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174 q Chapter 7 Virginia Woolf and Victorian “Incests” Many narratives by survivors of incest and sexual abuse indicate that the trauma resides as much in secrecy as in sexual abuse—the burden not to tell creates its own network of psychic wounds that far exceed the event itself. —Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 2003 Would it not have been better (if there is any sense in saying good and better when there is no possible judge, no standard) to go on feeling, as at St. Ives, the rush and tumble of family life? To be family surrounded; to go on exploring and adventuring privately while all the while the family as a whole continued its prosaic, rumbling progress; would this not have been better than to have had that protection removed; to have been tumbled out of the family shelter; to have had it cracked and gashed; to have become critical and skeptical of the family—? —Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” 1939–40 It is so hard to talk even to ones [sic] own brothers and sisters. —Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, 1904 In “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf sought once more to come to terms with “the past” in writing—but flinched at the task. “I do not want to go into my room at Hyde Park Gate. I shrink from the years 1897–1904,the seven unhappy years” when the Stephen sisters “were fully exposed without protection to the full blast of that strange character ,” “the alternately loved and hated father” (“SP” 136,107,116). Orchestrated by George Duckworth,the “Greek slave years” of “coming out” were filled with “drudgery and tyranny,” as the sisters suffered under the “accepted standards” of “upper middle class Victorian society” that he embodied and enforced (“SP” 106, 151, 150). These were the years of which Woolf wrote, VIRGINIA WOOLF AND VICTORIAN “INCESTS” 175 “the division in our lives was curious. Downstairs there was pure convention ; upstairs pure intellect,” and, further, that “there was no connection. There were deep divisions” (“SP” 157,158). But the “divisions” were not so sharp as she insisted. For the room she did not “want to go into”—“‘done up’ at George’s cost” after Stella’s death, complete with a “long Chippendale (imitation) looking glass, given me by George in the hope that I should look into it”—not only sheltered “pure intellect” but also enabled bodily violation (“SP” 122). As she wrote in an earlier memoir, “There would be a tap at the door; the light would be turned out and George would fling himself on my bed, cuddling and kissing and otherwise embracing me in order, as he told Dr. Savage later,to comfort me for the fatal illness of my father.”1 These were the years, then, when sexual attention from an older sibling compounded the serious difficulties of being Virginia Stephen and becoming Virginia Woolf. “The impact of childhood sexual abuse” on Woolf’s “life and work” has been a topic of scholarly debate at least since the publication of Louise DeSalvo’s important,if tendentious,1989 study.2 Woolf’s multiple accounts of George Duckworth’s “cuddling and kissing,” combined with her single report of Gerald Duckworth’s “hand going under [her] clothes” when she was a very young child, “going firmly and steadily lower and lower,” have inspired an array of critical responses too varied for quick synthesis here (“SP” 69). Most of this scholarship locates Woolf’s experiences within our contemporary paradigm for understanding and representing incest as sexual trauma. Not published until late in the twentieth century, a moment when the prevalence of incest was being rediscovered under new, but not entirely different, historical and discursive conditions, Woolf’s autobiographical writings offer testimony from someone we might now characterize as a “survivor.” But as the previous chapters of this book should suggest, I will read “childhood sexual abuse” in the life and work of Virginia Woolf within the historical parameters of nineteenth-century discourses on sex and marriage within the family, which differ in some substantive ways from those that currently constitute (incestuous) sexual abuse.3 Although recent theoretical work on trauma aims to conceptualize its political and historical dimensions, I highlight Victorian discursive legacies in my analysis in an effort to isolate the terms through which Woolf fictionalized and analyzed her experiences, born as she was at a moment when,as I argue in chapter 1,incest and its cultural meanings were...

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