Gisèle Pelicot's book and everything that can be read between the lines
Gisèle Pelicot, the woman whom her husband drugged for many years in order to rape her and offer her to other rapists while recording the acts, has just published the book A hymn in life (Now available in books translated by Imma Falcó). The title perhaps forces a vital optimism that's hard to embrace while reading, although the author is determined to make her resilience a plea for a better society and a personal desire to be happy despite everything.
The book is clearly edited with sensitivity. It has no literary pretensions, but it carefully documents an intimate chronology of events that alternates with biographical episodes from the past, both hers and her ex-husband's. Childhood and adolescence become a residue that can be read between the lines. It doesn't serve to justify her actions but to understand that, almost always, our temperament and decisions are determined by unconscious reasons cultivated for years in family environments.
Gisèle Pelicot, now Gisèle Guillou, recounts an anecdotal but terribly significant event that occurred in the hours immediately following the discovery of the atrocities Dominique Pelicot had committed against her and, possibly, against her daughter Caroline, who also appeared in some of the photos. Caroline, beside herself, stunned by unbearable pain, began to break objects in her parents' house. Filled with rage, she grabbed a painting her father had done years before, which hung on the wall. It was an image of a woman with her back bare. Caroline had always asked her father to let her inherit it because she liked it so much. While she was on the terrace trying to destroy the painting, the title Dominique had written on the back in black pencil appeared. A title that, considering everything they had just learned, seemed to be an inheritance: "Domination." Caroline tore it to pieces.
Everyday Submission
The tragic anecdote is representative of what we find in the book: latent, buried, implicit, or veiled circumstances that Gisèle didn't seem to detect but that had always been there. For the reader, this blindness, which Gisèle herself now acknowledges, can be unsettling. It is also unsettling for her children. The way she initially explains how she prepared her husband's clothes for the next day reveals a submission so commonplace that it became invisible, disguised as love and familial devotion. It is telling how she explains that the other men in her husband's family exhibited sexist, aberrant, or at least disturbing behavior, while she considered her husband the exception. At times, Gisèle recalls situations with enough boldness for the reader to secretly suspect other vile acts that remain implicit.
The trial against Dominique Pelicot turned Gisèle into an empowered and courageous international heroine, undoubtedly thanks to the media frenzy that always remains superficial. She doesn't recognize herself in that tailor-made stereotype. A hymn in life It intentionally deconstructs any notion of heroism. It honestly recounts a harrowing relationship and the hell she endured afterward, beginning with the consequences for her health: "A few days later I went to the forensic medical unit in Versailles. My body was a piece of evidence." Gisèle had to take on her husband's debts, resign herself to a nomadic life after selling their house, accept the manipulation she had suffered, and, worse still, see her relationship with her children deteriorate. Gisèle shatters the myth that misfortunes bring people together. The book is more revealing for understanding the annihilating power of an abuser in everyday life than for the details of what became a scandal.
