Reprise: Speaking my truth: my WHOLE truth*
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Remembering the fears that kept me awake at night for a long time (virtually four years) after Trump’s election. Worth revisiting and reassessing now that the nightmare is over in name at least, but not nearly as over as it should be, thanks to ongoing GOP efforts to maintain the destructive impulses trump’s presidency made manifest.
* NOTE: Medium doesn’t like it when you re-post a previously published article, but that is a rather bogus expectation when they haven’t curated/distributed a single one of your articles in the entire three years you’ve been writing here, and as a consequence it received very few readers.
So, Medium, you get a resounding raspberry here (along with an eff you).
Speaking my truth: my WHOLE truth
Reflections on the political and personal consequences for myself and other women of the election of Donald J. Trump as president.
Journal entry, November 17, 2016, edited and expanded December 2, 2016
In “Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work,” Louise DeSalvo examined the impact of Woolf’s experience of sexual abuse at the hands of her half brothers. DeSalvo argued that Woolf’s suicide can be directly connected to her terror over the rise of Hitler in Europe, representing to Woolf the abject powerlessness she had in the household where she grew up — not just because of her sexual abuse by her half-brothers, George and Herbert Duckworth, but because of the autocratic, patriarchal rule of her father, which enabled the abuse.
Woolf herself suggested that World War I and fascism (she committed suicide in 1941) were the natural outcome of the patriarchal family. DiSalvo suggests that Woolf’s anxiety over Hitler’s anticipated invasion of England contributed, via its allegorical connection to her experience of sexual violation, to Woolf’s final depression and suicide. Perhaps the most significant contributing factor was that Woolf was reading the later Freud, where he questions the reliability of childhood memories of incest and rape, believing it not possible…
