HANOVER — As a creative writing and English student at Dartmouth College, Diana Whitney thrived in most respects.
She competed in sports and served as editor of the feminist student publication “Spare Rib.” She found mentors and friends she still speaks with today, and in 1995, she graduated as salutatorian and studied as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford.
But Dartmouth is also the place where Whitney was raped in a dorm room during her freshman winter. She was 18 at the time.
Almost 35 years on, Whitney, now an activist and writer living in Brattleboro, Vt., recently described the dissonance between these experiences to a couple dozen Dartmouth students — a few men, but mostly women — on the lower floor of the college’s Collis Center.
She was there to discuss her new book of poetry, “Girl Trouble,” which came out in April.
The book offers a scathing condemnation of the pervasiveness of sexual violence, drawing on the experiences of Dartmouth survivors, including Whitney, and the girls abused by Jeffrey Epstein and other powerful men. Her third book of poetry, it traces the thrill and devastation of female adolescence, and excavates Whitney’s rage about her rape and the mark it’s left on her life.
“The process of writing really is about taking back control over the material,” she told students during the talk.
While writing “Girl Trouble” has helped Whitney regain a sense of agency, she’s also reluctant to dole out empty doses of optimism about the future. “We’re in the long haul transformation” when it comes to building a safer, more just world for women, she said in a conversation in Hanover after the talk.
“Do I believe we’re going to see a huge change in my lifetime? I don’t think so. But I hope it will be in my children’s lifetime.”
“Girl Trouble,” which Whitney, 52, began during the coronavirus pandemic, started as a way of processing the parallels she observed between her daughters’ adolescence and her own.
Ages 14 and 12 at the time, they described cyberbullying and a “spectrum of sexual harassment” at school, she said.
“It felt so anachronistic. Like, how is this happening in 2020 or 2021?”
She realized that as her kids got older, she could no longer protect them like she could when they were younger.
That realization gave way to the book’s first poem “Watching Thelma & Louise During Lockdown with My Daughters.”
The film’s inciting incident revolves around the attempted rape of Thelma, which Louise interrupts, killing the assailant. The friends make for Mexico, eventually leading to a high-speed chase with the FBI. As they reach a cliff’s edge, it seems their only recourse in an unjust world is to leave it.
They soar through the sky as though taking “a magic feminist ride to the afterlife while we’re stuck here on the ground, on the couch, in the house, where it’s dark dark dark,” Whitney writes in the poem.
Only in fiction does freedom seem possible.
In “Girl Trouble,” Whitney envisions her own victorious endings, at times describing new outcomes to painful episodes of adolescence.
“That sort of strategy of reimagining history and reimagining personal experience was very empowering and really healing,” Whitney said.
In “My 6th-Grade Self Strikes Out Jason Tournay,” she imagines taking revenge on a boy who snapped girls’ bra straps on the playground:
(…)jinx, double-jinx
wind -up release
(…)Nobody
will forget my victory
Poetry has helped her access a level of emotion less easily expressed through more didactic forms of writing such as an op-ed or a work of nonfiction, she said.
Her ferocity comes through in “Hate Poem for Animal House,” a denunciation of frat boys and their sense of entitlement. The poem’s title makes reference to the 1978 film inspired by the Dartmouth frat Alpha Delta.
I hate your grand pillared houses of debauchery
still standing, prime real estate increasing tenfold, lifelong capital return
(…)I was supposed to laugh, supposed to feel lucky
appraised by the bouncer dude working the door. Frat boy I hate you
After Whitney was raped, she wrote about her assault as a piece of fiction told in the third person. “I needed that distance,” she said, and she struggled for the language to describe what had happened to her.
She brought the story to her creative writing class, half hoping someone might check on her, but no one did.
The outcome was largely the same when she told a counselor about the assault. She recently retrieved the counselor’s notes from the meeting and learned that her experience had been reduced to a simple explanation, that Whitney was having trouble adjusting to “being a woman at Dartmouth.”
Eventually, she found solidarity in her fellow writers for “Spare Rib” and student activists on campus.
Still, there remains a betrayal at the heart of how Dartmouth treats its female students, Whitney said. The institution promises a prestigious education, but falls short when it comes to protecting women against sexual violence during their time at school, she said.
Greek life still reigns, with about 65% of eligible students participating last year, according to data from the college’s Greek Life and Student Societies, and the name of Leon Black, the billionaire with ties to Epstein, remains attached to the Black Family Visual Arts Center, one of the college’s arts hubs. Black also faces sexual assault allegations, which he denies.
“We take seriously the allegations that have been made against Leon Black, and we continue to evaluate any new information that comes to light with the seriousness it deserves,” Dartmouth spokesperson Jana Barnello told the Valley News in a recent story about the calls to rename the arts center. “Dartmouth currently has no financial relationship with him.”
In spite of the enduring obstacles to women’s empowerment at Dartmouth and beyond, in “Girl Trouble,” Whitney has found a command of her voice that she struggled to find as a student after the assault.
“I’m glad it’s accusatory; I’m glad it’s righteous,” New Hampshire Poet Laureate Jennifer Militello, who helped Whitney develop the manuscript, said in an interview.
“It’s amazing to have a book that is like: ‘I will not be quiet,’ ” she said.
Whitney’s voice comes in loud in “Survivor Song,” which she wrote as a villanelle, a poetic form containing 19 lines, grouped into five tercets, or stanzas of three lines, followed by a quatrain.
The use of form in poetry lets the author and the reader know that what is being described is going to end, Whitney told students at the talk on campus. That promise can be particularly comforting to survivors of sexual violence, for whom traumatic memories can play on loop.
“Survivor Song” borrows a phrase that Sarah Ransome, who endured abuse by Epstein, used to describe her vulnerable state when she met him: “I was so broken. I was an open book.”
The poem takes aim at powerful men and the people who protect them:
A man makes a promise and sets the hook —
he floats above the common world, a king.
(I was so broken, I was an open book.)
At the end, the focus shifts:
my story is my own now, a precious thing.
A man made a promise and set the hook
but I wasn’t broken. I wrote the book.
A co-founder of Dartmouth Community against Gender Harassment and Sexual Violence, Whitney has been among the alumni urging the college to remove Black’s name from the visual arts center.
“We want to see Dartmouth show institutional courage,” she said, borrowing a phrase from the psychologist Jennifer Freyd.
Whitney planned to walk past the visual arts center after the talk on “Girl Trouble,” the record she’s crafted of her and other women’s anger and pain and hope.
“I worked so hard on the poems, and now I get to stand behind them,” she said.
Diana Whitney will read from her new book “Girl Trouble” in an event with authors Eve Alexandra and Meg Reynolds at 7 p.m. on May 12 at the Norwich Bookstore. Learn more at norwichbookstore.com.
