-girlfriend by wiring a can
of Coca-Cola with 117 volts of electricity and leaving it in a
garden shed that she habitually frequented. Fortunately, a
neighbour became suspicious and contacted police.
Headlines such as Man accused of love trap negate the
seriousness of the crime and play into a script with
undercurrents of romance, rather than abuse. Yet the term 'love
trap' is not even justified by the facts in evidence as the
device was clearly not designed to ensnare affection, but
rather to cause bodily injury. It follows that if a possum trap
traps possums, a grease trap will trap grease, and therefore a
'love trap' should trap love - not electrocute one's beloved.
Furthermore, the use of the word 'love' in conjunction with
such an attempt uncritically perpetuates the myth that violent
men are abusive as a demonstration of love towards their
victims. As I wrote this paper a report in the Herald-Sun
(17/5/02: 4) regarding the murder of career criminal Victor
Pierce, quotes a relative as saying: Victor and Wendy were like
a lovey dovey Barbie and Ken … He may have given her a
backhand once or twice, but it would only have been once or
twice. As McCaughey argues, whilst discussing rape culture,
prevailing cultural models "accept men's aggression against
women as normal, sexy and/or inevitable and often regards
women's refusal of it as pathological, [and] unnatural" (1998:
278). The discursive strategies used within the text transfer
the concept of the violence from an act of simple abuse or
premeditated revenge into a by-product of love or passion,
therefore providing, once again, mitigating circumstances that
at least partially redeem the perpetrator.
When explanations are required for male violence towards
women, they often focus on whether the male aggression was
'natural' in relation to the woman's behaviour (Stanko in
Belknap 1996: 126). This has largely developed out of the
stereotypical and historical notion of the 'nagging wife', and
calls into play the 'good girl/bad girl' dichotomy that is an
inherent part of our culture. The premise is that had the
victim not behaved in a certain (bad) way, the violence would
never have eventuated. Bearing this in mind in conjunction with
the social tendency, as stated earlier, for women to be held
primarily responsible for both the maintenance of heterosexual
relationships and for her own personal safety, the ready
inclusion within the text of female agency regarding break-ups
becomes more sinister and more discursively damaging. It is a
power dynamic that holds women accountable for their own
physical victimisation (Cahill 2000: 48). Yet again, in Man
accused of love trap, the reader is immediately informed
of who can be held responsible for the demise of the
relationship, and yet again no further explanation is given as
to why the relationship may have foundered. Apart from meeting
her friends in a garden shed, spurning her lover is the only
active role that this victim is allowed within the article. It
is difficult to know whether the absence of a statement by the
girl is by journalistic intent or by her wishes, however the
dearth of prosecutorial statements appears to be a discursive
strategy where the perpetrator is a male.
In her 1984 study of romance reading, Janice Radway found
that, for readers, "the ultimate pleasure is to see how the
hero's masculine defence mechanisms crumble beneath the love of
the heroine. The transformation of the reserved and indifferent
male into a warm and loving human being signifies a victory of
female values of care and nurture" (Van Zoonen 1994: 109). One
would imagine that it would be difficult to enscript an
incident of domestic violence within these parameters, but the
second article Love conquers even stab in back shows
that it is not impossible. In this article, Colin Wilkinson
proposes to his girlfriend, Tracie Mears, as she stands in the
dock charged with wounding him with intent and affray:
A lovestruck boyfriend proposed to his sweetheart when she
appeared in a court dock charged with stabbing him in the
back.
Once again, although in this case he is not the perpetrator,
the emotive state of the male involved takes centre stage. He
is lovestruck, loyal, brave and romantic - and the fact that he
deliberately chose an odd day to propose is overlooked, as is
his sweetheart's lack of a joyous reaction, because neither fit
neatly within the romantic theme chosen for this particular
script. Instead, the apparently dysfunctional nature of their
relationship is displaced by the transformation of Colin Mears
from victim to saviour:
Imagistic discourses routinely position women as
boundariless, vulnerable sex objects - objects that brave and
physically capable men protect, save, and have sex with.
Gender is no less bodily or material because it is discursive
or textual. (McCaughey 1998: 279)
The romantic discourse is enlivened with the sentimental
terminology of 'lovestruck' (with the inherent double meaning)
and 'sweetheart', and demonstrates a disturbing twist to the
notion of the triumph of romantic love. Here the male victim
romantically proclaims "I never thought anything about
it … I love her and that's it", thus providing a
privileged interpretation that not only does love conquer all,
but that it is actually somewhat heroic (perhaps even manly) to
play down the violence. The attack itself is rendered
powerless, a kind of pinprick, by his forgiveness. The female
perpetrator is saved from both legal condemnation and societal
disapproval by the 'selfless' actions of her boyfriend who
provides a discursively instructive example of overcoming the
obstacles necessary for true love to be secured. Paradoxically,
there were no articles published that dealt with full details
of male-female abuse where the victim was still alive, and no
articles at all that ended with the abused female vowing
romantically to continue the relationship. Indeed, in the
latter instance they may well have been represented as
pathological had they done.
In fact, female voice was largely absent in articles both
where the women were still alive and where they had been
murdered. The only exception to this rule was where the female
was the perpetrator and, even there, female voice was limited.
In Love conquers even stab in back, the accused only
nods acceptance to her boyfriend's proposal and no interview or
mention of why the attack took place is included. The covert
message also deals with the privacy of abuse, and the labelling
of crimes within the homes as mere domestics. However, Tracie
Mears is not just denied verbal expression, but visual
description as well. The script provides adjectives for
everyone except her. Colin Wilkinson is 'lovestruck', the
official are 'astonished', yet Mears is wholly expressionless.
The reader is merely told that she is 'his' sweetheart - and
that she caused him to undergo 'hours of surgery', a fact which
emphasises the discursive theme inherent within the double
meaning of the stab in the back. In fact, the mention of the
'hours of surgery' Colin Wilkinson was forced to undergo is the
only hint of condemnation for the accused. She is rescued from
harsher journalistic treatment by her boyfriend's proposal and
the subsequent recuperation within a romantic script. Yet even
this hint of disapprobation is more than is evident in
Soldier stole rifle, shot wife, Gunman left
apology note or Man accused of love trap, even
though in two of these cases the victims were actually
murdered. It seems that, to be sure of moral outrage and a
conscionable response to a sickening crime, one must turn to
articles dealing with child abuse. For example, on 22/8/98 the
Herald-Sun published an article titled Vile grandfather
jailed, which dealt with an elderly man who was jailed for
the sexual abuse of six of his daughters. The text included
words such as 'depraved' and 'disgusting' and relayed the
judge's opinion that the man had "betrayed his role as a
father.' Paradoxically, nowhere in articles regarding domestic
abuse was the reader told that the man had betrayed his role as
a partner/husband, and words such as 'vile' were conspicuous
only by their absence:
The fact that social tolerance for aggression is gendered
reflects the cultural equation of violence and masculinity in
a way that naturalizes their coincidence. Both men's
self-defensive violence, and their sexual violence against
women fit neatly into what we understand as natural
masculinity, while women's aggression is seen as unnatural
and, therefore, pathological (Jones 1980 in Grindstaff &
McCaughey 1998: 180)
Witches and bitches
"Lesbian vampire, witch, black widow, female castrator,
monstrous mother, dangerous daughter - the idea of the female
killer has gripped people's imaginations for centuries" (Creed
1996: 108). Promoting an offender as evil - a witch - is "an
umbrella 'explanation' for badness which is felt to be
otherwise inexplicable" (Naylor 1995: 88) and an explanation
which is exclusively female. In her 1997 study of media
coverage of violence against women, Marion Meyers argued that
society responds harshly to women who step outside the
traditional role of victim - "'good girls'…follow the
rules and, in doing so, stay out of trouble; 'bad girls' do not
follow the rules and, therefore, get what they deserve" (1997:
36-39). The article discussed in this section, Witch's brew
attack (Herald-Sun 24/9/98), covers the second case of
female-male violence, falls into the 'bad girl' category, and
is awarded a journalistic treatment wholly dissimilar to the
other articles discussed in this paper.
This article covers yet another relationship breakdown but
this time the instigator is the male and the violent partner is
the female. After being informed that their four-year
relationship was over, Melanie George boiled a pot of various
substances (disinfectant, candle wax, bleach, honey, etc.) and
poured it over her partner's groin. After Leon Tsouris hid in
the bathroom she apparently refused to call an ambulance and
instead crushed some firelighters, lit them and attempted to
throw them over him. She was sentenced to seven years jail.
In Witch's brew attack, the use of the word 'witch'
in the headline already conjures up stereotypical images of a
violent, vindictive woman wielding unnatural female power. This
image is a powerful representational strategy that has been
used against women for centuries. Whilst those accused of being
witches may no longer be hunted down and summarily executed,
the witch image "sits on top of a pyramid of related images of
deviant women as especially evil, depraved and monstrous"
(Heidensohn 1985: 92). The use of this image within Witch's
brew attack renders a romantic script implausible and therefore
George is denied the romantic alibi granted to other
perpetrators discussed in this paper. The discursive power of
this alibi should not be underestimated - "it enables men to
narrate their violence as romance… [and] locate their
unethical actions in a discourse which will exculpate them"
(Puren 1994: 243).
In this way, the article labels Melanie George as deviant
before the text itself even opens. However, she is soon to
become doubly deviant as the reader learns that she was not
content with metaphorically stabbing her lover in the back, she
threatened to remove his manhood itself. As the generally
hysterical media coverage that followed the Bobbit case
indicated, emasculation generates abhorrence largely absent
from mere murder:
Touted in the media as the ultimate example of male
bashing, male hysteria over the Bobbitt case was not unlike
that over the film Thelma and Louise; both illustrate a tired
double standard in which isolated cases of female aggression
("real" and Hollywood) are read as evidence of the routine
victimization of white men rather than as rational responses
to male oppression. This double standard highlights white
men's greater power to voice their complaints in the media
(while silencing women's) as well as their sense of
entitlement to sexual invulnerability (Grindstaff &
McCaughey 1998: 176).
Or, as one writer expressed it in Newsweek during the height
of the Bobbitt media frenzy: "rapists are chopping off women's
arms and getting out on parole two years later, and maybe it's
covered once in the news. But let one woman touch one single
penis and the whole country goes ballistic" (Heimel 1984 in
Grindstaff & McCaughey 1998: 178). Whilst the threat to
Tsouris's penis may not have sent this whole country ballistic,
perhaps that has more to do with the fact that this particular
penis survived relatively unscathed than any claim Australia
might have to more balanced reporting. Indeed, the injury to
Leon Tsoursis's groin area, and his fear of possible harm to
his penis, is treated with a level of disgust and horror that
is simply not evident even in articles dealing with domestic
murder, such as Soldier stole rifle, shot wife. This
is exemplified by the marked shift in the word space given to
the judge's comments. In this article, five paragraphs are
devoted to the judge's rather appalled summing up of her
"deliberate, well-planned act" of "dreadful violence" and,
whilst no prosecutorial statements are included, George's own
defence lawyer is represented as less than sympathetic to her
client's cause:
George's lawyer, Sheila Amsden, described the mixture as a
"witch's brew". "She intended to do grievous bodily harm to a
particular area of his anatomy which was particularly
important to him because he was a man obsessed with sex," Ms
Amsden said.
In fact, despite the fact that her victim lived to tell the
tale, Melanie George stands as the only perpetrator in this
sample who was continually and relentlessly condemned for her
actions.
There were several other elements within this article that
made it stand out from similar ones dealing with the more
common male-female violence. Firstly, the language chosen was
unusually graphic with details such as Waking up in agony,
Tsouris, 34, ran screaming… and George yelled, "Suffer -
I'm not going to ring an ambulance for you … drop your
pants and I'll cut your dick off". These inclusions are
gratuitous elaborations that stand out simply because they are
unusually descriptive. Secondly, whilst George's actions, like
the perpetrators in both Soldier stole rifle, shot
wife and Man accused of love trap, are
foreshadowed by her victim's decision to end the relationship,
it is her 'unnatural' frightening anger that is the focus here
- not her distress. So whilst in Soldier stole rifle, shot
wife, the male perpetrator is presented as angry and
distressed, in Witch's brew attack, the female
perpetrator is presented as simply angry and vengeful.
Another textual dissimilarity was the amount of space given to
Leon Tsoursis in this article. Unlike the female victims, he is
given considerable voice within the text and his feelings and
injuries are made abundantly clear. In fact, more text is used
foreshadowing Leon Tsouris's distress (agonised, screaming,
terrified) than Melanie George's feelings (anger) regarding the
events following the end of their relationship.
Melanie George's main crime appears to be not so much
attempting to punish her lover, but for falling between the
social and moral cracks. Whereas men are socialized to dominate
women and male violence is in fact "more conforming than
aberrant behaviour" (Bograd & Yllo 1988: 17), female
violence offends the status quo, upsets cultural expectations
and is seen as necessitating harsh punishment. This is further
aggravated by the simple fact that George presented a threat to
a male penis. As Grindstaff and McCaughey argue, the phallic
regime of the masculine identity is by no means as invulnerable
as patriarchy would have it seem. Rather, "it has to be
endlessly narrativized, idealized, and defended against
threats, both internal and external, revealing that men have
castration anxiety, precisely because their masculinity is not
as unproblematic or invulnerable as they would like to believe"
(Grindstaff & McCaughey 1998: 186). Therefore, George has
threatened not just Leon Tsouris's penis, but the status quo
itself. She suffers the consequences journalistically by being
portrayed as single, aggressive, and powerful - all negative
discursive attributes for a female (Wykes 1995: 68).
Paradoxically, Melanie George's 'power' was one of the most
compelling aspects of this article as well as its major
exclusive feature - Witch's brew attack was in fact the only
article to refer to domestic violence as a means of
establishing or redressing power imbalances. Ironically, and
tragically, George's admission that her actions had "made her
feel powerful" were swiftly used against her in sentencing.
Conclusion
Romantic love is "one of the most compelling discourses by
which any one of us is inscribed; throughout the world there
are cultures in which individuals are educated in the
'narratives of romance' from such an early age that there is
little hope of immunity" (Seuffert 1999: 211-240). This, in
turn, brings into play underlying assumptions regarding
active/passive and dominant/submissive gender roles inherent
within notions of romantic love and naturalizes male-female
aggression in a way that is simply unavailable for most other
forms of abuse. The articles examined for this study appeared
to reflect this in the differing treatment afforded male-female
abuse from female-male abuse. If the perpetrator was male, the
newspapers tended to focus on shifting the blame by either
holding the victim at least partially responsible or by
emphasizing any possible extenuating circumstances. Ironically,
despite 'romantic love' being popularly understood as the
domain of 'the feminine' (Williamson 1996: 24), the sample
studied here made the excuse of 'love' available exclusively
for the males. In this way, men were represented as being
driven to violence by overpowering love, all-consuming passion,
or overwhelming grief. Women are merely collaborative victims
or aggressive ball-breaking (penis-threatening) witches.
In fact, all of the women in the above articles were presented
as somehow derelict in their femininity. The three women who
'rejected' their lovers also rejected romance, failed in their
'duty' to nurture their relationships and failed to protect
themselves, whilst the two female perpetrators were portrayed
as lacking in passivity, compassion, obedience, acquiescence -
all traits inherent within the idealized feminine role
(Cranny-Francis 1992: 134-135). Yet the voices of the women
were all but absent within the articles as well, perhaps
because "when men's lives, values and attitudes are taken as
the norm, the experiences of women are often defined as
inferior, distorted, or are rendered invisible" (Bograd &
Yllo 1988: 15). Certainly, of the two cases of female-male
violence, one was transformed into a salutary lesson of male
heroism and love winning out over the obstacles, whilst the
other was utilized as a moral tale of the pathological
aggression of predatory females and their frightening tendency
to strike at the heart of a man - his penis.
Why, with so much feminist research being conducted into the
ramifications of skewed representations, is there no evident
shift in popular discourse or even an inclusion, within
opinion-articles at least, of a feminist analysis of domestic
violence? Adrian Howe (1998: 35-38) provides some illumination
in his examination of a series of articles published by the Age
in 1993 under the title 'The War Against Women.' One of the
most unusual aspects of this series was the space given to
feminist explanations of domestic violence. However the
backlash from readers was enough to ensure the editorials
published during the series read "as desperate attempts to
steer a path between what the feminist experts and their own
research was telling them, and the angry reaction of misogynist
readers." They did this by labelling as extreme any attempts by
feminists to identify domestic violence as a male problem and,
by doing so, fell back into their more customary, and more
popular, anti-feminist rhetoric:
It is as if the stark 'reality' of men's violence against
women is simply too awful to contemplate. It must be hedged in
with discursive strategies which have the effect of deflecting
attention away from the harshness of the verdict that men are
responsible for their own violence. Resistant speech, in this
case feminist speech about the pervasiveness of men's violence,
may sometimes be given space in the mainstream (that is,
non-feminist) media, but it is quickly subsumed by the
'recuperative machinations of power' deployed by the dominant
discourses (Howe, 1998: 38)
Therefore, the formula inherent within the romance script
remains intact and offers an "expectation of male violence and
the potential to tame aspects of this violence by passive
acceptance and respect for male domination" (Gilbert &
Taylor 1992: 81). In other words, a romantic discourse does not
just excuse male violence - it anticipates and naturalises it.
It should then come as no surprise that the press
representations in the sample studied here implicitly, and at
times explicitly, convey the acceptability of male violence and
therefore reinforce "the belief that men should use violence to
deal with their problems. This in turn strengthens the other
powerful media message that minimizes, tolerates, and condones
violence toward women" (Thorne-Finch 1992: 69). Coupled with a
parallel message of the desirability of romantic love and the
sanctity of marriage, this creates a complex paradigm that
requires someone being held discursively responsible when
things go wrong - and that appears to be the women.
However, I do not mean to suggest that readers are acquiescent
recipients of the representations proffered by a wholly
blameworthy press. Instead, a common socialization within a
patriarchal society ensures that the editors, journalists and
readers all participate in an active collaboration that defines
the discursive structures used - and that certain
interpretations become privileged. In her paper, 'Resisting
Passion: Pedagogy and Power', Burack (2000: 105) argues that
contemporary scholars identify two broad categories of
prejudice with regard to race, gender, sexuality, or other
dimensions of identity. The two categories are
individual/private and structural/collective/public. Ordinary
public discourse is more often than not focused within the
first category, with issues such as racism, sexism or
homophobia being a matter of personal preference or viewpoint
and best countered with education. However, the second type of
prejudice is structural, "and in the most sophisticated forms
of analysis, demonstrates the ways in which public discourse,
institutions, and social, economic, and political practices
operate to stereotype, discredit, marginalize, and disempower
members of particular social groups" (Burack, 2000: 107). I
argue that the press, as exemplified by the examination of the
articles presented here, fall into this second category and
therefore that individual education is not sufficient. Burack
goes on to say that the remedies for forms of institutional
prejudice and discrimination do not merely depend on the
willingness of individuals to change their attitudes, but
rather requires a more collective approach to deeply held
prejudices and social 'truths' which affect the active
collaboration mentioned earlier.
This active collaboration can be best summed up as a "cultural
blindness", which has as its root "the social structures and
values that deny male violence against women in a serious
systemic problem rooted in misogyny and patriarchy" (Meyers
1997: ix). Yet newspapers connect the individual to the world,
"telling stories of social life, news is a social resource. A
source of power, news is a window on the world" (Tuchman 1978:
217). And with the power of such a window, 'cultural blindness'
is a luxury the press, and society, can ill afford.
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Ilsa Evans lives in the Dandenongs of Melbourne’s outer-east with her three children and keeps busy by writing both fictional and academic material. Her first novel, Spin Cycle, is being published by Pan Macmillan in December of this year. Ilsa is also currently in the middle of PhD studies at Monash University in Melbourne, where she is researching the long-term effects of prior domestic violence.
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