That Sounds More Like Something Aarfy Would Do: Conflicting Portrayals of Sexual Assault in Catch-22 and Something Happened

Abstract

Duckett tells Yossarian in the 2019 Catch-22 miniseries during their first scene together. Whereas in Joseph Heller's 1961 novel the deathaverse Yossarian can check into the hospital with a fake liver ailment whenever he wants, the miniseries shows him being questioned by a well-informed Nurse Duckett about his alleged pain and unable to pinpoint it to his liver. Her character, played by Tessa Ferrer, eventually submits to Yossarian's charade and goes on to serve as his knowledgeable confidant and foil, in contrast to the novel where her role is limited to intimate liaisons on the beach. The decision to give at least one of Catch-22's female characters more depth and agency was necessary in a novel where at best women are relegated to background characters and at worst they serve as objects of sexual fulfillment for the male characters. While little has been written by scholars regarding Heller's treatment of sexual assault or women in Catch-22, media reviews of the miniseries unequivocally condemned the negative portrayals of women in the original novel, calling them "terrible" (Holloway), "misogynistic" (Moore), a "threadbare portrayal of women as two dimensional, objectified non-characters" (Miller), and noting that "some of what the book treats lightly would be rightly recognized as sexual assault today" (Lloyd). Heller himself even acknowledged his own sexism in a 1996 interview, calling his 1994 novel Closing Time the first time in his work that "women are consistently treated with respect" (Reilly 511).