Abstract
Although scholars have argued that plot is key to narrative’s effects, no one has studied empirically how people interpret stories told along different plotlines. This has left unexamined an important puzzle: how do time- and place-specific beliefs intrude on the operation of plot genres in shaping narrative’s meaning? On the basis of a survey and focus-group study of how women interpreted first-person stories of an acquaintance rape told along different plotlines, we argue that what stands in the way of adapting old stories to new purposes is less plot than character. The same events can be inserted into different genres of plot to yield quite different moral messages. But audiences’ expectations of characters are more rigid. Time- and place-specific ideas about how people properly behave – about how ambitious women should be, for example, or how emotional men should be – limit audiences’ ability to imagine them playing the roles associated with different plots. Plots are transposable; characters are less so.
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Notes
Scholars have conceptualized this aspect of stories in multiple ways: they have referred to story models (Davis, 2002), genres (Jacobs, 2000; Alexander, 2003; Smith, 2004; Jacobs and Sobieraj, 2007), templates (Smith, 2004), functions (Propp, 1970), clause-based functions (Labov and Waletsky, 1967), schemas (Ewick and Silbey, 2003), formulas (Loseke, 2001; 2012) and plotlines (White, 1980; Miller, 1990; Kane, 2000; Maines, 2001; Polletta, 2006).
In their historical examination of the stories told by Congressmen about voluntary organizations, Jacobs and Sobieraj (2007) show that the ideological climate of the Cold War, with its emphasis on exposing subversive organizations, made possible the invention of a new character: the philanthropic ‘false heroes,’ who were masquerading as helpmates of the disadvantaged but were in fact out for their own gain. The story was old but the character was new. This suggests that character structures may be shaped by a different logic than plot, but the possibility is not explored.
Higgins and Brush (2006) show that women welfare recipients who sought to tell their stories in heroic terms were not effective. The heroic genre requires that the protagonist be superhumanly strong, the authors argue, a standard that no one can approximate. On the account that we propose, it is specifically women on welfare who could not be seen as approximating that standard.
Our sample of books is not comprehensive. We used various search engines to identify books about date rape that were aimed at a general audience. We were able to secure about 20 of them. Some did not have stories, and some of the stories did not hew to the genre that we describe above. However, more than half of those that included stories did.
And indeed, as entertainment education researchers Slater and Rouner (2002) and Moyer-Gusé (2008) point out, researchers often confuse several quite different dynamics when they talk about ‘identification’: homophily, identification, wishful identification and parasocial identification.
The high proportion of respondents who identified as Asian is consistent with the demographics of this particular university, but it is not typical of American universities. Several studies have found that Asian Americans hold more negative views of rape victims than do whites, and are more likely to see the victim as responsible for her rape (Lee et al, 2005). For that reason, we compared the responses of students who identified ethnically as Asian with those who did not. We focused on the students’ views of the gothic and heroic protagonists: both whether they identified with each protagonist and whether they could imagine being friends with each protagonist (we created binary variables for each). These were the stories that elicited the strongest views of the victim as either ‘innocent’ or as in some way responsible for her rape, so we expected that differences based on ethnicity would be evident here. However, regression models showed no significant relationships (results not shown; available upon request). This makes us confident that our findings reflect the views of college women more generally.
This is somewhat lower than Dunn et al’s (1999) finding that 52 per cent of 500 female college respondents knew someone who had been raped.
Many respondents described reporting the rape to ‘police’. However, some respondents referred instead to ‘authorities’. As at different colleges, students are encouraged to report their rape to different agencies (for example, local police or campus rape prevention and response agencies), we use the broader category of ‘authorities’.
In reproducing respondents’ comments, we have corrected for grammar or spelling only where not doing so would make the comments difficult to read. We have put all changes in brackets.
To say that readers must identify with a story in order for the story to have behavioral effects does not imply anything about the basis for identification. As we noted, people may identify with people who are like them or people whom they like (but who are not like them). See Moyer-Gusé (2008).
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Acknowledgements
Our thanks to three anonymous reviews and to editor Phil Smith for hugely helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to Edwin Amenta, Andrew Penner, members of the UCI Narrative Group, and colloquium participants at University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley for thought-provoking questions and excellent advice.
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Several typographical errors were introduced at typesetting stage and have now been corrected.
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Polletta, F., Trigoso, M., Adams, B. et al. The limits of plot: Accounting for how women interpret stories of sexual assault. Am J Cult Sociol 1, 289–320 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/ajcs.2013.6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ajcs.2013.6