Women's Anger
The feelings of powerlessness that a woman has in the face of the realities of the society and culture in which she finds herself have long found expression in western literature. As a number of modern feminist social critics have noticed, the culture is such that women have a strong stake in satisfying personal relationships, the stronger for the fact that their social and economic relationships are culturally defined, predetermined, circumscribed. "Obviously," comments Germaine Greer in this connection, "spurious altruism is not the monopoly of women, but as long as women need men to live by, and men may take wives or not, and live just the same, it will be more important in feminine motivation than it is in male" (Greer 159). The powerlessness women as a group may feel in a culture that denies them the same economic and social freedom that men as a group enjoy and prescribes that the limits of their emotional and psychological roles must, for an individual woman in crisis, inevitably lead to an overweening feeling of psychic if not physical peril. To respond to all or part of a culture this rigid is to challenge the limits, break the rules of the roles, and invite frustration. It follows that urgent anxiety and anger may arise. Life must be changed for the better, the woman must seize control over her own destiny at least, or she faces psychic if not physical death. Each in her way, for example, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina respond to and attempt to escape from a bleak domestic situation, only to be frustrated and isolated by social convention and economic realities. The choices they make in response to this may not always be rational, but they represent a reaction, of love, despair, or anger to what seems an irrevocable life situation.
So it is in Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl, where the frustration and anger of women characters who perceive the injustice and i...