Who Was Andrea? Writing Oneself as a Feminist Icon

Abstract

Abstract: This article explores the construction of Andrea Dworkin as a public persona, or a ‘feminist icon’, revered by some and demonized by others. It argues that in both her fiction and non-fiction, Dworkin engaged in a process of writing herself as an exceptional woman, a ‘feminist militant’ as she describes herself in the subheading of her 2002 memoir, Heartbreak. The article illustrates Dworkin's autobiographical logic of exceptionalism by comparing the story told in Heartbreak to the story of Dworkin's major novel, Mercy, which features a heroine, Andrea, who shares Dworkin's name and significant biographical details. While Dworkin has insisted that Mercy is not an autobiographical novel, the author undertakes a reading here of Mercy as the story of Dworkin if she had not become the feminist icon of her own and others' construction. In Mercy, Andrea unsuccessfully attempts to escape the silent, victimized status that Dworkin has insistently argued is imposed upon women. In her repeated victimization, Andrea functions for Dworkin as an ‘everywoman’ who both embodies Dworkin's world-view and highlights how Dworkin's own biography exists in tension with some of her central assumptions about women, gender and contemporary society.

Keywords:

• Andrea Dworkin
• Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant
• Mercy
• autobiography
• subjectivity
• fiction
• truth
• feminism
• rape

Notes

¹Morgan discusses the comparison in an interview with Ariel Levy (Levy 2007: xix–xx).

²I do not have room here to discuss Dworkin's claims or the controversy with which they were greeted, although I return to it briefly in the conclusion. For her article on the alleged assault, see Dworkin (2000). For an illustrative critical and disbelieving response, see Bennett (2000).

³In the remainder of this article, I refer to the protagonist of Mercy as Andrea and to Andrea Dworkin, its author, as Dworkin or Andrea Dworkin.

⁴Dworkin writes of the assault in at least two other pieces of writing (see Dworkin 1997a: 22, 1997b: 68).

⁵The song was originally recorded in 1962 by The Crystals and produced by Phil Spector (Ribowski 1989: 114).

⁶The vow is also mentioned in Dworkin's discussion of the incident in her autobiographical essay (see Dworkin 1997a: 17).

⁷The sexual or pornographic nature of the unremitting violence inflicted on Andrea in Mercy has been commented on by a number of authors (see, especially, Gilbert 1993; Morgenstern 1997).