How Epiplexis And Epistrophe Operate In The Victim Impact Statement of Chanel Miller
By Jocelyn Crawley
Repetition is oftentimes thought of as a literary device incorporated into the world of fictional texts for the purpose of elucidating a concept or emphasizing specific epistemological or ontological realities within the invented world of creative narration. However, this strategy of articulation is not confined to the realm of fictional texts. In reality, writers, speakers, thinkers, and any other member of the sentient living world can appropriate repetition to express ideas and delineate concepts in nonfictional texts. This reality transpires when Chanel Miller, victim-survivor of rape, writes and subsequently verbally articulates her Victim Impact Statement regarding the multifariously deleterious impact that sexual assault had on her psychosomatic and social life. In articulating the depth and scope of how her life devolved into myriad realms of dissonance and dissociation, Miller appropriates a specific form of repetition to limn the unraveling of her inner world and psychosocial existence. Specifically, Miller utilizes the form of repetition called epistrophe to convey the way her world devolves into multiple spheres of necrotic decay as a result of her rape. Epistrophe is defined as a pattern of arranging words in which one or more terms are repeated at the end of a sentence, phrase, or clause. (An example would be the section from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which reads “government of the people, by the people, for the people…”). Miller’s use of epistrophe transpires in context of her explaining how she responds to being interrogated by Turner’s attorney during the rape trial, and she contextualizes his verbal attack of her with the literary device epiplexis. Epiplexis is typically thought of as a rhetorical device in which a speaker asks a question or questions to criticize or express disapproval rather than to attain an answer. (Examples would be “How could you?” and “Have you no sense of decency?”) Additionally, epiplexis is designed to shame an opponent or audience into framing reality within a specific lens (theirs). Finally, epiplexis can be appropriated for the purpose of catalyzing the listener’s assent to the idea that their current mode of action or cognition is futile. In the case of the attorney questioning Chanel Miller, it is arguably all of the aforementioned elements of epiplexis which he is attempting to realize. Recognizing the presence of these linguistic strategies is important because it enables radical feminists to understand how rhetoric is being used, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to develop modes of discourse which express resistance to the master narrative regarding rape.
One of the experiences Miller delineates which is germane to her rape is the process of being interrogated by her assailant’s attorney. As a result of Brock Turner’s willingness to subject her to the dehumanizing degradation that is sexual assault, Miller is forced to listen to his lawyer verbally assault her with a series of questions meant to discredit her. The assaultive nature of the lawyer’s articulations is exacerbated through the fact that the rhetorical format of the interrogation unfolds within a framework of epiplexis. In conveying his form of rhetorical questioning within her VIS, Miller paraphrases his interrogative attack thus:
“Instead of taking time to heal, I was taking time to recall the night in excruciating detail, in order to prepare for the attorney’s questions that would be invasive, aggressive, and designed to steer me off course, to contradict myself, my sister, phrased in ways to manipulate my answers. Instead of his attorney saying, Did you notice any abrasions? He said, You didn’t notice any abrasions, right? This was a game of strategy, as if I could be tricked out of my own worth. The sexual assault had been so clear, but instead, here I was at the trial, answering question like: How old are you? How much do you weigh? What did you eat that day? Well what did you have for dinner? Who made dinner? Did you drink with dinner? No, not even water? When did you drink? How much did you drink? What container did you drink out of? Who gave you the drink? How much do you usually drink? Who dropped you off at this party? At what time? But where exactly? What were you wearing? Why were you going to this party? What’d you do when you got there? Are you sure you did that? But what time did you do that? What does this text mean? Who were you texting? When did you urinate? Where did you urinate? With whom did you urinate outside? Was your phone on silent when your sister called? Do you remember silencing it? Really because on page 53 I’d like to point out that you said it was set to ring. Did you drink in college? You said you were a party animal? How many times did you black out? Did you party at frats? Are you serious with your boyfriend? Are you sexually active with him? When did you start dating? Would you ever cheat? Do you have a history of cheating? What do you mean when you said you wanted to reward him? Do you remember what time you woke up? Were you wearing your cardigan? What color was your cardigan? Do you remember any more from that night? No? Okay, we’ll let Brock fill it in” (4).
In rearticulating the line of questioning thus, the reader can easily infer the presence of all of the aforementioned elements of epiplexis as being not only evident but resonant in the lawyer’s voice and tone. His criticism and expressed disapproval of Miller feels most palpable when he asks about her sexual activity. As many rape experts and individuals who operate in antagonistic relationship to sexual assault know, attempting to create a tangible, salient connection between an individual’s prior or present sexual behavior and rape by asserting that the former negates the latter is a common rhetorical strategy of lawyers who defend rapists. To paraphrase, many rape apologists and individuals who operate in consonance with rape cultures–such as lawyers who defend rapists–argue that victims promote sexual assault by acting in promiscuous ways. This line of thought oftentimes precipitates another cognitive inclination, with that being the notion that if an alleged victim asserts that she is raped but engages in what one might consider to be a sexually questionable manner, then her assault is not actually an assault but rather some other amorphous, ambiguously defined somatic reality such as “bad sex.” Here is the cognitive-linguistic magic of rape cultures in full effect, with the magical impact being the transformation of one material reality into another. In this case, rape magically transforms itself into some form of sex based on discrediting the victim’s sexual morality. (Another magical transformation of rape into sex transpires when the concept of consent is interjected into the analysis of the sexual assault.)
In addition to conveying contempt for the victim by questioning her sexual activity, the lawyer’s mode of questioning is perspicuously designed to shame Miller into framing reality within his perspectival lens. This perspectival view incorporates the fallacious idea (master narrative) that she was never raped by his client. This reality becomes plain when the reader considers Miller’s framing of his questioning thus: “Do you remember what time you woke up? Were you wearing your cardigan? What color was your cardigan? Do you remember any more from that night? No? Okay, we’ll let Brock fill it in.” Although the lawyer did not literally frame his interrogation the way Miller rearticulates it, juxtaposing what he actually stated and how she remembers what was articulated aloud yields similar, even synonymous, results. Specifically, the lawyer’s line of questioning is designed to assert that Miller doesn’t remember significant events that transpired on the night that she was raped and, therefore, she, the jury, and anyone else in the sentient world who is observing the unfolding case should assent to listening to Brock’s narration of events and subsequently concluding that his interpretation of reality is accurate. This narration–Brock’s narration–is the master narrative which the lawyer wants Miller and all other sentient beings (particularly the jury who will be making determinations regarding Brock’s culpability) to adopt. For clarity, Brock’s narration is one that negates the reality of his rape of Chanel, and is thus a classic representation of the master narrative and its tendential inclination towards erasure. Two modes of erasure transpire here. The first is the erasure of the deleterious reality for which the master (white male rapist) is culpable of: rape. The second erasure is the annihilation of Miller’s experience of sexual subordination, the reality of which transpires as Turner and his lawyer attempts to reword her rape into sex.
In addition to functioning as a tool through which he attempts to reframe reality such that is viewed through the lens of the master (a privileged male rapist), the lawyer’s line of questioning unfolds in a manner which enables the reader to see that he wants Miller to view her attempt to defend herself as fundamentally and incontrovertibly futile. This reality becomes evident when the reader considers the seemingly endless number of questions that he verbally assassinates her with. The list of questions the lawyer asks her work to wear down, press against, and diminish the resistance that she attempts to express by showing up in the courtroom for herself and other survivors. Ideally, this patriarchal ploy of posing pressing and oppressive questions will culminate with the victim acquiescing the master narrative and male supremacy by retracting claims of rape, reframing rape as consensual sex, etc.
Yet this is actually not what the lawyer’s epiplexis is able to engender despite its efficacy in enervating the victim, eroding her personhood, and erasing her reality. Rather, Miller continually enunciates her counternarrative to the master narrative in a manner which reveals that the master, not its victim, is inundated in a world of psychosis and asininity. The psychosis and asininity become evident when the reader considers how both the master and all of the individuals who bolster his narrative are defending an individual whose actions resulted in the devolution and dehumanization of his victim. This fact becomes plain when Miller notes that “I was pummeled with narrowed, pointed questions that dissected my personal life, love life, past life, family life, inane questions, accumulating trivial details to try and find an excuse for this guy who didn’t even take the time to ask me for my name, who had me naked a handful of minutes after seeing me” (4). Here, epistrophe interjects itself into the ever-unfolding discourse regarding Miller’s rape as we observe the repetition of the same words at the end of a phrase, clause, or sentence: life. In this case, the repetition transpires at the end of the phrase (personal life, love life, past life, family life) and works to underscore the fact that Brock Turner has metaphorically taken Miller’s life through the process of hiring a lawyer who unabashedly and aggressively dissects it. Pummeling her with questions, the lawyer tears apart the aspects of life Miller defines as pertaining to her personal life (personal), relational systems for intimacy (love life), previous eras of material existence (past life), and intercommunal world (family life). In other words, the lawyer moves towards ruining or destroying her entire life (personal, love, past, and family) so that there is no space for organicity and production as it pertains to anything–including her subjectivity. Thus while conveying the lawyer’s (and, by extension, Brock Turner’s) attempts to discredit her authority and demean her existence through the use of the rhetorical strategy epiplexis, Miller’s VIS also elucidates how other rhetorical techniques (such as epistrophe) are deployed to convey an antagonistic disposition towards the master narrative’s attempt to dehumanize and belittle victims.
As I have articulated in other spatiotemporal and textual spaces, discursive formations are a discourse framework through which radical feminists can grapple with how language is used to challenge or bolster rape as a tenable or inevitable aspect of human existence and experience. Here, I have articulated how the divergent discursive frameworks that exist regarding this issue can converge within a language domain where the master narrative’s conceptualizations of rape unfold within the linguistic field of epiplexis and the counternarrative to this construal transpires in context of epistrophe. As radical feminists continue to challenge the most integral and destructive element of patriarchy (rather than wasting time with pseudo-feminist endeavors) by examining how language regarding rape functions as a catalyst for understanding the divergent ways that people who oppose and support sexual assault think about it, we must remember that Victim Impact Statements are a discourse modality that should be considered in our analyses.
Jocelyn Crawley is a radical feminist who places primacy on analyzing and exploring rape and sexual assault as key aspects of male supremacy.