Outlander has a serious rape problem
Let's talk about it.
Trigger warning for rape and sexual assault
Spoilers for the show and book follow.
There’s a scene in Never My Love, the season five finale of Outlander, where a fellow time traveller named Wendigo Donner tells Claire that he knew she was from the future because “you don’t act afraid of men. Most of the women from now do,” and leaves her, tied up and defenceless, with what he thinks is advice but sounds more like an admonishment, “You ought to act more afraid.”
Seconds later, Claire is raped. Multiple times, by different men.
Jamie finds Claire after her kidnap and assault.
Thankfully, this isn’t drawn out, and the writers choose to have Claire’s husband, family, and clan come to rescue her, killing many of her kidnappers in the process. She is told some are alive, and given the chance to have her vengeance. Jamie, her husband, knows that as a doctor Claire is bound by an oath to do no harm. “It’s myself that kills for her,” he says. “And I,” echo Ian and Fergus. A point that must be made: all three men who take her “vengeance” for her also happen to be people who have suffered sexual assault in previous seasons.
How much rape and sexual violence could there possibly be?
A little background on the show itself: Outlander, based on Diana Gabaldon’s extremely popular book series with the same title, revolves around Claire Randall, the eponymous outlander, a former World War II nurse who travels 200 years back in time from 1945 while on a second honeymoon in Scotland with her husband. In 1743, she meets a dashing Highlander, Jamie Fraser who she has to marry for survival and then gets embroiled in the Jacobite uprisings. The series sees her try to survive in an unfamiliar time and land, and takes her to multiple countries — England, Scotland, France, America — all while she tries to keep from losing her loved ones to big things like wars and small things like scurvy.
Jamie and Claire in a still from Season 1.
Outlander is five seasons in, and in every single season, a major character has suffered a violent rape, whether man or woman. In season one, within minutes of Claire accidentally travelling to the past, she is assaulted by Black Jack Randall, and narrowly escapes being raped. Over further seasons of the show, Claire fights off several sexual assaults, one of which results in her killing someone. Later, in the same season, Randall rapes Jamie brutally, and in a following season, rapes young Fergus as well. Later on in the show, Jamie is blackmailed by his employer’s daughter to have sex with her. In season two, Mary Hawkins, a young girl Claire befriends, is attacked by a group of masked men, and raped by one of them. The same season, Claire has to sleep with Louis XV to get her husband out of jail, a transaction she is forced into. In season three, Ian is raped by Geillis Duncan, as part of a time travelling ritual. In season four, Brianna is raped brutally by Stephen Bonnet when she tries to buy her mother’s ring back from him, and in season five, we witness Claire’s equally traumatic rape. It also bears mention that Laoghaire MacKenzie, one of Jamie’s clan women who later becomes his wife, is so traumatised by the marital rape she went through from her first husband, she cannot separate the idea of violence from sex. That’s six major characters, and one secondary character having to go through multiple extremely traumatic sexual encounters.
Is all the sexual assault on Outlander gratuitous?
Outlander isn’t the first show to rely on rape as a plot device to further the story, but it manages to escape a lot of criticism for it because one can argue that it depicts the assault sensitively. Men suffer sexual assaults on Outlander, and they’re given the space to deal with it, find a confidante who tells them unflinchingly that they were not to blame, and it doesn’t matter if their body responded, it was never, not once, their fault. And the male survivors are all physically very different, so we know there is no one kind of “victim.” But while the show does decide to do all of this, it’s often an inelegant attempt.
Marsali and Brianna comfort Claire
Outlander does focus on the aftermath of the rape, letting the characters have the space to actually deal with the trauma — but it’s clumsy. It knows only one way to deal with the PTSD. In nearly every single case, the rapists die violent deaths, often at the hands of the survivors. Jamie kills Randall on a literal battleground, Claire beheads Geillis Duncan, Brianna shoots her rapist (yes, he was going to die a more painful death, and the show even goes so far as to ask her if the death she gave him was mercy or just a way to make sure he was dead, but she never answers), Ian and Fergus kill the men who assaulted Claire, and for a brief moment, she contemplates killing Lionel, the man who put her abduction and assault into motion, before she decides against it and Marsali does it herself. Outlander is telling the same story over and over again; trauma, and then catharsis achieved through a form of violent retribution. Outlander is set in the 1700s, but it is literally a show about a time travelling nurse — is it too much to hope that restorative justice is something the writers in 2020 could somehow incorporate? We’ve moved beyond the bodice ripper heroes of the 1970s (a trend that didn’t even last beyond two decades in publishing because it’s difficult to like a hero who raped the female protagonist, considering how many female readers will go through a degree of sexual assault over the course of their own life), and the show has been pretty revolutionary in the way it films sex scenes, so there really isn’t anything stopping them from showing us that the only way a rapist’s story can end is death.
When Brianna gets raped, the camera pans away to show us the extreme apathy of the people present who hear her screams but do nothing, we aren’t forced to watch her be violated; and considering this scene comes minutes after a sex scene with two consenting adults, Outlander makes a very astute decision to show us how different these two things are.
The absolute cruelty of an unknown man placing Brianna’s boots so neatly to the side while she screams for help.
As critic Kathryn VanArendonk wrote, “Writer Luke Schelhaas and director Jennifer Getzinger seem to have done everything they can to turn the collision of these two stories into a productive, meaningful argument about the difference between sex and rape.” The way this scene was shot, to pan out to show the unfazed men and women on the other side of the door, even that little detail of someone straightening Brianna’s boots is a particularly cruel way to tell us, for the hundredth time, that the past is a tough place for women. But at some point, you have to stop and ask yourself, if you have to constantly resort to extreme sexual violence to show a character be broken down, is this not lazy writing?
But what about the source material and historical accuracy?
Many will argue that this is not the fault of the show writers, all of this graphic sexual assault is directly from Diana Gabaldon’s books, it’s all lifted straight from the source material. The show is an adaptation and it has taken plenty of liberties with the source material. And just because Diana Gabaldon relies on sexual violence and hides behind “historical setting” to do it, does not mean the writers at Outlander the show have to do the same. The whole point of an adaptation is that it gives you the freedom to change the bad parts of the source material. Gabaldon’s insistence on adding this much sexual violence in her books and the show writers’ decision to not change that is simply an excuse to not write a compelling plot. There are plenty of ways to show that a particular place and setting is brutal and dangerous without having to constantly resort to rape. And of course, the show doesn’t have to romanticise the past, but here’s the thing — it absolutely does! Outlander is pretty tame over its depictions of slavery and the treatment of native Americans, and is literally a show that features time travel as a legitimate thing! So does sexual violence have to be the only way to show us that the past was more dangerous for women to be in than now?
Maybe the whole point is to talk about rape culture and patriarchy?
When there is any kind of sexual assault written in, one must ask the question: what does this add to the story? Jamia, Laoghaire, Mary, Fergus, Ian, Brianna, Claire — what’s common to everyone named is that they’ve all been raped, some of them multiple times. Has Outlander managed to turn this into a larger point about rape culture? No, it hasn’t, and frankly, I don’t think they care to. When Donner tells Claire to “act more afraid” of the men in the 1700s, it struck me as odd. Claire is originally from 1945, and I’m from 2020, and even today, the threat of sexual violence from men looms over women in all our interactions. While Outlander is mostly set in the 1700s, we saw plenty of Claire and Brianna in the 1960s as well. The big difference, besides the obvious — Claire and Brianna are not overrun with men making sexual overtures at them. Never mind overrun, there’s no unwanted sexual attention from men, while the 1700s are apparently filled with lecherous men who are constantly attacking women. Some of it even seems quite unreasonable, because Claire as the wife of a nobleman and landowner has plenty of protection by virtue of her social status. Someone making unwanted sexual advances to her would be punished and ostracised from society. So the only reason the writers write in the constant barrage of men attacking or dreaming about attacking Claire is to drive in the point—the past is a tough place to be in for these women. There are ways to show wartime brutality and the perils of a world that hasn’t conceived of women’s rights without resorting to sexual violence.
Claire is attacked by another nobleman at the wedding of her husband’s aunt
Caitriona Balfe, who plays Claire, said in an interview, “You’re like, “Do we really have to do this?” But it is part of Claire’s journey and we have an opportunity to do it with a lot of respect and give Claire as much agency as we could. What I’m interested in is how we continue on from this and explore her recovery, because that’s incredibly important.” Honestly, with Outlander’s history, I don’t have much faith.
There’s more where that came from.