Women writers give voice to their rage

The first word in Western literature, according to the classicist Mary Beard, is “wrath,” which opens the “Iliad,” written in the eighth century B.C. “Wrath” might also be the first word of the literature of the past decade. Novels and plays throughout history have starred women who insist on doing it their way—savage, intemperate women, beautifully indifferent to opinion: Tess of the D’urbervilles, Hedda Gabler, Sula Peace.

But never in such numbers as now, and never have they prompted such protracted conversation about what we expect from female characters, and why. These are the seething women of Elena Ferrante’s Naples; the heartbroken and enraged in books by Claire Messud and Han Kang; the charming, sinister heroines in the work of Ottessa Moshfegh, Alissa Nutting, Jade Sharma and Danzy Senna—not to mention the warriors in a new wave of dark feminist dystopias. With their deep unconventionality, their ire, intensity and excess, they have spurred debates about the narrow roles allotted to women—fictional women at that—many of whom have faced criticism for being unlikable, even dangerous.

The word “anger” has a strange root: an old Germanic word for unbearable narrowness, the distress of painful constriction (it is etymologically related to “angina” and “hangnail”). Much of the work about women and rage in the past 10 years seems to bespeak a frustration with femaleness itself, as a condition of unbearable narrowness and painful constriction.

Remember the “Cool Girl”? In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), Amy, our antiheroine (and one of the characters criticized for her unlikability) rages at the roles women are forced to play. “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? ‘She’s a cool girl,’ ” she says. “Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want.”

In nonfiction, a raft of books have examined women’s anger from personal and political angles, in memoirs, essay collections and hybrids of the two: Lindy West’s Shrill, Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, Lilly Dancyger’s anthology Burn it Down. Soraya Chemaly explored how women have been socialized to disavow their anger in “Rage Becomes Her”: “By effectively severing anger from ‘good womanhood,’ we chose to sever girls and women from the emotion that best protects us against danger and injustice.”

In her memoir, Know My Name, Chanel Miller recounts the story of her sexual assault, and how difficult it was for her to summon up her rage in the aftermath; the workshops she required, the study. Writers like Leslie Jamison have also described trying to reclaim their anger, suppressed or turned inward.

Black feminists have long explored the political uses of anger (and also pointed out that, of course, not all women are allowed, let alone congratulated, for accessing their anger). Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage (2018) follows in the line of classics in the genre, like Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger and bell hooks’ Killing Rage. It was the 2016 election of Donald Trump, according to Rebecca Traister in Good and Mad, that awakened other women, “largely white and benefiting in many respects from the status quo.”

Surveying these books, there is, unsurprisingly, no consensus on the correct uses of rage, its prescribed application—even its value. For some, like Rebecca Solnit, rage must be supplanted by love. For others, like Cooper (and Traister would agree), rage is valuable and must be harnessed: “We need to embrace our rage,” Cooper has said, “and allow it to become a source of energy that empowers the type of work we can do, to build a world we want to see.”

But these books all share the backdrop of our age of rage: of far-right protesters marching with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia; the massacre at Mother Immanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Christine Blasey Ford’s precision and reserve contrasted with Brett Kavanaugh’s suppurating anger and tears at the spectacle of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

In each book, there is the intimation that we have still only seen the first sparks of the fire. “While men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end,” Ferrante writes in My Brilliant Friend. “Women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”

© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES

In nonfiction, a raft of books have examined women’s anger from personal and political angles, in memoirs, essay collections and hybrids of the two: Lindy West’s Shrill, Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, Lilly Dancyger’s anthology Burn it Down.