The Other Narratives of Sexual Violence in Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories

Abstract

Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories (2000) primarily narrates, through obscene and disturbing images, Minnie’s sexual violation during childhood and adolescence by two of her mother’s boyfriends. In this essay, I investigate parallel narratives of sexual abuse by considering Gloeckner’s art-historical and literary influences, arguing that alongside Minnie’s stories they form a network between different cases of sexual crimes and incest in the United States, as those are partly renegotiated in or inspire male art and literature. Examining Gloeckner’s feminist use of the medium of comics and the genre of the fairy tale, I propose that while A Child’s Life shows how art imitates life, and vice versa, when it comes to sexual violence against women and girls, it also demonstrates that the graphic memoir can function as a channel through which the abused girl or woman can be lifted from the status of the passive, silent sexual object. Her choices show that art can be used to emancipate the girl from victimization in the space of the graphic memoir, counter-posing this potential to the silence and passivity she is invested with in Marcel Duchamp, Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, William Burroughs and Donald Henderson Clarke’s works.