'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

also wears a golden ring. Both women are violated by male figures. The Other bride is
abducted, coerced to drink wine, stripped, dismembered, salted, and „consumed‟ by a
group of men against her will. These brutal acts can be read as a group rape and sex
murder. As Cook claims: “Although there is no mention of rape, the suggestive
description of the fiendish murder […] clearly stands for a voracious and wilful sexual
assault, that one would, of course, omit in a folktale told to children” (Cook 115). At this
point in the filmic narrative, Lene has also been raped by two Allied soldiers who offer
her wine before sexually assaulting her. While both women have acts of sexualized
violence perpetrated against them, the fate of the perpetrators differs in the two
narratives. In the fairy tale, the miller‟s daughter is able to see that the robbers are
stopped from further acts of violence against women, by telling publicly about the murder
she has witnessed and by providing proof of the crime in the form of the severed finger
(McCormick, Politics 203). In contrast, the soldiers who rape Lene are not brought to
justice. In the post-war section of the film, Lene appears to passively accept her
victimization in that she does not speak to anyone about it. Instead, she is silent about the
suffering she has endured and does nothing to ameliorate her situation. When she is
reunited with Hans, she does not even tell him about the rape.
One possible reason why Lene does not speak about the rape could be that she
chooses to suppress her suffering so as not to anger her husband. If one accepts this
theory, then Lene's silence regarding the rape could symbolize the silence of many female
wartime rape victims in post-war Germany. As discussed in Chapter 2, many German
women who had been sexually assaulted during the war tended not to discuss their
traumatic experiences in order avoid enraging their male partners. Moreover, wartime
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