Beyond Taboo and Stigma: Domestic Violence in 20th Century Rural Hungary and Transylvania

Abstract

The study underscores the conversions in violence concepts textualized in eight Hungarian-speaking peasant women’s life narratives. By addressing the central questions of violence against peasant women, the examination provides a path toward including the rural as a geographic and socio-cultural dimension in the studies of women’s writing. In this corpus of marginalized counter-histories, two main types of abuse were scrutinised: sexual and physical violence against wives. Breaking with the social and community norms, these rural women textualized and publicized their stories of abuse and moved beyond the stigmatizing efforts of patriarchal society. I examine these accounts of violence as coping strategies that transform former victims into actors. Based on the concepts of resilience and agency, I attempt to disentangle the stories of women who have experienced domestic violence from the framework of indescribability and shame by suggesting a possible approach beyond taboo and stigma.