Rage: Blog #1

The Woman in the Green Babushka 

One blustery day some years back I was walking along Great Charles Street in Dublin heading for the North Circular Road when not too far ahead of me a mild-looking woman in a green babushka got blown off her feet while trying to enter a small grocery store. The wind caught the door just as she opened it and the force of it flying open yanked her off balance before she could even think to let go of it, so she went down hard. I and a few other passers-by rushed over to her. As I approached, though, the look on her face gave me a bit of a shock—the fury, the murderous cast about the mouth and the flanges of her nose, the eyes fixed, it seemed, steadily and exclusively on me. It was almost as if she knew me and, more importantly, knew what I had done, an impression that was especially unsettling in that, the day up to that point having been relatively uneventful, I was unaware of having done anything.

I’ve since realized that the way she was looking at me was exactly the way Sister Patrick Bernadette, my fourth grade teacher, would eye me when she’d caught me picking my nose or something during the Lord’s Prayer. Sister Patrick was a puncher and she especially liked to beat up little boys. She wasn’t too nice to the more “slatternly” girls in the class either, especially the “chatterboxes” as she called them, but to the boys she showed no mercy. It was as if boys had cloven feet and little knobs on their heads waiting to realize into horns. She had a mission, it seemed, which was to purge all the boyness out of us, to render us into proper images of, say, the child Jesus preaching demurely among the Sadducees or pharisees or whatever they were. Even when she was nice to you—like when she would finally let you go to the bathroom after she’d made you wait ten minutes hoping you’d wet yourself so she could slap you around for it—it was in a bullying way. If she praised you—for getting a hundred percent on a math test, say—even then you’d flinch.

Anyway, I realized almost immediately that the look on the babushka’d woman’s face was almost certainly due to the fact that she’d hurt her back in the fall. It had nothing to do with me or, for that matter, Sister Patrick Bernadette. The others and I helped her up and saw her into the store, satisfied with her embarrassed but appreciative assurances that she was okay and, having relieved her of our attentions, re-entered our personal vectors down or across or back up the street.

For quite a while afterwards, however, I couldn’t forget that look, how it had flashed at me out of the eyes of such an altogether mild-seeming woman. I began wondering what the overall quality of her life might be and how much energy during a given day she expended in the suppression of some unhappiness or other, what sort of toll it took on her limbic system to have to manage so much unhappiness, so much rage, when it was so near the surface. These were outlandishly extrapolative thoughts indicative of little more than a bent on my part for facile psychologizing even when surrounded by the wonders of Dublin town. I’d already ascertained, as it were, that the look she’d flashed me had after all entirely to do with her traumatized lower lumbar region and nothing whatsoever with me. Nor for that matter with anything I’d reconstructed in my mind pertaining to her psychological life. Be that as may be, what my mind did with that woman’s life before I realized how absurd I was being led me during the rest of my stay in Ireland to think from time to time, and rather studiously if I do say so myself, about the thematics of female rage in the works of three of my favorite novelists, all of whom I happened to be re-reading at the time, and all of whom happened to be women, English women, not Irish.

Nor nuns neither, although my thoughts in this area were related to other thoughts I have had down through the years about the good women to whose wisdom our childhood development was entrusted for six hours a day during the autumn, winter and spring months of each year for eight long years. Specifically, I’d done plenty of psychologizing with regard to Sister Patrick Bernadette and her need to deconstruct the egos of her little male charges. I had come long since to the conclusion that she had grown up in a big family with a lot of brothers who tormented her until she learned to fight back. That once she’d learned the survival value of certain pugilistic skills vis-à-vis the male gender she’d never looked back, having as it were enough rage against testosterone to last her a lifetime. Of course there might have been a roughneck father, too, with his own way of dealing with the disappointment of having a daughter in the house to feed. Neglect, disdain, verbal humiliation, the occasional shove or nocturnal encroachment on the bedstead, any of these could have added more lava to the volcano. What must it have been like for her, I’d often wondered, when as a black-habited young woman she’d suddenly found herself at the front of a classroom of girls, yes, but, more potently, of defenseless little boys, little brother and father avatars whom she could treat however she liked by way of taking vengeance on her past?

Such elaborate conjectural flights on my part are probably readily reducible to some species or other of passive aggression, which can become a bit Borgesian, a labyrinth of surmising upon whose walls are projected images of truths instead of the truths themselves, which are at the center. The positive obverse of this dilemma is that it conditions one to love literature, novels and plays, and also poetry with its tendency to rely on metaphor by way of getting at the ineffable. There can be an indirectness about literature that derives from its fictive nature. It claims to be both a kind of lie and a kind of truth. One doesn’t always immediately see through the fictional presentation, but when one eventually does it opens up into truths that are not just inherent in the story itself but universal. That may be why instead of immediately recognizing Sister Patrick Bernadette’s rage in the woman’s face I saw it first as the woman’s particular rage (not as her pain), then as Sister Patrick’s, then as the generalized rage of women under the conditions of patriarchy as addressed, of course, by these three intrepid and brilliant novelists I was re-reading at the time.

As for one of these novelists, I was interested particularly—I suppose since I was a tourist there—in the conceptual role Ireland seemed to play for her with regard to the management of rage. I’m referring, of course, to Charlotte Brontë and her wonderful bildungsroman Jane Eyre. Ireland comes up in the book only by way of a minor detail, which nevertheless does substantial work to posit it—Ireland, that is—as a foil for the disciplined English mind. It is probably not unfair to venture that, for English readers, especially back in the day, the less intellectual attention paid in a work of literature to the notion of Ireland the better, particularly if one were concerned to maintain a sense of propriety and, especially, equanimity. Jane Austen’s references to it—she was another novelist I was thinking about—tend to focus on Irish music and the beauty of the landscape, while Virginia Woolf—the third under my microscope—once or twice shows interest in Ireland from a political point of view, but not often.

Brontë treats of Ireland from a psychological vantage point as a repository of sorts for those unruly forces in the human soul that, if not kept isolated from the mainland, so to speak, threaten to break down the pales and forts of reason. Unruliness breeds, if only in one’s thoughts, unruliness, and the intellect requires rules in order to arrive at proper conclusions. Ireland for the English was a kind of stand-in for the notion of unruliness as well as for its concomitant characterological sickness, undifferentiating rage. Probably all occupiers of other lands are disposed—more or less happily—to see the occupied in this light, and in the case of the British not only Ireland but even more exotic-seeming possessions like the West Indies lent themselves in this way and against their will to the role. One might say—especially if given, like me, to psychologizing—that England as an occupier needed the occupied entities to be this way, needed to export to them as it were its own less seemly passions, thereby justifying at least to itself its rule over them as an extension of its virtuous control over itself.

None of these writers, by the way, show any particular sensitivity to Ireland, nor to the West Indies, nor are they apt to see these regions and their peoples as unjustly coopted to play their roles as unwilling cauldrons for the newts’ eyes and frogs’ toes of English rage. They were, however, acutely aware of all the ways in which on the home front the asymmetrical power distribution between genders results in the same sort of psychological division of labor. Domestic asymmetry, that is, mirrors the global kind. Or, perhaps, vice versa. On the one hand there is the reason and the will of the domestic occupiers—the men—and, on the other, the rage and impertinence of the occupied—the women.

Brontë for her part seems at least provisionally aware of a possible link between global occupation and the sometimes more subtle kind that takes place at home. The heroine of Jane Eyre, for instance, is at one point in the book faced with the daunting prospect of spending the rest of her life on the Emerald Isle. At the same time, her doppelganger, the psychologically disintegrated Bertha Mason, is from the West Indies, which the logic of the book suggests is exactly from where a disintegrated character like her should be, especially if swarthily complected and mannish. It would be assigning Brontë too much credit, perhaps, to suggest she questioned the stereotypes underlying these plot elements, but it would not be too much to suspect that subconsciously she was at least aware of them as stereotypes. The novel is not about colonialist prejudices; it is, though, in large part about the oppressive conditions under which women must live and function in a patriarchal world, almost all of which conditions require the enforcement of certain underpinning stereotypes that are corollary to and therefore mirror the delusions of colonialism concerning the colonized. It is not, I’d suggest, too much of a leap to assume that Brontë intuited this connection, although her critical faculty is focused on domestic injustices, her perception of which is explicit.

Woolf, in fact, thinks Brontë too aware of injustice and too possessed by her resentment of it to hold together a satisfying and balanced work of art. This leads Woolf in A Room of One’s Own to adjudge Austen the superior artist, untroubled, it would seem, by Austen’s own tendency in Pride and Prejudice to distribute rage asymmetrically among her female characters. Woolf’s awareness of gender asymmetries leads her to reason that both Brontë and Austen are hampered in the full expression of their genius by the material limitations placed on them by patriarchy—limitations that are, however, also clearly metaphorical, standing in for the psychological oppression inherent in male expectations. In any case, in all three works and as the focus of all three women’s artistic enterprises, rage, especially because justified, is a force that threatens at every thematic point of entry to blow open doors of a creative project perhaps too suddenly and violently, toppling the writer, as it were, whether or not she sports a babushka. The theme at issue here is not just rage but more generally the pain and suffering attendant upon its suppression, so frequently mistaken by those who don’t want to look directly at it for its less human-seeming behavioral expressions, such as madness, animality, arsonism. For a novelist, especially a male novelist but often a female one too, rage is a more comfortable manifestation of the female condition because rage, after all, can be censured. The suffering and pain behind that rage need not be addressed.