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lences, insofar as the kinds of presumptions of safety that are in–
volved are themselves open to question. To give a not entirely
frivolous example, it was positively refreshing when in Del Tenney's
The Horror of Party Beach
great black scaly Things came up out
of the water and carried off screaming teenagers in a context - rock
and roll beach dancing, pajama parties, and so on - that normally
serves in such movies to reassure teenagers of their own admirable–
ness and invulnerability by virtue of the mere fact of being between
the ages of twelve and twenty. Or, more weightily, there
is
the
episode in
Wuthering Heights
in which, having lured young Cathy
and Nelly Dean up to the Heights, Heathcliff casually grips the
wrists of the former in one hand and with the other "administered
three or four tremendous slaps to her face." The action shocks espe–
cially because of the implicit revelation that Cathy can from now on
expect absolutely no mercy at the Heights by virtue of her various
conventionally estimable status - daughter of respectable local citizen,
pretty young girl, pitying lover of a wretchedly unhappy boy,
"heroine" of this part of the novel.
It
is
shocking; indeed, it out–
weighs some of the ostensibly greater violences in the book. Never–
theless one can still feel, I think, that Cathy, like those other adoles–
cents, may have been presuming a little too much on the world's
treating her benevolently because of her status, and there is no doubt
that she has to some extent mentally dehumanized (or at least over–
confidently categorized) Heathcliff, just as the injured middle-aged
woman in the beauty parlor may have overconfidently categorized
and dismissed from her thoughts the technician ministering to her
elegance. Certainly E. M. Forster, that most civilized of men, under–
stood all this sort of thing very well indeed: it is the chief point of
the utterly "indefensible" torturing of Philip by Gino in
Where
Angels Fear to Tread.
And this brings me back to the figure of the
violator.
What shocks profoundly in a number of the examples that I
have given is not just that someone is assaulted or tortured or killed
but that someone else is undisturbedly willing to do these things
and to ignore the conventional safeguards of innocence or ignorance
or helplessness, just like the crucifiers of the lions and mutilators of
the elephants in
Salammbo
or the torturers of the dogs in
Huckle-
