#child abuse in literature

[m-c-easton]

Book Picks: The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

**Triggering Content (child abuse) Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award (yes, people, I’m still catching up on early pandemic booklists), Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ novel The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois has given us an immensely rich novel, one that hooked me with the depth and drama of a Black family spanning the history of America. The structure is complex, opening most of the eleven…

[becomingvecna]

#my writing

[visionsofaselfmademan]

[lostmf]

[camomileapplesyrup]

my father never really behaved like one. he was violent. he beat me and my mother. he cheated on her with hookers every night, and got off on the idea of assaulting them behind my mother's back. after my 4th birthday, he up and left. from then, my childhood with him was meeting a string of women from russia, all claiming to be engaged to him. no one stayed long enough but one woman. who became my stepmother.

we didn't like each other. as a small little girl, who watched her big professor father dancing around in suits all day and then slapping my mom before storming away, i didn't have much faith in my safety with this woman. i saw an evil lady, who was corrupting my father with her evil lady ways, turning him against me to prioritise her son who she brought with her. this illusion dropped one night during an argument that lasted hours.

after hurling an array of expensive china at each other, and slamming all the doors in their big house, my stepmother sat crying in our red armchair, repeatedly murmuring things in russian i wish i would have understood. my father saw me approaching and snarled at me. something along the lines of "don't entertain the attention seeking goose. she is playing the victim." as a young 13 year old girl, the only thing i could conjure up was "well, you hit her, dad. don't you think that's why she's crying?"

whatever happened after that was a blur. he went on a tirade at me, clearly bothered by the correction. he looked like a big, puffed up toad, in my memory. croaking unintelligibly with anger and offence. but, im his daughter after all. i didn't understand a thing, i yelled back at my father, attempting to mimic his emotionless-debate-arguing.

that night i saw my real mother in her.

my real mother, in the same house, who never cowered. never ran away, or cried without a glare. my mother who made sure i saw her slap back. slap back so hard it made my father stagger against the very same doorframe i stood.

amidst my heated conversation with my father, the woman whom i hated so much, called out my name. she looked at me and choked out a sentence i'll never forget. in her thick, russian accent, she said "you are a strong young woman. never cower in front of your dad, or any man who hurts you. thank you."

it was the first and last time she ever complimented me. for the first time, we saw each other for what we truly were. two women victimised by an abusive men, who shrunk into the very thing he wanted to avoid most. two women who respected each other enough, to stand up to him. no matter how far apart our worlds were, in that moment, we became the very core of our beings and forgot everything else.

i'll never forget her defeated voice, and tear stained face. i'll never forget what she gave me that day.

[mysterieuxclairdelune]

{Katie Maria/ Gregory Orr/ Li-Young-Lee, A Hymn to Childhood/ Liv Ullman, Changing/ Broken Veil/ Louise Glück, Unpainted Doors/ Anne Carson/ m.h.w, yuki, age thirteen/ Killing Eve/ unknown/ Ekta R. Garg/ Beau Taplin}

[verademialove]

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”

Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

[sweetsweetperil]

Ribbon and lace

Wrapped around my waist,

So tight I can barely breathe

Take the air right out of me,

Slowly, softly,

I beg you,

Please

[ninadove]

My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me.

[Pluto] was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.

[…] I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog, when, by accident, or through affection, they came in my way. But my disease grew upon me—for what disease is like Alcohol!—and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old, and consequently somewhat peevish—even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.

And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;—hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;—hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;—hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin—a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it—if such a thing were possible—even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.

I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually—very gradually—I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence.

My wife had called my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed. […] By slow degrees—degrees nearly imperceptible, and which for a long time my reason struggled to reject as fanciful—it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name—and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared—it was now, I say, the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the GALLOWS!—oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime—of Agony and of Death ! And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. […] And a brute beast—whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed—a brute beast to work out for me—for me, a man fashioned in the image of the High God—so much of insufferable woe!

Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal, which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife.

No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!—by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman—a howl—a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the dammed in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation. […] The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman.

I had walled the monster up within the tomb.

— Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat

[thoughtsfromthecorneroftheroom]

No, I'm not ok. But I haven't been ok since I was 11, maybe 12. I am still here though. I'm still breathing. For me, sometimes, that will have to be enough.

[sulasnsleep]

“As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.”

— Alain de Botton

[showmethesneer]

The fact that Dolores Haze died in childbirth will never not be the most gut-wrenching symbolism in all of literature to me.

In a literal sense, of course she was going to have complications. She had been raped for years as a child. That's unspeakable trauma put on her still-developing organs.

But also the metaphor of Lolita, the nymphet, dying when she becomes a mother is so perfect it makes me angry and somehow elated at the same time. It's almost like this small victory, this idea that she was able to escape ever being viewed and abused like that again, because she has crossed a threshold into permanent adulthood. And I know the point was that the character actually died, and i know that Humbert was never deterred by her being pregnant (not in his sick, incestuous fantasies nor in reality), but I like to imagine that Dolores lived, and that only Lolita died when she gave birth.

[shirleyjacksonism]

everybody is recommending "american gothic" media but nobody is ever talking about My absolute darling. one of THE american gothic novels if you ask me

[graywensdays]

I use to think

“I’m someone who did not die when they should have.”

I didn’t know where that feeling came from

I just felt as if I should have died when I was ten or so.

I think I know why.

I was assaulted by my own blood

But I blocked it out

And i think I felt as if I was already dead

As if the person I was before all that was dead

So maybe I did die when I was 10 just not physically.

[sweetsweetperil]

I want you

In ways a girl should never want a man,

I need you

But I’ve always been too afraid to hold your hand,

It’s happened

Time and time again,

The violation, the degradation

The beating till I’m half dead,

So please don’t mind my hesitation

I’ve only know hopeless

Love