ABSTRACT
In James Dickey’s 1970 novel Deliverance, four Southern, white, suburban,1 male characters embark on a canoe trip that offers them one harrowing torture after another: Bobby is raped; Ed is bound, cut with a knife, threatened with rape and later impaled by his own arrow; Drew is killed by a sniper; Lewis is tossed into the raging river and survives with a horribly fractured leg. It comes as no surprise that countless readers and critics of the book, as well as viewers of the 1972 film adaptation, dub this scenario a “nightmare.”2 Yet in a novel that casts postsixties white, suburban, professional life as emasculating, this camping trip from hell is, curiously, the protagonist’s dream come true. The trip gives Ed a unique opportunity to withstand great hardship, even trauma. Even more unique is Ed’s self-conscious and active orchestration of his own suffering. This orchestration, which Kaja Silverman terms “reflexive masochism,” consolidates the male ego even as it seems to dismantle it. Ed also develops an identification with the rapist, thus becoming socially sexed by incorporating his brutal autonomy and “indifference” (180). This phallic restoration is necessary for Ed, a man who experiences an emasculating midlife crisis, a terrifying suspicion of even his most masculine friend’s vulnerability, and then who narrowly escapes becoming a victim of homosexual rape.
