THOSE SCARY , SEXY, VENGEFUL WOMEN
AMAD bitch and scary – that’s how schoolboy Tom saw his mother Gemma Foster at her worst and of course he hated it. And that’s how we saw Doctor Foster too. Of course we absolutely loved it. On October 5, 2015, 10 million of us sat salivating (or hiding behind the sofa) when she invited herself and dragged along her cheating husband to dinner at the family home of his 22-year-old mistress Kate.
This wasn’t just the dinner party from hell, it was the dinner party from hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. “You’re a bitch,” hissed Kate as the Doctor laid waste to everyone present. “Bitch is right,” said Gemma, “I’m a wolf tonight.” And wolf she was. How we cheered!
Suranne Jones, who plays Doctor Foster and was previously in Coronation Street and Scott & Bailey, is an intensely sexy and compelling actress who grabbed us hungrily right from the start.
Only one thing left thousands of viewers disappointed: the episode’s closing scene saw her in the town square being the good doctor, resuscitating a man mouth-tomouth. What we wanted was the bad doctor tearing her husband limb from limb.
His affair had been going on for two years. He wouldn’t stop lying to her about everything. He’d emptied the bank accounts. He’d forged her signature and mortgaged the house. He had beaten her up. He couldn’t have been much worse. “Why didn’t she kill him?” roared Twitter, as he took off for London with his pregnant young lover. He seemed to have got away scot free.
But not so fast! Next Tuesday Doctor Foster is back for a second series and hell only knows what she’s going to do to him now.
Most of us are incapable of generating her kind of anger even if we feel her kind of hurt. That’s a mercy for those who do us wrong, it’s also a mercy to ourselves. Being gripped by such fury is the stuff of tragedy. Othello, tricked into jealousy by Iago, kills the woman he loves.
IN THE Greek tragedy Medea, she responds to her husband’s abandonment by killing her two children. When Clytemnestra’s husband sacrifices their daughter to get a fair wind to carry his ships to Troy she takes over the throne, gets a lover, waits 10 years for Agamemnon to return then murders him with an axe.
According to Aristotle the purpose and effect of such dramatic tragedy was “catharsis”: purging the audience of emotions and bringing a sort of purification. It would be going a bit far to attach such elevating effect to our enjoyment of Doctor Foster.
Why are we so gripped? Well we love to be frightened so long as it is at a safe distance, we are fascinated by extreme and dangerous characters provided they aren’t in our neighbourhood and we feel a kind of admiration for people who don’t take things lying down.
Do we learn from it? Perhaps. The film Fatal Attraction doubtless made some men think more carefully about one-night stands and giving greater protection family’s pet rabbits.
That film was made 30 years ago but the memory lingers on. In the same year the Bafta award for best British television drama series was won by Life And Loves Of A She Devil, a tale of infidelity, extreme anger and revenge.
Ruth, very unlike Gemma Foster, is a housewife not blessed with good looks. She is extremely large and ugly. Her husband leaves her to go off with Mary, a glamorous bestselling novelist. When Ruth registers to the HELL HATH NO FURY: Suranne Jones as Dr Foster and, inset, that dinner party her fury her husband calls her a “she devil”. Bad move!
She sets out to become precisely that. She gets a job as a nurse at the old people’s home where Mary’s mother lives and has the old woman kicked out. She finds ways of stealing money from Mary’s large bank accounts, implicating her husband in the fraud. She undermines her husband and Mary’s relationship by supplying him with a secretary who had an affair with him.
She persuades a judge to give her husband a long prison sentence Daily Express Thursday August 31 2017 and she has multiple operations to make her body identical to Mary’s. It was ridiculous and terrifying and we were gripped by it. She Devils and Bunny Boilers are difficult to erase from the consciousness (especially men’s).
Powerful bad women characters have always been magic in television and film – take Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. Joan Collins laboured for decades in the foothills of stardom until she played the title role in The Bitch and established her place in things. It was as the superbitch Alexis in Dynasty that she rose to superstardom. Without bitchery she was just a good-looking woman, with bitchery she became a legend. The only truly compelling character in Downton Abbey, and then only in the first series, was Lady Mary, the beautiful, slightly bad sister, the one sexy woman in the whole castle. A young Turkish diplomat died in her bed doing things best left unspecified. After that she became disappointingly nicer.
Lady Mary was devious, Alexis was a bitch by nature. Doctor Foster was neither bitch nor wolf till she was betrayed and wounded by her husband and that makes it a very different matter.
We understand why she is furious. She has reason for it even if she has gone rather far over the top, so we watch her with a mixture of horror and admiration.
There is something magnificent as well as mad about generating and sustaining such fury. She is a champion of rage, near-righteous rage. Don’t many of us feel ashamed that we are incapable of being as angry as we sometimes ought to be?
FURY takes many forms. It is hard to forget the case of John and Lorena Bobbitt. In 1993, in Manassas, Virginia, Lorena, who had been abused by her husband and subjected to recitations of his infidelities, cut off his penis while he was asleep, drove off in their car and threw it into a field.
Then, realising this was rather extreme, she called the emergency services. The appendage was retrieved and reattached but it was never quite the same again. Such behaviour is rare, or at least rarely reported, but there must be many women who found Lorena’s action sort of understandable. (Doctor F is obviously technically equipped to perform such an amputation but it would be against the Hippocratic oath).
Cathartic for her and more acceptable and amusing to the local community is what a woman did in Warwick in January to shame her unfaithful husband. She put up big posters all over town showing a heart in a hangman’s noose with the words: Graham, if she’s so good in bed you can stay there! Merc keys in the canal. Locks changed. Cards maxed. Happy new year, Linda xxx.
In the final first series episode of Doctor Foster Gemma goes round to vindictively tell her neighbour Anna what havoc she has wreaked on their marriage (she has slept with Anna’s husband – had to be done, he was an accountant and Gemma needed the accounts). Anna is unmoved – she knows about it and accepts her husband’s infidelities. She tells Gemma: “People breathe a sigh of relief when you leave the room.”
We quiver with excitement at the thought of her coming back into ours.