lways am and they know it. There’s no point in being anything else, is the way I look at it, and sooner or later the truth will out so you might as well not waste the time, right? (33)We can see that the similarities between this fantasy and her others have something in common. Unlike Chrissey’s or Greta’s fantasies, none of them actually involve any kind of actual sexual act. By the end of the story, we believe that the polite rapist who gets the lemon juice in his eye is part of an actual fantasy of Estelle’s. In this little episode we can see Estelle’s honesty and sweetness, since none of the disguised brutality found in the fantasies of the other two women is evident in the story that Estelle reveals.Along with maintaining an ironic balance within Rape Fantasies, Estelle’s personality revelations introduce other ideas into the story. Her casual friendly banter Bloom, 5can take a complex, weighty topic such as rape and simplify it into one naive workingwoman’s thoughts. She mentions growing up as a Catholic girl and how that helped to save her from the fantasized basement axe murderer.There are two religious references made by Estelle, and both mention the Virgin Mary. This possibly expresses two things about Estelle’s personality and an overall idea found in the story. First, and most obvious, is just the fact that she has had a religious upbringing. Second is the paradoxical situation that one finds in the ‘virgin birth’ and in the ‘satisfying rape.’ These references introduce into the story the surreal nature of rape fantasies as presented by the magazines and TV that Estelle tells of in the beginning of the story. The idea that the perfect woman, or the Virgin Mary, gave birth to a child while remaining a virgin presents woman with the same kind of paradoxical model as having rape fantasies, the similarity being that a woman can no more find a happy...
