Rape Fantasies

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of physical violence, sexual violence, rape, and gender discrimination.

Estelle is the main character and first-person narrator of the short story. She is a young woman who lives in Toronto, Canada, and works in the Filing Department of an unnamed company. Throughout the short story, Estelle largely leaves distinguishing information about herself off the page; the reader is thus left to make conclusions about her character from context clues and her narrative style and tone. However, Estelle does make some off-handed remarks about her life, family, and identity that offer the reader vague insight into who she is. For example, she says that her mom lives in Leamington (one of her rape fantasies takes place in this setting), that she grew up Catholic (she references the church when one of her imagined rapists tells her the angels instructed him to kill her), that she was “the kind of little girl who buried dead robins,” that she cries during movies, and that she recently moved to Toronto on her own and has had trouble making friends in the city ever since (167).