ABSTRACT
In representing the witness watching the victim, Weems, Morrison, O’Connor, McCullers, Allison, and Dickinson’s works walk a performative tightrope—performing violence for an arguably still patriarchal audience while also critiquing that violence. Dickinson creates the speaker by deploying the rhetorical strategy of describing a sadistic father, radical insofar as Dickinson could only expect a male audience (despite female readership) to determine the critical reception of her work; indeed men did determine the critical fate of Dickinson’s poetry. That the texts under consideration in this study respond to and shape an American paradigm of sadism is a fact to revisit, a subterranean national aesthetic. The revisiting—to expose and condemn—of the residue of sadism persisting from the patriarchy of slavery is itself a necessity, an ethical imperative.
