The creative component of this thesis, the novel Gris-gris, explores how a mother's betrayal of her daughter and the resulting rape of that daughter is reiterated through three following generations of women within the same family. In the contextualizing component, I explore approaches to effectively crafting the pivotal rape scenes in Gris-gris to avoid reducing the novel, in the reader's mind, to being primarily one "about rape". I did not want the scenes to be pornographic or voyeuristic, metaphorical or ambiguous. I wanted them to be honest and truly affecting - but not hijack the novel's central narrative, which is how one mother's betrayal reverberates through following generations. Two popular, literary novels with plots that hinge on rape scenes are Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits. The architecture and positioning of the rape scenes in these works has much to do with each novel's unique narrative power. My original contribution to knowledge, therefore, is a study -- from the point of view of a practicing creative writer -- of 1) how these two writers craft rape scenes in these novels and 2) how, in the writing of Gris-gris, I situate and develop my own practice in terms of craft, while responding to personal and social considerations. This study will inform the creative writer who is assessing how to modulate scenes of rape in literature as one novelist's considered approach to the delicate balances involved in crafting such scenes.