ABSTRACT
The child makes a similarly surprising entrance at the end of Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse, when — since this is a book about 'ordinary' sex - she extrapolates from the violence and inequity she sees in heterosexual intercourse between adults. Perhaps incestuous rape is becoming a central paradigm for intercourse in our time. Intercourse, like many or modern lemimsm's most influential polemics, begins as literary criticism. The first five chapters - 'Repulsion', 'Skinless', 'Stigma', 'Communion', 'Possession' — consider in turn fiction by Leo Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The book's second half is more diffusely organized, but it too ranges across the writings of Gustave Flaubert, Bram Stoker, Marcel Proust, and Vargas Llosa, among others. Fatal Attraction introduces the Gallaghers' own Oedipal triangle as the wholesome familial norm. The combination of attraction and terror, so marked in the child's relation to the primal scene, is spelt out in Dan and Alex's two major physical encounters.
