Burn It Down

by Lily Fyfe

  I kept returning to the early novels of Jean Rhys, whose wounded heroines flopped around dingy rented rooms in various European capitals, seeking solace from their heartbreak, staining cheap comforters with their wine. Sasha, the heroine of Good Morning, Midnight—the most famous of these early picaresques of pain—resolves to drink herself to death and manages, mainly, to cry her way across Paris. She cries at cafés, at bars, in her lousy hotel room. She cries at work. She cries in a fitting room. She cries on the street. She cries near the Seine. The closing scene of the novel is a scene of terrifying passivity: she lets a wraithlike man into her bed because she can’t summon the energy to stop him, as if she has finally lost touch with her willpower entirely. In life, Rhys was infamous for her sadness, what one friend called “her gramophone-needle-stuck-in-a-groove thing of going over and over miseries of one sort and another.” Even her biographer called her one of the greatest self-pity artists in the history of English fiction.

  It took me years to understand how deeply I had misunderstood these women. I’d missed the rage that fueled Plath’s poetry like a ferocious gasoline, lifting her speakers (sometimes literally) into flight: “Now she is flying / More terrible than she ever was, red / Scar in the sky, red comet / Over the engine that killed her—the mausoleum, the wax house.” The speaker becomes a scar—this irrefutable evidence of her own pain—but this scar, in turn, becomes a comet: terrible and determined, soaring triumphant over the instruments of her own supposed destruction. I’d always been preoccupied with the pained disintegration of Plath’s speakers, but once I started looking, I saw the comet trails of their angry resurrections everywhere, delivering their unapologetic fantasies of retribution: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”

  I’d loved Rhys for nearly a decade before I read her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, a reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre whose whole plot leads inexorably toward an act of destructive anger: the mad first wife of Mr. Rochester burns down the English country manor where she has been imprisoned in the attic for years. In this late masterpiece, the heroines of Rhys’s early novels—heartbroken, drunk, caught in complicated choreographies of passivity—are replaced by an angry woman with a torch, ready to use the master’s tools to destroy his house.

  It wasn’t that these authors were writing exclusively about female anger rather than female sorrow; their writing holds both states of feeling. Wide Sargasso Sea excavates the deep veins of sadness running beneath an otherwise opaque act of angry destruction, and Plath’s poems are invested in articulating the complicated affective braids of bitterness, irony, anger, pride, and sorrow that others often misread as monolithic sadness. “They explain people like that by saying that their minds are in watertight compartments, but it never seemed so to me,” Rhys herself once wrote. “It’s all washing about, like the bilge in the hold of a ship.”

  It has always been easier to shunt female sadness and female anger into the “watertight compartments” of opposing archetypes rather than acknowledge the ways they run together in the cargo hold of every female psyche. Near the end of the biopic I, Tonya, Tonya Harding’s character explains: “America, they want someone to love, but they want someone to hate.” The timing of the film’s release, in late 2017, seemed cosmically apt. It resurrected a definitional prototype of female anger—at least for many women like me, who came of age during the 1990s—at the precise moment that so many women were starting to get publicly, explicitly, unapologetically angry.

  Harding was an object of fascination not just because of the soap opera she dangled before the public gaze—supposedly conspiring with her ex-husband and an associate to plan an attack on her rival figure skater Nancy Kerrigan—but also because she and Kerrigan provided a yin and yang of primal female archetypes. As a vision of anger—uncouth and unrestrained, the woman everyone loved to hate, exploding at the judges when they didn’t give her the scores she felt she deserved—Harding was the perfect foil for the elegant suffering of Kerrigan, sobbing in her lacy white leotard. Together they were a duo impossible to turn away from: the sad girl and the mad girl. Wounded and wicked. Their binary segregated one vision of femininity we adored (rule-abiding, delicate, hurting) from another we despised (trashy, whiny, angry). Harding was strong; she was poor; she was pissed off; and eventually, in the narrative embraced by the public, she turned those feelings into violence. But I, Tonya illuminates what so little press coverage at the time paid attention to: the perfect storm of violence that produced Harding’s anger in the first place—her mother’s abuse and her husband’s. Which is to say: no woman’s anger is an island.

  When the Harding and Kerrigan controversy swept the media, I was ten years old. Their story was imprinted onto me as a series of reductive but indelible brushstrokes: one woman shouting at the media, another woman weeping just beyond the ice rink. But after watching I, Tonya and realizing how much these two women had existed to me as ideas, rather than as women, I did what any reasonable person would do: I Googled “Tonya and Nancy” obsessively. I Googled: “Did Tonya ever apologize to Nancy?” I Googled: “Tonya Harding boxing career?” and discovered that it effectively began with her 2002 “Celebrity Boxing” match against Paula Jones—two women paid to perform the absurd caricatures of vengeful femininity the public had projected onto them, the woman who cried harassment versus the woman who bashed kneecaps.

  In the documentaries I watched, I found Harding difficult to like. She comes off as a self-deluded liar with a robust victim complex, focused on her own misfortune to the exclusion of anyone else’s. But what does the fact that I found Harding “difficult to like” say about the kind of women I’m comfortable liking? Did I want the plotline to be that the woman who has survived her own hard life—abusive mother, abusive husband, enduring poverty—also emerges with a “likable” personality: a plucky spirit, a determined work ethic, and a graceful, self-effacing relationship to her own suffering?

  The vision of Harding in I, Tonya is something close to the opposite of self-effacing. The film even includes a fantastical reenactment of the crime, which became popularly known as the “whack heard round the world,” in which Harding stands over Kerrigan’s cowering body, baton raised high above her head, striking her bloody knee until Harding turns back toward the camera—her face defiant and splattered with Kerrigan’s blood. Even though the attack was actually carried out by a hired hit man, this imagined scene distills the version of the story that America became obsessed with, in which one woman’s anger leaves another woman traumatized.

  But America’s obsession with these two women wasn’t that simple. Another story rose up in opposition. In this shadow story, Harding wasn’t a monster but a victim, an underdog unfairly vilified, and Kerrigan was a crybaby who made too much of her pain. In a 2014 Deadspin essay, “Confessions of a Tonya Harding Apologist,” Lucy Madison wrote: “She represented the fulfillment of an adolescent revenge fantasy—my adolescent revenge fantasy, the one where the girl who doesn’t quite fit in manages to soar over everyone’s bullshit without giving up a fraction of her prerogative—and I could not have loved her more.” When Kerrigan crouched sobbing on the floor near the training rink, right after the attack (Newsweek described it as “the sound of one dream breaking”), she famously cried out: “Why? Why? Why?” But when Newsweek ran the story on its cover, it printed the quote as: “Why Me?” The single added word turned her shock into keening self-pity.

  These two seemingly contradictory versions of Harding and Kerrigan—raging bitch and innocent victim, or bad-girl hero and whiny crybaby—offered the same cutout dolls dressed in different costumes. The entitled weeper was the unacceptable version of a stoic victim; the scrappy underdog was the acceptable version of a raging bitch. At first glance, they seemed like opposite stories, betraying our conflicted collective relationship to female anger—that it’s either heroic or uncontrollably destructive—and our love-hate relationship with victimhood itself: we love a victim to hurt for bu
t grow irritated by one who hurts too much. Both stories, however, insisted upon the same segregation: A woman couldn’t hurt and be hurt at once. She could be either angry or sad. It was easier to outsource those emotions to the bodies of separate women than it was to acknowledge that they reside together in the body of every woman.

  Ten years ago in Nicaragua, a man punched me in the face on a dark street. As I sat on a curb afterward—covered in my own blood, holding a cold bottle of beer against my broken nose—a cop asked me for a physical description of the man who had just mugged me. Maybe twenty minutes later, a police vehicle pulled up: a pickup truck outfitted with a barred cage in the back. There was a man in the cage.

  “Is this him?” the cop asked. I shook my head, horrified, acutely aware of my own power—realizing, in that moment, that simply saying I was hurt could take away a stranger’s liberty. I was a white woman, a foreigner volunteering at a local school, and I felt ashamed of my own familiar silhouette: a vulnerable white woman crying danger at anonymous men lurking in the shadows. I felt scared and embarrassed to be scared. I felt embarrassed that everyone was making such a fuss. One thing I did not feel was anger.

  That night, my sense of guilt—my shame at being someone deemed worthy of protection, and at the ways that protection might endanger others—effectively blocked my awareness of my own anger. It was as if my privilege outweighed my vulnerability, and that meant I wasn’t entitled to any anger at all. But if I struggled to feel entitled to anger that night in Nicaragua, I have since come to realize that the real entitlement has never been anger; it has always been its absence. The aversion to anger I had understood in terms of temperament or intention was, in all honesty, also a luxury. When the Black feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde described her anger as a lifelong response to systemic racism, she insisted upon it as a product of the larger social landscape rather than private emotional ecology: “I have lived with that anger, on that anger, beneath that anger, on top of that anger… for most of my life.”

  After the Uma Thurman clip went viral, the Trinidadian journalist Stacy-Marie Ishmael tweeted: “*interesting* which kinds of women are praised for public anger. I’ve spent my whole career reassuring people this is just my face.” Michelle Obama was dogged by the label of “angry Black woman” for the duration of her husband’s time in office. Scientific research has suggested that the experience of racism leads African Americans to suffer from higher blood pressure than white Americans and has hypothesized that this disparity arises from the fact that they accordingly experience more anger and are simultaneously expected to suppress it. During the 2018 US Open final, the tennis superstar Serena Williams was chided and fined for expressions of anger that wouldn’t necessarily get other players in trouble (she called the umpire a “thief”); but as law professor Trina Jones put it, responding to the incident: “Black women are not supposed to push back and when they do, they’re deemed to be domineering. Aggressive. Threatening.” For Williams, this is part of a larger pattern: in 2009, Williams was fined over $80,000 for an angry outburst against a lineswoman; and in 2011, Gretchen Carlson, a Fox anchor at the time, called another one of Williams’s angry outbursts a symbol of “what’s wrong with our society today.” Carlson, of course, has since come to embody a certain brand of female empowerment: one of the leading voices accusing the late Fox News chairman Roger Ailes of sexual harassment, she recently published a book called Be Fierce: Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back. But the portrait on its cover—of a fair-skinned, blond-haired woman smiling slightly in a dark turtleneck—reminds us that fierceness has always been more palatable from some women than from others.

  What good is anger, anyway? The philosopher Martha Nussbaum invokes Aristotle’s definition of anger as “a response to a significant damage” that “contains within itself a hope for payback” to argue that anger is not only “a stupid way to run one’s life” but also a corrosive public force, predicated on the false belief that payback can redress the wrongdoing that inspired it. She points out that women have often embraced the right to their own anger as a “vindication of equality,” part of a larger project of empowerment, but that its promise as a barometer of equality shouldn’t obscure our vision of its dangers. In this current moment of ascendant female anger, are we taking too much for granted about its value? What if we could make space for both anger and a reckoning with its price?

  In her seminal 1981 essay, “The Uses of Anger,” Audre Lorde weighs the value of anger differently than Nussbaum: not in terms of retribution, but in terms of connection and survival. It’s not just a by-product of systemic evils, she argues, but a catalyst for useful discomfort and clearer dialogue. “I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger,” she writes, “and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.” Anger isn’t just a blaze burning structures to the ground; it also casts a glow, generates heat, and brings bodies into communion. “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions,” Lorde writes, “which brought that anger into being.”

  Confronting my own aversion to anger asked me to shift from seeing it simply as an emotion to be felt, and toward understanding it as a tool to be used: part of a well-stocked arsenal. When I walked in the Women’s March in Washington—one body among thousands—the act of marching didn’t just mean claiming the right to a voice; it meant publicly declaring my resolve to use it. I’ve come to think of anger in similar terms: not as a claiming of victimhood but as an owning of accountability. As I write this essay eight months pregnant, I don’t hope that my daughter never gets angry. I hope that she lives in a world that can recognize the ways anger and sadness live together, and the ways rage and responsibility, so often seen as natural enemies, can live together as well.

  “Once upon a time / I had enough anger in me to crack crystal,” the poet Kiki Petrosino writes in her 2011 poem “At the Teahouse.” “I boiled up from bed / in my enormous nightdress, with my lungs full of burning / chrysanthemums.” This is a vision of anger as fuel and fire, as a powerful inoculation against passivity, as strange but holy milk suckled from the wolf. This anger is more like an itch than a wound. It demands that something happen. It’s my own rage at that faculty meeting, when the voices of students who had become statistics at our fingertips were asked to hush up, to step back into their tidy columns. This anger isn’t about deserving. It’s about necessity: what needs to boil us out of bed and billow our dresses, what needs to burn in our voices, glowing and fearsome, fully aware of its own heat.

  This essay was originally published by the New York Times Magazine as “I Used to Insist I Didn’t Get Angry. Not Anymore.”

  The One Emotion Black Women Are Free to Explore

  MONET PATRICE THOMAS

  In Western culture, anger is red. To see red is to be extremely angry. But red is also associated with passion and love. A woman puts on red lipstick before a first date. A child draws a red heart on a white piece of paper and gives it to his mother. Red is allowed its range. First-day period blood. Arizona sunset. The proverbial red flag. And anger, too, is allowed its degrees. But I’ve learned this is not so for Black women. There are no allowances for our emotions. An angry Black woman, no matter the reason, is thought to have an attitude, which is a subcategory of a sub-emotion, a pale orange. This paints us as intractable, unpleasant to be around, and therefore easier to dismiss.

  When Black American sons get the talk, the one their parents can only hope will save their lives from state-sanctioned murder by police or any other level of violence or debasement, it is because a Black man’s righteous anger is the color of his potential death. Black daughters are taught something, too: that because we are Black and female in America we must be punished. For Black women and girls, our anger doesn’t make us dangerous; no, it colors us another way.

  I was one of those tall, gangly girls in fifth grade. Corey, who struck me in the nose with her coa
t sleeve as we stood in the courtyard waiting for the bell to ring, was one of the shortest. My gut reaction was to respond in kind and so I did, swinging one arm out to hit Corey with a lackluster swipe across her face. We were both wearing those puffy jackets of the late nineties and suddenly we were both windmilling our arms and a ring of students had formed around us. When I came back to myself, I was sitting in the detention room. My only injury was a throbbing nose where the first blow had landed. Across the room, Corey looked equally unharmed, and bored. I, on the other hand, was fascinated. I had never been in this room before. This was where exasperated teachers sent very bad students.

  My mother, called from work, arrived quickly. As a much smaller child, I’d noticed the way her tone would change when she was in public, the mask she wore. She navigated the outside world with the false pretense of a pleasantly blank expression, but that was not who she was when we were alone, where I knew her as a sharply astute woman who saw through most bullshit. That day when she came to my school was the first time I heard her raise her voice outside of our home. “Suspended?!” she yelled, and I felt alarmed. She explained to me that the school’s administrators wanted me to apologize to Corey for starting the fight or I would be suspended for the rest of the day. But I didn’t understand. I had not started the fight, hadn’t really known I was fighting until it was over. Why should I apologize for what I hadn’t done?

  My mother tried to explain to the administrators that I had never been in this kind of trouble before, that I was a good student. But they were adamant that letting me go would be sending the wrong message; the underlying reason was that Black students were seen as more violent. My mother’s back straightened. I was suspended and we left for the day. My mother did not make me apologize for something I hadn’t done. And even though I’d made her leave work for the day and had been suspended, she took me to IHOP.