The Angry Girls
Dec. 7th, 2008 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI've been thinking about women's anger in narrative. My Boy just read Jane Eyre for the first time, and while he loved Jane's passionate rage as a child, he was disappointed by the way that she cools down and reigns herself in as an adult. Also, Hoyden About Town posted a feminist exploration of The Taming of the Shrew yesterday - the one Shakespeare play that I can't get my head around, that I can't figure it out.
(I also saw Australia last night, and while I loved the film I rather wish that the heroine had been more Mary Lennox or Jo March than Indiana Jones Sidekick No. 2)
I love angry girls in books. Anger is a useful resource; if you are oppressed, anger is a necessary reaction. Out of anger is born activism. I love the angry girls because they see gender oppression as the crock it actually is, and they aren't willing to play along. As a girl, the angry girls made me feel validated, like I wasn't making it all up - like I had a right to my anger. I felt with their fire.
Rosario Ferre has this wonderful essay, "From Ire to Irony," in which she discusses the function of irony is women's writing, the ways in which women, being barred from outright anger, write bitterly ironic work. Austen falls into this paradigm, which is part of the reason why I don't like her as much as the Brontes - some part of me always wants to shake Austen and demand of her, "why aren't you enraged? how can you stand to quip about things like this? why don't you feel moved to rebellion?" - although of course Austen is writing in a deeply subversive way. I just prefer the naked passion of the angry girls to the sly stilettos of Lizzie Bennett.
Ferre also places Virginia Woolf within the paradigm of ironic anger, which interests me, because I've been struggling with Woolf's pronouncements on anger in A Room of One's Own since I was about sixteen. Woolf argues that women writers' anger bars them from artistic incandescence. Woolf speaks of consuming impediments. Importantly, I think, she doesn't suggest that the incandescent writer deflect or ignore them, only that they do not allow themselves to be impeded. Consumption is a violent action, fuelled by anger. But Woolf also has this earlier image of the red light of emotion versus the white light of truth - the image carries connotations of flame, which consumes its fuel in order to make its light. The fire of anger is described as ordinary red flame, the light of truth is white-hot. The true fire of inspiration is colorless. The red part of a candle flame is the least hot, while colorless fire, fire hot enough to not radiate within the color spectrum, is also known as “incandescent” fire. Art, Woolf is saying, ought to be hot and flame-like; the trouble with anger is that it does not burn hot enough. Anger in Woolf is problematic because it is a distraction, not because anger is an inappropriate response to systematic oppression.
The thing is, I kind of agree with Virginia Woolf. It's hard to be angry all the time, to live your life constantly throwing yourself against the bars of an unyielding cage. Maybe it's different now, but for Jane Eyre, for Kate the Curst, what kind of freedom was there? Kate never could have been at liberty to speak her mind. Jane, like it or not, has to remain within some sort of enclosure. This is Victorian England we're talking about!
For Jane Eyre, at least, I think the "taming" is more beneficial than not. Jane carves out a place for herself in which she can breathe. It's not perfect - she still has to get married, and Rochester has to get all messed up before he can deal with her need for liberty - but it works. As an angry child Jane was miserable. As a calmer adult, she finds happiness. Ultimately, I would rather she be happy that I get my validation from her anger and misery. In the same way, Mary Lennox and Jo March are both happier girls once they abandon their tempers a bit. None of the three ever ceases to be a rebel - they just stop killing their own hearts with futile rage. They learn how to cope.
It seems unfair to me, in an odd sort of way that we as readers should demand that our characters suffer for us. (which sounds weird coming from an h/c girl, but.) I want Jane, Mary, Jo, to be happy.
Katharina I'm still not sure about. The play is just too brutal. Petruchio is just too much of a bitch to her. The only reading of that play that's ever worked for me was an improv take on it that we did at the Stratford Shakespeare School when I was a kid. We played it as a straight-up s&m scene, a power game that was all about the erotics of control. The earlier parts of their interaction were very obviously played as a negotiation, making sure everyone understood the game, and then went to some great erotic physicalized dominance play in the "tongue in your tail" sequence. But apart from that, I can't see how it can work. I agree that Kate needs, in some way, to be "tamed," because it can't be fun to live like that. And I like the game-playing hypothesis. It's just that while I don't have a problem with the angry girls quieting some of their anger, I do have a major problem with someone outside of themselves - especially a man - being the one to de-fang them.
If you decide that you can't live your life, make your art, because your anger is stifling or contorting you, that's one thing. If your love interest beats up on you because he doesn't like angry girls, screw that. If I didn't think that Edward Rochester liked Jane because of her rebellious spirit, I would think a great deal less of him.
Of course, the moral of the story is that Much Ado About Nothing is the greatest thing in the world, because it's the story of the angry girl triumphant. Nobody takes away Beatrice's fangs, and she doesn't need them to, because she can be joyous and rageous all at once. God, I love that charcter.
(I also saw Australia last night, and while I loved the film I rather wish that the heroine had been more Mary Lennox or Jo March than Indiana Jones Sidekick No. 2)
I love angry girls in books. Anger is a useful resource; if you are oppressed, anger is a necessary reaction. Out of anger is born activism. I love the angry girls because they see gender oppression as the crock it actually is, and they aren't willing to play along. As a girl, the angry girls made me feel validated, like I wasn't making it all up - like I had a right to my anger. I felt with their fire.
Rosario Ferre has this wonderful essay, "From Ire to Irony," in which she discusses the function of irony is women's writing, the ways in which women, being barred from outright anger, write bitterly ironic work. Austen falls into this paradigm, which is part of the reason why I don't like her as much as the Brontes - some part of me always wants to shake Austen and demand of her, "why aren't you enraged? how can you stand to quip about things like this? why don't you feel moved to rebellion?" - although of course Austen is writing in a deeply subversive way. I just prefer the naked passion of the angry girls to the sly stilettos of Lizzie Bennett.
Ferre also places Virginia Woolf within the paradigm of ironic anger, which interests me, because I've been struggling with Woolf's pronouncements on anger in A Room of One's Own since I was about sixteen. Woolf argues that women writers' anger bars them from artistic incandescence. Woolf speaks of consuming impediments. Importantly, I think, she doesn't suggest that the incandescent writer deflect or ignore them, only that they do not allow themselves to be impeded. Consumption is a violent action, fuelled by anger. But Woolf also has this earlier image of the red light of emotion versus the white light of truth - the image carries connotations of flame, which consumes its fuel in order to make its light. The fire of anger is described as ordinary red flame, the light of truth is white-hot. The true fire of inspiration is colorless. The red part of a candle flame is the least hot, while colorless fire, fire hot enough to not radiate within the color spectrum, is also known as “incandescent” fire. Art, Woolf is saying, ought to be hot and flame-like; the trouble with anger is that it does not burn hot enough. Anger in Woolf is problematic because it is a distraction, not because anger is an inappropriate response to systematic oppression.
The thing is, I kind of agree with Virginia Woolf. It's hard to be angry all the time, to live your life constantly throwing yourself against the bars of an unyielding cage. Maybe it's different now, but for Jane Eyre, for Kate the Curst, what kind of freedom was there? Kate never could have been at liberty to speak her mind. Jane, like it or not, has to remain within some sort of enclosure. This is Victorian England we're talking about!
For Jane Eyre, at least, I think the "taming" is more beneficial than not. Jane carves out a place for herself in which she can breathe. It's not perfect - she still has to get married, and Rochester has to get all messed up before he can deal with her need for liberty - but it works. As an angry child Jane was miserable. As a calmer adult, she finds happiness. Ultimately, I would rather she be happy that I get my validation from her anger and misery. In the same way, Mary Lennox and Jo March are both happier girls once they abandon their tempers a bit. None of the three ever ceases to be a rebel - they just stop killing their own hearts with futile rage. They learn how to cope.
It seems unfair to me, in an odd sort of way that we as readers should demand that our characters suffer for us. (which sounds weird coming from an h/c girl, but.) I want Jane, Mary, Jo, to be happy.
Katharina I'm still not sure about. The play is just too brutal. Petruchio is just too much of a bitch to her. The only reading of that play that's ever worked for me was an improv take on it that we did at the Stratford Shakespeare School when I was a kid. We played it as a straight-up s&m scene, a power game that was all about the erotics of control. The earlier parts of their interaction were very obviously played as a negotiation, making sure everyone understood the game, and then went to some great erotic physicalized dominance play in the "tongue in your tail" sequence. But apart from that, I can't see how it can work. I agree that Kate needs, in some way, to be "tamed," because it can't be fun to live like that. And I like the game-playing hypothesis. It's just that while I don't have a problem with the angry girls quieting some of their anger, I do have a major problem with someone outside of themselves - especially a man - being the one to de-fang them.
If you decide that you can't live your life, make your art, because your anger is stifling or contorting you, that's one thing. If your love interest beats up on you because he doesn't like angry girls, screw that. If I didn't think that Edward Rochester liked Jane because of her rebellious spirit, I would think a great deal less of him.
Of course, the moral of the story is that Much Ado About Nothing is the greatest thing in the world, because it's the story of the angry girl triumphant. Nobody takes away Beatrice's fangs, and she doesn't need them to, because she can be joyous and rageous all at once. God, I love that charcter.