ABSTRACT
J. Cheryl Exum challenges the biblical authors with her suggestion of female figures being raped by the pen-if not the penis (1993: 171-202). While this suggestion may seem to exist totally within the realm of metaphor, it is more than a tour de force. Because reading is such an intimate experience, its form ofviolation is almost as frightening as a physical experience. The importance of Exum's oppositional reading is that it asserted her right to read representations of violation critically, skeptically; to refuse to remain the victim of the narrative force of the biblical narrator. If women can march through city streets to "take back the night," then feminist critics can also "take back the texts," or at least recognize what is at stake in the process of representing rape and the act of reading violence.
