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Jephthah's
Daughter and Chaucer's Virginia: The Critique of Sacrifice in The Physician's
Tale
by DANIEL T. KLINE, University of Alaska, Anchorage
In her provocative discussion of torture in The Body in Pain,
Elaine Scarry argues that in "benign" contexts,
When one human being 'recognizes' the incontestable legitimacy
of another human being's existence, he or she is locating the other's
essential reality in one of two places—either in the complex fact
of sentience or in the objects of sentience, in the fact of consciousness
or in the objects of consciousness.
In contrast, a "political situation is almost by definition one in which
the two locations of selfhood are in a skewed relation to one another or
have wholly split apart and have begun to work, or be worked, against one
another." "Torture," Scarry goes on to say, "is the most extreme instance
of this situation." Compromised through the language of interrogation and
the pain of physical and psychical brutality, the subject of torture is
broken down, and as both body and voice disintegrate the subject is transformed
into an object. Rendering the victim into a ventriloquist's dummy, torture
demonstrates the torturer's agency and the victim's subjective negation
when the victim "speaks the words" of the torturer, and the torturer sees
himself and his regime perfectly reflected in the language he authorizes.
Resistance to such violence therefore can be measured by the degree to which
the victim does not adopt the language, and thus the worldview, of the oppressor.
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