Do I need to elaborate?

[Otto26]

I'm writing a steampunkish story (more Space: 1889, really) about a woman who goes to Mars. Her mother was Martian and she's idolized the planet and is 'returning to her roots'. But things go wrong, she ends up enslaved by the locals, and she's trying to survive. This is the descent portion of the story where she's finding out that reality and her understandings of reality don't match up and maybe she's not as Martian as she thought she was. There's more to it than this, but this is the piece I'm concerned about. Specifically I'm concerned about the bolded text in the quote below. I summarily deal with with painful and humiliating episodes. I took this approach because I don't like genuine non-consent and adding more detail to the summary felt like writing torture/humiliation porn. Not my cup of tea.

But... do I need to add more? I've sort of breezed over the tribulations that led this very strong woman to considering self-harm as a way out of her situation. Have I done too much summary? Are more details necessary to make her descent to this depth of despair believable? If so, do you have suggestions about how I might do it without writing the torture/humiliation porn?

Bhoo had no idea what day it was anymore and didn’t ask. Speaking without being spoken to was a sure way to get slapped or worse. Haramesh had taken a leather strap to her, once. The bruises still marked her back, ass, and legs and she had no desire to repeat the process. But it was a market day. She knew the signs. Haramesh had been drying resin for several days, bundling it into measured nuggets wrapped in a pair of leaves to form several small cubes about the size of gambling dice. Several new tapestries had been woven by Bauninsheg and were rolled up by the door.

Bauninsheg would take the two male slaves to the morning market where they could hold the tapestries up for display and sale. They would carry her purchases of fiber and groceries back to the house in the afternoon and clean. Haramesh and Bhoo would go to the redhouses in the morning to check the orchard and then go to a tavern in the afternoon and evening where he would conduct his business over drinks. And abuse of Bhoo.

The novelty of the Terran slave had worn off after a few markets. She tried not to remember market days but sometimes the memories thrust themselves forward. The first had been bad, maybe the worst. He’d had her up on a table displaying herself to the onlookers, telling the story of Gilkidu and the horizontal cunt. Then he’d bragged about how she touched herself at night and forced her do that standing in front of the crowd.

The predominantly male crowd brought their own female slaves to the tavern and had delighted in pairing them with Bhoo for a public displays. And concluding a deal meant drinks and promises of eternal friendship and the sharing of gifts which, as often as not, had meant Bhoo.

She’d repeated her mantra to herself over and over every night. Some nights she even dared to whisper it aloud. But she’d begun to shut down. She trudged through her life because there was no alternative but she’d increasingly begun to ignore anything that didn’t immediately affect her. She’d fought this by manufacturing other alternatives but those had all involved escaping. Except for one. And she had begun to consider that. She’d rejected it for many reasons. Pride had been a strong motivator. She was Martian! She could endure anything. Except, maybe she couldn’t. Suicide would earn her no dharma at all, would waste that she’d accumulated in her suffering so far. But she wasn’t sure she believed in another life. Maybe she could just end all the suffering. That thought haunted her. But she resisted it. She’d said she’d wait for two months for rescuers to find her and she hadn’t reached that deadline yet. She thought. Maybe. Perhaps she had, though.

That thought worried at her like an insistent wasp as she followed Haramesh through the redhouse all morning. It nagged at her as she bathed and combed her hair and Haramesh rubbed fragrant oil beneath her arms and between her thighs. It preoccupied her as she knelt next to Haramesh in the tavern while he drank and bargained. It so preoccupied her that she missed his command, twice. Only when he slapped her hard enough to cause her to fall prostrate upon the floor, hard enough for the slap to be heard above the music and cause it to falter, hard enough to attract the attention of every occupant of the tavern, only then did she realize how deep in thought she had been.

 

[ElectricBlue]

To my eye, those two paragraphs are a very light skate over the topic, a fairly innocuous passage that doesn't go deep into torment or angst.

 

[shelleycat1]

I think you have to have more to make it convincing. In a story I did (Tuesdays) I tried to show that the MC was isolated, alone in a foreign country, could not see a way out, and make the surrounding weather and darkness have an effect too.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I think it's adequate. You've basically said she's been repeatedly publicly raped. That's enough to.eat away anyone's soul.

 

[Britva415]

Do you want to elaborate?

You can focus on her experience of her anguish without focusing on the acts which cause it.

I don't know the whole story so I can't judge from just this one passage whether her "end-it" mentality is convincing or not. Depending on the story, it might be enough for a reader to just be told that that's where her mind is at. It might not, and they might need to be shown why the experience is so insufferable that it leads her to that extreme.

Like I said, there are ways to show that without dwelling on the details of the abuse itself. What usually gets depressed people there isn't so much the negativity of the situation, but, the hopelessness around being permanently stuck in it.