152
Sleeps (2018) by Bina Shah, The Nowhere Girls (2017) by Amy Reed, Saints and Mists (2017) by S. K. Ali, Milkman
(2018) by Anna Burns, Trust Exercise (2019) by Susan Choi, Girl in Pieces (2016) by Kathleen Glasgow, Rani Patel
(2016) by Sonia Patel, Whisper Network (2019) by Chandler Baker, The Friend (2018) by Sigrid Nunez, His
Favourites (2018) by Kate Walbert, Red Clocks (2018) by Leni Zumas, The Farm (2019) by Joanne Ramos, Vox (2018)
by Christina Dalcher, Asymmetry (2018) by Lisa Halliday, The Power (2016) by Naomi Alderman, Anatomy of a
Scandal (2018) by Sarah Vaughan, and last but not least I Have Some Questions for You (2023) by Rebecca Makkai.
One thing is clear, all the contemporary novels have one thing in common, and that is how they, in one way or
another, bring voice and awareness to the MeToo Movement, and that how human violence has no limit, and
that because the novels stand as representatives of larger groups most of them have unnamed characters or
narrators pointing out the vagueness, uncertainty and contradictory of their story.
Candice Carty-Williams’ debut novel Queenie (2019) is a coming-of-age story of the Jamaican British
Queenie Jenkins, whose life brings both laughter and tears in the reader. The novel deals with the intersecting
issues of both gender and race. Similarly, Women Talking (2018) by Miriam Toews is based on a true story,
discussing the hidden truth behind the sexual aacks on a group of Mennonite women, which was later adapted
into a lm. Such narratives teach readers “about the emergent themes of post-MeToo feminisms: from
weaponized faith and internalized oppression to strategic resistance, intergenerational struggle, and men’s
allyship” (Staoroni, 2022). Moreover, S.K. Ali’s Saints and Mists (2017) narrates the story of a young Muslim
girl, Janna Yusuf, who nds her own voice as the plot develops. Janna is sexually assaulted by a so-called
religious Farooq and feels mist to the family and society around her. The 2019 National Book Award for Fiction
winner Trust Exercise by Susan Choi depicts how much it takes for a person to realise that they are victims, by
employing the theme of trust in a very powerful narrative style. Vox (2018) by Christina Dalcher is yet another
powerful narrative on silence. The novel tells the story of a former American scientist Jean McClellan. The
government restricts women to speak a hundred words a day. Should they exceed, women will be zapped with
huge amounts of volts of electricity. However, the main character Jean, will not remain silent shifting the aw
of the story. Last but not least, T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land is also at the centre of aention from the point of #MeToo
as the novel features an art teacher sexually assaulting a 15-year-old student, similar to that of Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Despite the rereading of certain ction including sexual abuse, today there is a
tremendous amount of interest in the literary world on the MeToo Movement to the extent that there are genres
called MeToo novels or MeToo lit. However, long before the MeToo Movement, there were genres including
Trauma Narrative—but these genres and narratives dealt only with the trauma from an indirect point of view
passing through “trauma like a river past a hillock” (Pederson, 2018, p. 97). This being the case, the MeToo
novels are proof that women’s literature during the fourth wave feminism radically stood as examples of how
to speak up, stand tall and ght and thus strengthening “the power of literature to ght for social justice” (Fejzić,
2020). What the biographer Gillian Gill says on Virginia Woolf’s sharing of her traumas is relevant to the MeToo
movement either ctional or non-ctional subjects, too:
if you’re able to talk about it, you’ve made a stride, you’ve moved forward, you’re no longer a victim, you’re a
survivor, you’re a protester. This is such a complicated subject, but it seems to me that we’re making progress
here, in a very dark area of human life. (Haynes, 2019)
To conclude, it is indicated that the English literary world traces literary ction about sexual violence long
before the MeToo movement, with an emphasis mainly during the late Victorian period to the modernist era.
The sexual violence survivors, it seems, are mainly female protagonists, indicating that the power holder is no
doubt the male. Another striking issue is that many of the ctional survivors are unnamed, pointing out the
anonymity and weakness of the female. In fact, the English literary world homes a myriad of unfortunate
examples of stories of sexual abuse—waiting to be reread under the spotlight of MeToo movement on the
shelves in the libraries. However, due to limitedness, the present paper is conned with the above-mentioned
works only.
German Literary World and the #IchAuch Bewegung
A problem well-dened is a problem half solved.
—Charles F. Kaering.
Although one can encounter examples of sexual harassment in past and contemporary German literature,
the primary issue that should be discussed in this part of the study is, rst of all, to clarify how Germany adopted