Sex often, though not always, goes hand in hand with violence in the novel. This violence is almost always, if not always, committed by men against women. The summer before the events of the novel, Bucky Duvalle, with the help of his friends, attempts to rape Patrice. She eventually gets away by swimming to Thomas’s boat in the middle of the lake, but not before she suffers scratches, bruises, and a bite mark on her shoulder, along with deep psychological wounds. When Patrice goes to Betty Pye as a trusted confidante to talk about sex, one of the main topics of their conversation is how to get away from men who they don’t like. And when Patrice is considering how her relationship with Wood Mountain might progress, she remembers something her mother told her, which she believes to be absolutely true: you don’t truly know a man until you reject him, and then “his true ugliness, submerged to charm you, might surface.” When Valentine spurns Barnes’s advances, he doesn’t react with physical violence, but he does think to himself, in a threatening way, “a man is a man,” intimating his belief that men have needs that women are obligated to satisfy. More shockingly, Vera is brutalized by men, who commit unspeakable acts of violence against her so that they can use her body for sex. She finds herself in the hold of a ship where, while going through withdrawal, she feels her insides being “pulled out” and her brain “heaving in her skull,” and she comes home bearing scars of the violence committed against her. In the city, Patrice finds collars fixed to chains attached to the walls of an abandoned house, where it’s suggested that women were held captive.
It’s worth noting that sex and violence do not always go together in the novel. Betty Pye enthusiastically enjoys much of the sex she has with her boyfriend, and Patrice goes to her when she is curious about sex. But by presenting various women’s relationships with different men, and by showing the internalization of gender norms and the violent actions of those different men, the novel suggests that gender norms at this time tended to affirm and perpetuate gender-based violence.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Sex, Violence, and Gender ThemeTracker
Sex, Violence, and Gender Quotes in The Night Watchman
Mr. Vold forbade speech. Still, they did speak. They hardly remembered what they said, later, but they talked to one another all day.
There were times when Patrice felt like she was stretched across a frame, like a skin tent. She tried to forget that she could be so easily blown away. Or how easily her father could wreck them all. This feeling of being the only barrier between her family and disaster wasn’t new, but they had come so far since she started work.
Valentine said, “You can have my days.”
“What do you mean?”
“My sick days. Mr. Vold told me that I could give my days to you. Under the circumstances.”
Gawiin ingikendizo siin. I am a stranger to myself […] This was again the sort of feeling and thinking that could only be described in Chippewa, where the strangeness was also humorous and the danger surrounding this entire situation was the sort that you might laugh at, even though you could also get hurt, and there were secrets involved, and desperation, for indeed she had nowhere, after her unthinkable short immediate future rolling in the water tank, nowhere to go but the dressing room down at the other end of the second-floor hall of Log Jam 26.
She began to wonder whether she was even dead. Although she had been dead way back when she’d been alive. Maybe for a long time. Of that she was sure.
“A pimp is someone who owns the lady. Takes the money she got paid for having sex, see?”
“No. I don’t see,” said Patrice flatly. But she did see. Jack would have tampered with her slightly, just enough so that when somebody else came along she’d have that shame, then more shame, until she got lost in shame and wasn’t herself.
And Patrice thought another thing her mother said was definitely true—you never really knew a man until you told him you didn’t love him. That’s when his true ugliness, submerged to charm you, might surface.
