Women's Anger in Literature Women's Anger

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 Karen

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irst identifies as Nancy, a sexual rival. It's perfectly true that white men's sexual liaisons with slave women are part of the slaveholding system, but Sapphira shows herself to be as jealous as the next master's wife of her prerogatives. In this regard, Stampp comments, "Southern white women apparently believed that they suffered most from the effects of miscegenation," and he cites the diary of a disaffected Virginia woman who considered that Southern women were surrounded by prostitutes. She "grieved for the 'white mothers and daughters of the South' who had 'seen their dearest affections trampled upontheir hopes of domestic happiness destroyed' by husbands, sons, and brothers who gratified their passions with female slaves" (Stampp 3567). Sapphira acts in the view that one man's meat is another woman's poison, and when her scheme against Nancy fails, her emotional distance from others increases, and she retreats into anger as a defense, never achieving the awareness of moral uncertainty. If Sapphira could examine her own attitudes, she might find herself less angry, less powerless. But this cannot occur to Sapphira, who also resents the fact that such an examination has occurred to Rachel. Meanwhile, she has been born into

Category: Literature - W