(Out) Raging Women: The Truth About Angry Beauty

Andrew M. Stauffer

Probably since Kate Millett published Sexual Politics in 1970, and certainly since 1979, when Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar placed the mad-woman in the attic at the center of debate, a powerful strand of contemporary feminism has embraced anger as its own. As Julia Lesage put it in 1988, "Anger is a cleansing force. It frees the woman from...despair and inaction; it makes her fearless and restores her self respect." Jane Marcus has said, "I have nurtured and protected my feminist anger like a cherished daughter," and poet Janice Mirikitani, in her collection, We the Dangerous (1995), echoes Marcus when she says that women must "birth [their] rage" from the "mute grave" of patriarchal history. Most recently, a 1995 collection of critical essays, Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women's Writing as Transgression, edited by Dierdre Lashgari, gathers a variety of voices holding that women's anger -- the emotion of rebellion and resistance - - has been repressed, stifled into silence, and threatened with extinction; and it is by giving voice to anger that women will begin to dismantle structures of oppression.

In fact, I think this exactly the case; women's anger has been repressed and silenced throughout history, with politically disabling consequences. But I want to suggest that men s response to women's anger is more complex than narratives of repression imply, and therefore that getting angry does not necessarily constitute an escape from, or a blow against, patriarchal power. Not surprisingly, this complexity centers around beauty; that is, beauty provides a way for men to encourage women's anger, rather than repress it, even while rendering it politically inert. My justification for exploring this as a literary phenomenon rests in the assumption that art shapes our ideas of the beautiful; and that we may have learned the fashion of eroticizing female anger from the poets. And perhaps I should note at the outset that my definition of beauty here owes more to Plato than to Kant, in that it rejects disinterested appreciation for an inextricable mingling of the beautiful and the erotic.

My remarks then are meant as a meditation -- by way of poetry -- on the familiar remark, "you're beautiful when you're angry." It s a phrase often used disingenuously, as mock or goad, as a way of ignoring and infantilizing female rage. I want to recognize, but bracket, that obviously manipulative strategy, and turn my attention to the more subtle cases wherein beauty and anger are actually equated in the male imagination. Such cases nicely illustrate the problem with aesthetic appreciation, which has always been that it explicitly denies the claims of the political and thereby installs a covert politics of its own. When a man reads the anger of a woman from an aesthetic vantage, he ignores her message for its medium: that is, her enraged body, which he calls beautiful. His strongly anti-verbal delight in her physical expressions of outrage filters the content from her voice, leaving only appassionato tones behind. The angry woman turns from political agent to eroticized spectacle by way of the male aesthetic imagination.

However, despite this silencing effect, the spectacle of female anger is no dumb-show for male observers, if literature is any guide. On the contrary, women's anger speaks volumes to the interpretive male, who reads her manifestations of rage as revealing signs of her sexual temperature, and insists that there is a truth about angry beauty. In its turn to the erotic, his response thus combines aesthetic and hermeneutic delight; he finds beauty and truth in the face of the outraged woman, whose curses turn to blessings in his ears.

Perhaps we can lay the blame at the feet of Propertius. After all, think about angry women in literature previous to him, and you summon a formidable, frightening company, one that includes figures of violently retributive excess such as Medea, Procne, and Dido. Propertius' poems about his mistress Cynthia, on the other hand, seem to have inaugurated a new approach to the enraged woman, one based in the relentless eroticization of anger. For example, in an intensely energetic lyric describing his quarrels with Cynthia, Propertius writes,

          For me, last night's fight by lamplight was delicious,
               As were all the curses coming from your raging mouth.
          In your furious rage, you scatter the furniture and
               Throw brimming cups at me with a violent hand.
          I dare you now: come, rip my hair out by the roots,
               Use your beautiful fingernails to gouge my face,
          Threaten that you will incinerate my eyeballs,
               And rip my clothes off, make me naked!
          You obviously are giving me signs that you're in heat;
               Women who lack real passion don't suffer so.

          The female who spits imprecations from a foaming mouth
               Prostrates herself at the feet of conquering Venus.
                                   . . .
          I am an unerring reader of every one of these anxieties,
               Having learned that they frequently signify true love.
                                   . . .
          I hate a peaceful slumber, never broken by sighs:
               I'd be a pale knight in thrall to an angry lady.
                                   (ll.1-28; my translation)

Instead, he praises her emotion here for two distinct reasons -- one aesthetic and one analytic, and both under the sign of eroticism. First, Propertius enjoys Cynthia's anger as a beautiful, erotic performance. Because the physical manifestations of rage -- flashing eyes, subvocal growls, reddened skin, convulsive movements -- can resemble those of sexual arousal, male poets frequently turn to women's anger as a metaphoric displacement of sexual desire. Here Propertius masochistically craves Cynthia's passionate physical interaction in any form she will grant it, effectively taming her ferocity by aestheticizing it. Second, Propertius transforms the anger of his mistress into a signifier, of which he will be the "unerring reader." Cynthia's outrage becomes a symptom indicating her "real passion" and "true love." For Propertius, the anger of women reveals them, working counter to the mystifications of female sexuality, which he sees as the source of women's power. Once anger takes hold, he believes, women "prostrate themselves before the feet of conquering Venus," having been made helpless to prevaricate because of that emotion's urgency. In this dangerous interpretive mood, Propertius hears words of sexual assent in Cynthia's language of resistance and abuse. A self-described "unerring reader" of her aroused body, he interprets the signs of her anger as signs of true love.

My loose rendering of Propertius' line 28, "I'd be a pale knight in thrall to an angry lady," is meant to signal the connection between Propertius' Cynthia and John Keats' merciless ladies, specifically in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Ode to Melancholy." Keats makes this connection by way of medieval romance and Renaissance courtly love lyrics, where pale knights read their mistress' wrath as easily as does Propertius. Although for these later poets women's anger indicates sexual coldness instead of heat, it retains an aesthetic flavor of its own. Further, its erotic legibility remains central. Take, for example, Thomas Campion's famous Petrarchan lyric:

          Sleepe, angry beauty, sleep, and feare not me,
          For who a sleeping lyon dares provoke?
          It shall suffice me here to sit and see
          Those lips shut up that never kindely spoke.
            What sight can more content to lover's minde
            Than beauty, seeming harmlesse, if not kinde?        (25.1-6)

Both Propertius and Campion display a great deal of anxiety over the veracity of their interpretations of female desire; and it is here that we can begin to see the importance of anger- as-beauty in the male imagination. For these poets, and for Keats as well, the connection between beauty and truth threatens to break down within the realm of the erotic. Through the eye of the desiring male, the sexualized female body, while beautiful, becomes a sign of mystification and deception, of that which prevents the reading of truth. Anger, on the other hand, promises legibility. In "La Belle Dame sans Merci," for example, Keats knight-at-arms incorrectly reads the lady's wild foot, sidelong leanings, and sweet moans (that is, the bodily signs of sexual arousal) as indications of love. Unlike Propertius, who reads Cynthia's signs of wrathful arousal with "unerring" accuracy (as indicative of "true love"), the knight-at-arms, who instead reads signs of sexual arousal, loses his ability to interpret; he admits that he "nothing else saw all day long." Confronted with a literal text, he falters: "And sure in language strange she said, 'I love thee true.'" Because the knight takes the signs of sexual arousal for truth, he mistakenly hears a confession of fidelity in the "language strange" of the merciless lady.

Similarly, in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats struggles to read the "leaf-fring'd" legend of the urn, asking "What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?/ What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?/...What wild ecstasy?" (8-10). These sexual figures, "for ever panting, and for ever young" in fact "tease us out of thought", providing for the urn's answer to the poet's many questions: "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'" In other words, the "warm...still to be enjoy'd" maidens on the Urn prevent the poet from understanding the depicted legends as such. Confronted with these aroused bodies, he can only read them generally as reflexive signifiers of beauty and truth. The Urn remains "silent" throughout Keats' poem, except when it offers a claim to its own veracity, as a thing of beauty. But as "La Belle Dame sans Merci" demonstrates, the truthfulness of sexualized representations is neither all the knight knows, nor all he needs to know.

Therefore, because he associates female sexuality with mystification but still desires to respond to the beauty of an impassioned body, Keats turns from aroused women to angry ones. Like Propertius, he does so in the confidence of anger's revelatory nature. Keats' recommendation to the melancholic male aesthete is well known:

          And if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
          Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
          And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
                         3.
          She dwells with Beauty -- Beauty that must die     (18-21)

We see that the poetic figuration of female anger as a kind of beautiful arousal serves a plainly political end, symbolized by Keats' recommendation to "Emprison" the hands of angry mistresses, let them rave, and feed upon their eyes. Such a posture effaces the claims of anger on its object, just as Propertius' diagnostic approach to Cynthia's violent wrath eliminates its urgent demand for penitence. The Keatsian mistress is beautiful when she's angry, and thus the causes and purposes of her anger, obscured by aesthetic sensitivity, must fade in importance. Keats can then turn to her "peer-less eyes", just as Propertius does when he tells Cynthia, "none possess your beauty...you should be proud of it" (ll.35-36). These poets thereby redirect the potentially explosive aggression of their mistresses from male targets to female ones, by implicitly urging the substitution of competition among their own peer group for violence toward men. Rather than breaking the charmed circle of oppression that enrages them, women's anger becomes one more "Fair attitude" adopted to please men, one more category in which their beauty will be judged and compared.

In these examples from Propertius and Keats, the male speaker reads the enraged body of his mistress as a transparent text, assuring himself that anger is that state of passionate arousal which cannot be counterfeited. Put another way, the poetic presentation of a woman roused to passionate anger works as a symbolic fantasy, prompted by male anxieties over the unreadability of the female body. Male poets, following Propertius, imagine anger as (a way to) truth; and, according to Keats' Grecian formula, truth equals beauty. Thus, in the male imagination, the rupture opened between these two terms by the beautiful falsehoods of female sexuality (as in "La Belle Dame sans Merci") is healed by means of anger. Like Propertius, Keats imagines an eroticized female anger as a synthesis of the aesthetic and the analytic, a reintegration of beauty and truth. The angrily-aroused female body becomes a signifier of erotic passion -- eloquent, truthful, and without content -- telling the male poet exactly what he wants to hear.

Significantly, Propertius and Keats present the anger not just of women, but of mistresses; that is, they code their female characters as creatures of sexual appetite, and female anger as fundamentally related to the frustration of desire. In fact, both use a term for their female lovers that captures the easy oscillation between power and powerlessness in eroticized relationships: Propertius word for Cynthia is domina, meaning -- like Keats term, mistress -- either director or servant, depending on the contextual spin. Yet when the domina or mistress does find herself holding the whip (so to speak), her power remains salient only inside the bounds of the erotic. Within such an imaginative structure, women s anger always emerges from frustrated desire and jealousy; it's violence serves as an index of sexual passion. Congreve's famous dictum, from The Mourning Bride, has lodged this equation in our consciousness: "Heav'n hath no rage like love to hatred turn'd/ Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd" (3.1.457- 8); and it was precisely this ideology that Mary Wollstonecraft was attacking in the Vindication when she said of Rousseau, "I war only with the sensibility that led him to degrade woman by making her the slave of love" (200).

One more example: Byron explores these connections among women's anger, sexual appetite, aesthetics, and power, in his portrayal of Gulbeyaz, the Turkish Sultana, in Canto 5 of Don Juan. He presents the anger of a woman scorned, and like Propertius and Keats, he judges her aesthetically as the center of a silent tableau of rage. Furthermore, in Byron's poem, as in Propertius', the playful tone of the narrator arises from his focus on sexual appetite, undercutting the seriousness of the woman's outrage. In Canto 5, the proud and powerful Gulbeyaz literally throws herself at Juan, only to be rebuffed; he "coldly" informs her that he will not "Serve a Sultana's sensual phantasy" (126.8). Byron lingers delightedly at this moment, allowing for Gulbeyaz' slow burning accumulation of rage, and assuring us, his readers, "You can't suppose Gulbeyaz' angry brow" (131.8). He elaborates:

          134
          If I said fire flashed from Gulbeyaz' eyes,
           'Twere nothing, for her eyes flashed always fire;
          Or said her cheeks assumed the deepest dyes,
           I should but bring disgrace upon the dyer,
          So supernatural was her passion's rise,
           For ne'er till now she knew a checked desire.
          Even ye who know what a checked woman is
           (Enough, God knows!) would much fall short of this.

          135
          Her rage was but a minute's, and 'twas well --
           A moment's more had slain her; but the while
          It lasted 'twas like a short glimpse of hell.
           Nought's more sublime than energetic bile,
          Though horrible to see, yet grand to tell,
           Like ocean warring 'gainst a rocky isle;
          And the deep passions flashing through her form
           Made her a beautiful embodied storm.

In presenting this anger caused by "checked desire," Byron fixes upon its physical manifestations, appreciating the visible "passions flashing through [Gulbeyaz'] form." An accomplished salesman of fantasy, Byron takes pains to assert the "supernatural" and "sublime" character of the sultana's anger, stating that his attempts to verbalize this passion, and our own to imagine it, must "fall short." Yet Gulbeyaz achieves only a mock-sublime because Byron presents the whole episode from an amused, knowing, and erotically-charged perspective, never allowing Gulbeyaz to verbalize her emotion. Of her wrath, he writes, "A storm it raged, and like the storm it passed,/ Passed without words; in fact she could not speak" (137.1-2). Beginning with the power of an "ocean warring 'gainst a rocky isle," Gulbeyaz' violent rage becomes "a beautiful embodied storm." The containment of that natural-supernatural storm within a beautiful body marks the falling-off point of the sultana's anger, and soon "her thirst of blood was quenched in tears" (136.8).

Despite the royal imprimatur of her outrage, and like the wordlessly angry mistresses of Keats, Campion, and Propertius, Gulbeyaz remains silent and contained in the aesthetic imagination of her male creator. Her anger is similarly contained within her body, which thus becomes the object of the male desire for (erotic) beauty and truth. Women who speak their anger -- whose rage overspills the bounds of their bodies and enters the realm of discourse -- typically receive a less appreciative response from men, as witnessed by the recurring figures of the shrew, the scold, and the hysteric, as well as the category of the shrill. When Tereus ripped out Philomela's tongue, he was testifying to his fear of the outraged woman who speaks words of anger in the service of ugly truths, rather than beautiful ones. I will suggest in closing that it might be here, within the realm of rhetoric, that we may look for aesthetic categories that will not depoliticize this most political of emotions. Anger encourages transgressions of all sorts; and the crossing of boundaries has been an aesthetic trope, from Longinus' treatise on the sublime written in the 1st Century A.D. to our current concept of the postmodern, both of which find their center in theories of language. We may in fact discover that the worded voice of women's anger has, as a function of its unsettling and transgressive powers, a complex aesthetic appeal that involves its kinship with revelation.