Let’s get this out of the way: I majorly fell off of the blogging train. I got busy with work and personal projects and trying to meet my 2018 reading goal of 50 books (which I did! Yay!) that I…just…forgot to sit down and review the things I read for the last few months.
But I’m back, with some thoughts I have on Diana Gabaldon’s OUTLANDER, a novel-turned-Starz-series that is half steamy romance, half historical fiction.
Before I dive in to my thoughts on the cult classic, I would like to give some major warnings: first, and most importantly, there will be a lot of detail about sexual assault and talk about PTSD in this review, so if you are triggered by this, please take care. Second, general spoilers ahead. I’ll be glossing over the entirety of the plot and focusing more on a scene very close to the end of the novel. Third, there are some general NSFW/sex scenes I want to discuss.
I was very, very excited to start reading (well, more specifically listening to the audiobook, but hush) OUTLANDER. It had been energetically recommended to me by co-workers who read the entire series and are now watching the show. As far as genres go, it was a perfect recipe for me: I have been looking for a romantic story set in this time period and I have a major soft spot for Scotland.
And for the first 20 chapters or so of this hulking, 41-chapter behemoth, I really did like it. The slow build in tension between Claire, a nurse who is swept out of her 1945 honeymoon into the 18th century, and Jamie, the Scottish Highlander with a complicated past, was palpable enough that I often found myself yelling at my car radio on my way to and from work, because damnit, just KISS already, you fools.
But then, things started slowly chipping my swooning state away. There are controversial scenes galore, such as Jamie beating Claire as punishment for disobeying his orders, and some…questionable choices of scenery for Jamie and Claire’s rendezvous (in front of a sleeping child? Maybe not the best idea, guys), but my major problem with OUTLANDER is how consenting sexual encounters are handled versus non-consenting, manipulative ones.
I don’t think I’m over-exaggerating by saying that 90% of the consenting, steamy sex scenes between Jamie and Claire are written with the slimmest amount of detail to get the point across. Diana Gabaldon has a tendency to begin her sex scenes with some glorious tension, but eventually dissolve into the one phrase that became my absolute ire throughout my 50-hour listening: “Sometime later…” ends sex scenes almost every. Single. Time.
For a novel featuring a 23 year-old man who is quite sex-crazed after losing his virginity, there is a lot of sex, but only a few principle scenes that deluge more than:
- Jamie or Claire initiates foreplay.
- Jamie penetrates Claire, which (as is the case in a lot of depictions of heterosexual, “P-in-V” sex in media) gives her far more pleasure than it should.
- Diana Gabaldon promptly fans herself and promptly fast-forwards to the post-sex pillow talk that occurs–unsexy groan–“sometime later.”
In the many sex scenes scattered throughout the latter half of the novel, there also isn’t a lot of prioritizing–or even considering–Claire’s sexual pleasure. There is one scene that fully prioritizes Claire’s pleasure: shortly after their marriage, Jamie wants to give Claire oral sex, and (sigh, like most depictions of this in media) Claire is hesitant because she’s never done it before and she’s afraid of repulsing her husband who clearly just wants to do this for her, but eventually, she consents. In a scene that, for all intents and purposes, should be given credence as a defining moment in Claire’s sexual life, her experience is framed as some kind of mystical, ungrounded experience, as if she’s wading through the cosmos instead of actually feeling anything:
Consciousness fragmented into a number of small separate sensations: the roughness of the linen pillow, nubbled with embroidered flowers; the oily reek of the lamp, mingled with the fainter scent of roast beef and ale and the still fainter wisps of freshness from the wilting flowers in the glass; the cool timber of the wall against my left foot, the firm hands on my hips. The sensations swirled and coalesced behind my closed eyelids into a glowing sun that swelled and shrank and finally exploded with a soundless pop that left me in a warm and pulsing darkness.
–Chapter 17, “We Meet A Beggar.”
(Seriously, Diana? Roast beef and ale is the detail you’re giving me here? ROAST BEEF AND ALE?!)
In clear contrast, Gabaldon dedicates nearly an entire chapter (Chapter 39, if you want to skip it) to discuss, in full, horrifying detail, Jamie’s sexual assault and torture at the hands of series villain Captain Jack Randall.
I just want to express, for a moment, that while sexual assault is often a gratuitous, unnecessary device used to force a character’s growth when other options are readily available, I don’t think that means that it shouldn’t be something that happens in fiction. It is real, it happens to many, many people, and when discussed properly, it can shed light on a subject that is so little talked about. I think the subject of men being victims of sexual assault is talked about even less, and for that, I commend the series for shedding light on this topic and for portraying Jamie’s victimhood so very accurately in this chapter. But that is about all of the credit I give, because the way Gabaldon handles it after Jamie’s disclosure (at least in the first book of the series) is a bit despicable.
After being beaten and assaulted to his near death, the stress consuming him, Jamie is irritable, easily startled, anxious, withdrawn, and wildly swinging between rage and tears, a textbook illustration of post-traumatic stress disorder. Being around Claire, someone he once found incredibly easy to be physically intimate with, is clearly a triggering experience:
He started violently when I touched him. His eyes, still glazed with sleep, were sunk deep and his face was haunted by dreams. I took his hand between both of mine, but he wrenched it away. With a look of near-despair, he shut his eyes and buried his face in the pillow.
Claire is angered by Jamie’s emotional and physical distance from her, and I didn’t fault her for this at first. Not everyone understands the mental severity of being sexually assaulted when it hasn’t happened to them, and Claire feels wounded by her husband being afraid of her when she hasn’t done anything wrong. She wants to heal Jamie, very, very badly, and she asks him to speak to her.
In a moment of complete vulnerability, fear, and helplessness, Jamie bravely decides to share every scathing detail of his assault with Claire, who can barely stand the recounting herself. He is baffled, like so many victims are, that not only did his rapist hurt him and use him, but that the experience brought him pleasure, something he had only ever experienced with his wife. It breaks him.
I truly began to dislike and borderline hate Claire for how she decides to move forward with this information. Because it’s the 18th century and healing environments are not sterile, Jamie’s wounds become severely infected, and the monks of the abbey where Jamie and Claire have taken refuge have decided to give him the Anointing of the Sick, often given to people who are near death.
Claire is unable to accept that Jamie is dying and decides that she can’t wait through the night to see if he survives: she must force Jamie to fight for his life.
She does so by reenacting nearly every single detail of Jamie’s assault, down to the scent of lavender in the room–something that she knows was particularly stressful for Jamie:
I unlaced the front of my robe and rubbed my body quickly with handfuls of the lavender and valerian. It was a pleasant, spicy smell, distinctive and richly evocative . . . A smell that, to Jamie, must recall the hours of pain and rage spent wrapped in its waves. I rubbed the last of it vigorously between my palms and dropped the fragrant shreds on the floor.
She grabs Jamie roughly, and, in the voice of his rapist, tells him that “he’s not done yet”; all while Jamie, half-conscious, weakly tries to crawl away while pleading with Claire/Randall. Reminder: Jamie is on his deathbed, presumably, and Claire is making him relive the most horrifying moment of his life. She gropes him and he screams in terror.
Then, she reenacts a specific moment of his assault, when Jack Randall cut into Jamie’s chest, tastes his blood, and forces Jamie to do the same:
I took the knife from the table and drew it firmly across his chest, along the path of the freshly healed scar. He gasped with the shock of it, and arched his back. Seizing a towel, I scrubbed it briskly over the wound. Before I could falter, I forced myself to run my fingers over his chest, scooping up a gout of blood which I rubbed savagely over his lips. There was one phrase that I didn’t have to invent, having heard it myself. Bending low over him, I whispered, “Now kiss me.”
This snaps Jamie into fighting back: he throws Claire off of him with a surprising amount of strength for a man on the brink of death, chases her around the room, pins her to the ground, then, realizing that she is a woman by seeing her breasts, mistakes her for his mother and reverts to a childlike state before passing out.
I hated every moment of this scene, and especially the fact that Claire takes the moment of trust that Jamie shared with her and irresponsibly, despicably, impatiently uses it to scare him back to life–and it works. Claire is rewarded for doing something that could have just as easily killed Jamie with the added stress, and Gabaldon paints this scene as something necessary and equally-painful for Claire as it is for Jamie when it is not, will not ever be, could not ever be.
I had plans to finish the series and move forward to the show, and because of this chapter, I’m not sure if I still do. The fact that it’s easier for Gabaldon to describe not one, but two non-consensual sexual acts in full detail than to describe sex between two willing participants is hard to overlook, and the fact that Claire’s manipulation of Jamie is seen as an act of love and a means of salvation is harder still.
I refuse to believe that love is this selfish, that hurting someone so deeply can be healing, and that a relationship like Claire’s and Jamie’s, given its tendencies to believe that loving, hurting, and healing are so intimately interwined, is healthy.
Bookish Kristen 