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Blasted’S Hysteria: Rape, Realism, And The Thresholds Of The Visible, Kim Solga

Kim Solga

A curious blind spot remains in the critical response to Sarah Kane’s Blasted: the rape of Cate by Ian. In a play famous for its onstage violence, why is this rape, one of its pivotal moments of brutality, left unstaged? This article investigates this gap by exploring the theoretical and historical dimensions of the ‘‘missing’’ in Kane’s play. I argue that Kane’s representation of Cate’s rape as missing signals both her engagement with the history of rape’s representation – an elusive, evasive history rather than an outrageous, in-yer-face one – as well as a deft understanding of how the ‘‘missing’’ …