On Righteous Female Rage: Part I
How thirty-five years of nonconformist reading made me finally do a Medusa act
If I had to choose between Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravaggio for depicting Judith beheading Holofernes, I would choose the former because she was the first woman to be accepted into the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (Academy of the Arts of Drawing) which was a pretty big deal in 17th-century Florence with Medicis crawling everywhere. Not every woman was Galileo’s pen pal. Perhaps they discussed blood splatter trajectories and crimson parabolas—the physics of revenge slaughter.
Artemisia voluntarily underwent torture to prove she did not frame Agostino Tassi, her rapist. Tassi was found guilty but went unpunished because he was the Pope’s golden boy —does anyone else smell Kavanaugh? Artemisia’s revenge is now immortalized in the painting where the Biblical character Judith infiltrates the Assyrian army, gets the Assyrian general Holofernes drunk, and beheads him with the help of her maidservant, Abra. She depicted her rapist in her art to publicly humiliate him. If there ever was a baroque display of rage by a female artist, this is it.
I came home this weekend from a seven-day trip to attend my cousin’s wedding at our ancestral house. Nestled in a densely populated suburban town, the nights are colder and blood runs thicker down there. And yet acceptance dissipates however hard you try. Returning after fifteen years, the Panopticon psyche of the small town made me retreat like an annoyed armadillo. Sexist microaggression is nothing new for me. But small events over a few days escalated into a domino effect.
One evening, the rage turned into a hysterical outburst that surprised me and everyone around me. I became Artemisia, Medusa, Medea all at once. Demanding respect, justice, recognition, and acceptance as a human being rather than just a woman. That a woman was more than her marital status (I have none) and fertility (are you kidding me?) was unthinkable for the older generations in that cold room where my grandmother’s photograph loomed from the wall. In a world where male anger is seen as powerful and female anger is deemed inappropriate, something that requires fixing, an entire pathology created around female rage, my ten minutes of hot, angry sobs paved the way for my younger cousins and friends to delineate their boundaries in the future. Scream if you must. Be Medusa-mad. Feminine rage is your right as a human being.
After this propulsive incident, I noticed a marked shift in the force field around me. I was Circe’d. That night, I toyed about writing what transpired and several books popped up in my mind. Some gleeful finds. Few shocking revelations. Turns out I have been collecting a feminine rage reading list for three decades, all of which resonated that fateful evening. This is a special edition with eight books. Part I comprises fiction titles.
The first time I read Carrie in high school, I went ‘ick’. But I cheered her on. It was also a time when I discovered various taboos surrounding menstruation in our society. Bloody Carrie was bloody right exacting her revenge. Watching Sissy Spacek dripping with blood in high school was an initiation itself complemented by Stephen King’s 70s writing, still some of his best. We need more art transcending the misunderstood female hysteria epitomized in franchises like Scream and elevated like the horror/crime prose by Carmen Maria Machado, Chelsea G. Summers, and Oyinkan Braithwaite.
The meteoric rise of Gillian Flynn was never surprising because who doesn’t hate a pretentious faux cool girl, eh? Hate is not a loaded word. Hate is an unapologetic expression of perpetual dislike of everything that sets our teeth on edge. Insert keywords: patriarchy, internalized misogyny, racism, schoolyard bullying. It’s not my favorite Flynn novel (Sharp Objects is) but Gone Girl remains my favorite book-movie combination (thank you David Fincher) that I have read and seen multiple times. The scene where Amy (the magnetic Rosamund Pike with her chiselled cheekbones sharpened for vengeance) wipes the kitchen floor with tissues after creating a blood splatter for beloved Nicky’s death sentence remains my favorite. All hail, luminol!
Followed by our Amy absconding in a getaway car stuffing her face in fries, an expression of grand defiance that flips the bird to a world obsessed with our ticking biological clocks, skin texture, and functionality of wombs.
“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.”
We get you, Merricat. Intelligent women frighten people. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson creeps and sneaks up your shoulder blade like a menacing chill. Jackson’s slow-burn horror featuring the caverns of the female psyche is like a deep ocean hydrothermal vent bubbling away without being dramatic. Merricat’s distrust of their cousin thrives within observations of small-town machinations. I have reservations about Merricat’s characterization as a neurotic protagonist. Too often scorned and misunderstood women have been pathologized under the terminology of psychiatry. It sanitizes the inexplicable and systemic horrors gnawing like termites in our woodwork.
When I read Circe by Madeline Miller, I found similarities with a beloved movie. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) is a relief within torment painted across a black and white Iranian nightscape. The Girl, a vampire, breezing on a skateboard, is mistaken for a damsel in distress, the lone woman, the weakling, and yet, what truths lie behind her chador, her fangs, make for one of the most powerful representations in the vampire genre.
A daughter borne of Gods but shunned because of her powers (Zeus is a dick of the highest order), hones her witchcraft on an island, turns men into swine, and crosses paths with Odysseus. All of us know the story of Circe. It’s Miller’s best work. If you don’t come out of reading this book wanting to run wild in the woods, picking berries, and befriending lizards and frogs, I don’t know what to tell you. You end up walking alone at night whistling to the hooting owls feeling Circe’s spirit within you.
Nonfiction titles coming up in the second part of this series. Meanwhile, drop a line about your Medusa act if any and how it changed your life.
Ciao!
I have been thinking about rage a lot lately, mainly because I have been thinking about identity and rage seems to be intertwined with whatever it is that makes me...me. I've had a temper ever since I was a child and my parents never knew what to do with me. They're used to my outbursts and maybe this is why I cannot remember a defining Medusa act right now. I've often voiced my feelings and said what bothered me or criticized others and then stormed out of the room haha! But I've only recently realized that our anger reveals what we care about, so instead of suppressing it or making ourselves feel guilty for it, we should listen to it and hear what it has to teach us. I just wish we lived in a world where people understood that emotions are feedback we can use to find out what is missing, what is wrong, what is important to us.
Some emotions are nice and pleasant and some are like fires that can destroy everything around us - but it's a mistake to show the first and hide the second. It's like putting a patch on one of your eyes instead of using both and how foolish is that? And that's exactly what society tries to do. So we must fight against that. When rage shows up, don't send it away. Open the door, invited it, ask it to sit down for a cup of coffee and listen to all it has to say because it must be important.
I'm sick to my gut how female rage is villified. Like we're being hysterical (hysteron the root word is uterus) and without reason. Like we were suddenly possessed by a nonsensical ghost of a teenager throwing a tantrum than the observer actually caring for the truth. That "you", the man, the perpetrator, have riled me up so with your repeated transgressions. I think I've had it with stupid males who unabashedly assume a hierarchy based on what hangs between their legs. Level up, match my vibe, or GTFO.