EXPRESS: “And we gossip about my life as if I am not there.” An autoethnography on recovery from infidelity and silence in the academic workplace

In this autoethnography, I engage with betrayal trauma from my husband’s infidelity as it relates to my recovery and my academic identity, and my work performance. As I navigate between the trauma, the stigma and taboo, the shame and lack of knowledge, my responsibilised academic self, the collegial interactions, and the question whether keeping silent robbed me of my voice, I distinguish toxic secrets, hurtful silencing, and healing silence. Although the exploitative nature of the academic workplace had never been more visceral, I also found that a tending silence contributed to my protection and my recovery. In silence, my academic life is opening up to embracing needs rather than enduring hardships, to inviting rather than striving, to vulnerability rather than empowerment.

“Unfathomable Calmness”: Betrayal Trauma, Silence and Dissociation in The Secret Agent

With the rise of trauma theory in late 19th century, researchers have focused on foregrounding the significance of some catastrophic events that pertain mainly to the collective, leaving other forms of trauma and their psychological aftermath on the individual underrepresented. In this paper, I focus on social traumas in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which seems to be overlooked by some critics whose insights highlight primarily its political aspect. The events of the novel revolve around the peculiar and traumatic experience of Winnie Verloc whose life is rife with betrayal and violence. Her recurrent exposure to successive shocking events culminates in her dissociation and, consequently, her suicide. To pin down what lies beneath Winnie’s ambiguity, aloofness and silence in the novel, I mainly rely on trauma theory, drawing from studies on PTSD, betrayal and dissociation by several trauma scholars, such as, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Jennifer Freyd, and others. Furthermore, this paper examines the inextricability of the past from the present in trauma through the breadth scrutiny of Winnie’s psychological response to her excruciating experience. Hence the way the appalling past returns unbidden to shake Winnie’s present.