| Volume 30 Spring-Summer 2004 |
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             Return to Table of Contents I had not recognized the political power and weight the collective narrative could bring to bear on individual endeavors for freedom from violence and abuse.
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By its very nature, there are few testimonies from the disappeared... As a folklorist studying the narratives of women living with or attempting to escape from abusive partners or spouses, I found myself concerned when I realized that the "cycles of violence" narrative prototype had come to carry so much weight in all venues that intersect with women and violence. The prototype has been identified and is now recognized among social workers who run shelters and programs for battered women, is used by professionals who deal with domestic violence in the legal system, has become the standard "script" for scholarship on the subject, and is well known among the victims themselves, particularly those who have sought services intended to help them. I would venture to guess that viewers of prime-time television, readers of popular fiction, and moviegoers all know about the cycles of violence and the legal defense known as the battered wife syndrome. Although my own field research on this topic has been largely in the American Midwest, the incidence of domestic violence in all regions, urban and rural, and in all demographic groups makes this work broadly applicable. In my recently published book on this topic, Women Escaping Violence: Empowerment through Narrative (2001), my concern was that somehow the narrative prototype had become so prevalent that the individual stories of women were perhaps being subsumed under the pervasive master narrative "the cycles of violence" (see Lyotard 1984) ... In the shelter environment, I heard social workers, shelter personnel, and court advocates explain to victims that certain aspects of their individual, personal stories would likely help them in their legal situations, while other particulars of their stories might actually hurt their efforts and should be deleted (or at the very least modified)... Admittedly, this is nothing short of the natural folklore process at work in a living storytelling context—an emergent folk process that has evolved with the express intent of empowering women even when they can claim relatively little redress, compensation, or protection against those who violate them. By reviewing the process by which the cycles of violence narrative prototype has become an accepted orally transmitted and perpetuated "folk story" of violence, I will explore what the cycles of violence narrative prototype is, how it emerged and has developed, and how women escaping violence (and those in the system working to help them) use this folk story of violence to seek justice. Origins of the Prototype The well-known cycle of violence that proliferates throughout the literature, both scholarly and popular, began as a prototype through the work of sociologists Suzanne Steinmetz (1977) and Leonore Walker (1979), ... with the stages moving from the early, sweet times in a relationship to a surprise first hit from a partner or spouse, the offender’s remorse, "honeymoon" periods of calm and attention, followed abruptly by unexplained rage and intensified battering. The cycle prototype ends, generally, with the victim’s many attempts at escape or her death, hence the plural, "cycles." ...this developed master narrative has become so endemic to our understanding of domestic violence that it has engendered cultural scripts that potentially demonstrate in provocative ways what Teresa de Lauretis (1987) has identified as the twin powers of language: the "rhetoric of violence" and the "violence of rhetoric."... ...Significantly, however, it is through their interactions with other women in the community and with those providing services that women learn what rhetoric to use to get help from the system... In other words, the collaborative nature of building this narrative prototype is a political endeavor to assist women who are negotiating the terrifying terrain of shelters, courtrooms, and possibly prisons. The shelter resident says her childhood family was "dysfunctional"; she may say she has a "codependent"" relationship with her abuser, who is emotionally, physically, and verbally abusive; she may speak of "syndromes" or conditions, such as "manic-depressive" and "bipolar," in the same breath she talks about rape, beatings, yelling, and fear. This is the language of modern maladies as conveyed to and through ordinary citizens exposed to daytime talk shows, evening news, and daily melodramas involving the law, police, hospitals, and shelters. The women’s language mixes everyday speech with the jargon of the media, the criminal justice system, the medical and mental health arenas, and the popular press—newspapers, magazines, and film. ...Although it makes her narrative recognizable to the other women in the group and may help her feel less alone, the collective narrative prototype also assists each woman as she attempts to make sense of her own life and what has been happening to her. Consciously or not, women come to realize that the rhetoric of the prototype may help them more than the individual details of what actually happened to them. Recently, I shared my concerns about the "totalizing" effect this process could have on women who are seeking services or trying to tell their own story to a law class at the university where I teach. The professor... was quick and abrupt in her response to my concerns: "...I want to get them off; my job is to help them out of the abuse, to put their abuser away, to get her kids and home back. It is in her best interest to know the story that will help her the most." It wasn’t until a few days after her adamant response to my concerns that I realized I had forgotten to bring my own folklore training and political knowledge to this work. I had always defended, for example, the kinds of "truth" evident in the stories Rigoberta Menchu (1987) has told about her life in Guatemala, and I had been bothered by David Stoll’s (2000) critique of her work as "untruthful," manipulative, and unreliable. Yet I had not brought those same critiques to the stories of battered women; I had not recognized the political power and weight the collective narrative could bring to bear on individual endeavors for freedom from violence and abuse. At first, women who seek assistance against abuse and violence in their lives are reluctant to tell their stories because as isolated and battered persons, they generally believe that what is happening to them is unusual, singular, and not shared by other women in their community.... In contrast, the depictions of abuse in the narrative prototype for cycles of violence suggest that domestic violence follows a predictable pattern...Even though many stories of women who have been repeatedly abused and violated suggest that violent abusers are "unpredictable" and that violence really cannot be "tracked," the collective tale type, if you will, with its variable motifs, serves a political purpose for the women who hear and learn it. Women’s powerlessness is transformed through this collective and collaborative narrative into empowerment as "his behavior" becomes recognizable and her options are stabilized. She is physically assaulted, but this is the predicted, inevitable violent situation, and it was not her fault after all. She learns that there are "signs" she can read, and she may feel empowered as she comes to read the signs better and act accordingly. The script becomes a powerful tool in her plan of action. ... Actually, abusers are quick to pick up on how women have been abused in the past. It is in their best interest to perpetuate violent behavior as a given but also as unpredictable. The woman above asked me: "What? Do I have a sign on my forehead that says, ‘Beat Me’? I continually find myself in relationships with men who beat me." Unfortunately, if a woman does tell her current partner about her former abusers and how badly she has been treated before, this is often a signal that this may be a woman whom he, too, can violate. Abusers know that the law provides little punishment for male outbursts of physical violence. The problem, after all, is defined "battered women," not "battering men." Reading the Gaps Aligning my work with Wendy Hesford’s (1999) work with rape stories as sites of resistance, I find that women’s stories of violence can also be characterized as "a process of negotiation with prevailing cultural rape scripts and practices." ... ...Their knowledge of the received "script" suggests a material response to abuse and violence directed at them, past and future. That is, both the reality of the abuse and violence and the narration of that violence in stories of re-presentation owe an allegiance to the cultural script. But the agency available to the women is discernible, as Hesford suggests, in the gaps of the narrative where the script is contested or the act of violence or death resisted. I believe we can "hear" the spaces where the women subvert and complicate the "cycles of violence" narrative; and it is in those spaces that their own agency is apparent (see Lawless 2001). Without a doubt, telling her story breaks the silence and diminishes his power over her. Many women in shelter reject the role of "victim" and substitute "survivor." ... Safe shelter, resistance, support groups, female friendships, education, planning, anger, and the belief in possible success are all factors that enable women to move beyond being victims. The cycles of violence narrative prototype—developed in the telling and retelling of women’s stories, honed and reshaped by subsequent generations of women living with violence, shared in safe shelters and with persons of trust, used in courtrooms to work a legal system that favors male rights in the home—provides political access to collective power and transformation.... Healing Connections Mary Farrell Bednarowski (1999) found that women’s religious thought across denominations, periods, and regions has always been solidly based in a female notion of "healing," a term she says is broadly defined and related to the generation of hope: "to be healed is to have sufficient hope to proceed, whatever that might mean in particular circumstances. And to offer healing to others is to work at eliciting and acting on sources of hope in an individual or a community " (Bednarowski 1999: 152, emphases in original). It is in the spirit of this definition of healing that I offer this analysis of the cycles of violence as a folk narrative intended for collective inspiration. ... Images, paradigms, and prototypes are not mere graphic representations; rather they can be productive for our scholarly and philosophical thinking about violence. Similarly, popular culture arenas respond to the image that is easily identifiable and correlates well with people’s lives.... Victimization can be replaced by healing and transformation as we recognize how women are shaping their stories in ways that provide them with new perspectives on a very old problem. Finding how their story intersects with other women’s stories and using that collective story power can give women creative energy, force, and powers of resistance. These excerpts are from "Recognizing the "Cycles of Violence": Narrative Prototype as a Folk Story" by Elaine J. Lawless whch was published in Voices Vol. 30, Spring-Summer 2004. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now. HOME | ABOUT NYFS | PROGRAMS & SERVICES | PUBLICATIONS | RESOURCES | CALENDAR | WHAT’S FOLKLORE? | MEMBERSHIP | GALLERY | SHOP |
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