Rage: Blog #4

The Dynamics of Rage

To fully appreciate Austen and Brontë, whose explorations of the female condition are necessarily predicated upon their awareness of repression and role-playing, one has to be a bit of a psychologist regarding family dynamics, especially as regards the management of rage. This management almost always requires that families structure their compulsory relationships according to an emotional division of labor. Somebody has all the triumphs, say, somebody feels all the guilt, somebody does all the condemning, somebody does all the protesting—those kinds of things. Everybody gets assigned a role, and they play out their roles without thinking why. Of course, the parents are usually the ones who assign the roles. They’re like the producer and the director.  

A novel, I’d venture, is a little like a family in this regard. The author and the narrator— who is a projection of the author—are like the parents. The characters are like the children. The author has an agenda to play out in the text and, through the careful offices of the narrator, arranges and structures the action, deploys her characters about her fictional world, and, by virtue of her management of imagery, syntax, diction, and of course dialogue and event, ultimately disposes her readers towards her children according to the author’s own disposition towards them, conscious or otherwise.  

If this sort of thing is at all at work in Pride and Prejudice, it’s likely to be found in the language—the narrator’s predications while relating dialogue and behavior. Specifically, the more admirable and winning a female character is meant to be, the less prominent a role rage can play in her behavior and her thoughts. If the author’s unconscious agenda, however, includes any measure of need regarding the expression of rage, she is likely to assign it to certain female characters whom she can then dismiss as petty and coarse. That way, not only does it not pollute her heroine(s), but it can’t be traced to said author, either, since she all but luxuriates in disapproving of it, and them. Not unlike the well-timed chucklings of a doppelganger, though, this dynamic can mar the artistry of the work, specifically by distorting the unlucky bearers of the author’s rage, who must necessarily suffer in the area of dimensionality, becoming too easily dispensed with as mere puppets in a kind of Punch and Judy show.

A look at the exact language Austen uses to characterize Mrs. Bennet and her truculent younger daughters yields hints as to the existence of this very problem in Pride and Prejudice, suggesting that Austen was not immune to such lapses in “artistic integrity” as Woolf notes with regard to Brontë. Because Lizzy and Jane are not allowed to evidence the distortions of rage the other women in the family are reciprocally overburdened with it, and the narrator necessarily can express or imply no sympathy for their unhappiness.

Thus, Mrs. Bennet, one reads, is “a woman of mean understanding . . . and uncertain temper.” She is forever “discontented” and almost always speaks “resentfully.” Even when she feels some trivial joy, it takes the form of a “tumult.” More often, though, she speaks of those whose privilege oppresses her with “much bitterness of spirit” along with “shocking rudeness.” Here she expresses herself with “more perseverance than politeness” and there with unwitting “impertinence.” “Rude” and “riddled with resentment,” Mrs. Bennet rains “sour looks” on all, accompanied by “ill-natured remarks” that are quite “enough to drive happiness away.” Mother Bennett bears a mother-lode of bitterness and despair, and who is there to sympathize with her in her “most pitiable state”? Who can help her carry up the Calvary hill of her tragic life her “agony of ill-humour,” her “jealous abhorrence,” her “grievances,” her “tears and lamentations of regret” accented with “invectives” against the cruelty of her impending disenfranchisement at the hands of a patriarchal world—a world that, of course, and not unlike her engendering narrator, has no interest in, or sympathy for, her “complaints of her own sufferings and ill-usage”?

No one can rage around the clock, of course, so—one reads with some relief—from time to time Mrs. Bennet has a few calm moments, but even these lulls get referred to by her disapproving narrator-parent as states of “querulous serenity,” whatever that may be. Or she exclaims with joy concerning some perceived restoration of justice, only to have her narrator refer with distaste to the “violence of [her] transports.” There’s no one, really, to help her bear the dudgeon throughout her weary days. The narrator looks upon her as one might upon a roach in one’s parfait. Her bandy-spirited husband seems to view her along with his entire domestic world as from a distance. The two elder sisters, as we have noted, have eschewed the indignity of rage, have purged themselves of it and sent it down the line to their less cultivated sisters—and they, the sisters, are the ones cast to help their mother bear the load.

Thus we read about Lydia’s “untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless” behavior, her “demanding” encroachments on civility, her “quite wild” desires from which she is obliged to “leave off in a violent hurry.” From her there is ever the “sudden attack” and the “always unguarded and often uncivil, boisterously exclaimed” challenge or umbrageous remark, which is always “impertinent.” In a moment of superficial triumph she “[flies] about the house in restless ecstasy . . . laughing and talking with more violence than ever.” In another such moment she yawps on in “clamorous happiness.” Her emulous sister Kitty, for her part, says things “fretfully” and is often said to have “repined” in a “peevish” cast of voice. Or “she did weep from vexation and envy.” While in the end Kitty turns out to be “not of so ungovernable a temper as Lydia,” and under her elder sisters’ influence grows “less irritable, less ignorant, and less insipid,” still, she’s raised her share of hell. Finally, Mary, having spent the entirety of her young years in voluntary and mean-spirited self-confinement, occupies herself with readings on, of course, the baseness of human nature. Occasionally, though, she finds herself in a social situation or two, and at those times she shows a repugnant tendency to be “impatient for display.”

Perhaps Mr. Bennett best captures all this suppressed violence and fury at the lower end of the family pyramid when, speaking of Lydia’s inconsolable desire to chase after soldiers at Brighton, he notes to Lizzy, “We shall have no peace at Longbourn if Lydia does not go to Brighton. . . . Let us hope . . . that her being there may teach her her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow many degrees worse, without authorising us to lock her up for the rest of her life." I personally can’t read that passage without hearing a little low laughter emanating from somewhere under the page. Indeed, with all this language suggestive of repressed violence and rage stomping about in the attic of my mind, I can’t help but feel that Bertha Mason herself may be lurking somewhere nearby.

Mr. Bennett lacks the force of will, really, to lock up any of his furious, fulminating women. He is no Rochester, and his remark to Lizzy is wholly ironic and not the least bit literal but, still, there it is: the frustration of the male with the frustration of the female; the suggestion that in her anger the female is “mad” and needs to be shoved in a room and locked up, there to fume and howl and yawp and scratch and bite, unheeded, of course, by the world. Let her blow on her outrageous bagpipes, but not downstairs, not among civil tongues, not among men and women of wit and grace. This was not what Woolf meant when she said that a woman needed a room of her own. Nor Bronte when she had Jane stand on the roof just above Bertha’s attic chamber looking out on infinite distances, searching for a vista that might be hers.

Rage is not an enjoyable thing to feel or think about or write about even, for, it seems, the more rage is dwelt upon the more it is felt. That might be a distinctive aspect of rage, who knows? Rage is not exactly the same thing, though, as simple anger. Rather, it results from the suppression and accumulation of anger and all the books seem to see it as something into which anger will eventually morph if unaddressed for too long. When rage does emerge out of the suppression of anger, it seems exponentially different—grotesque, self-cannibalizing, explosive. As such it cannot be a source of art, though this is not to say that anger can’t. I agree with Woolf’s insistence that the rage of an artist threatens the expression of her genius. In arguing for a woman author’s right to a room of her own and a proper per annum income, Woolf is really arguing for doing away with the asymmetries of patriarchy, the very conditions that generate rage in its victims—women, mainly, but also, one might argue, those who do not fit snugly into the simple gender and sexual categories that the logic of patriarchy requires.

To the extent that Woolf is right about the disruptive effect of rage on Charlotte Bronte’s art, to the extent that Austen’s characterizations of four of the female characters in Pride and Prejudice might also have been distorted by it, to the extent that Woolf’s own treatment of the male characters in her books—Mr. Ramsey in To The Lighthouse comes to mind—is occasionally over-simplified by her (justified) resentment of the male ego—well, it is clear that the blame lies not with those who produced these enduring works, but with the asymmetrical social order that has for thousands of years suppressed such genius in women in the first place. For art to be consistently expressive of the genius of all its makers, society must be justly configured. This is why artists, when they’re not art-ing, should be activists. The artists of the generation precedent to Woolf’s cried, “Art for art’s sake.” There was a certain wild Irishman at the center of that chant, who as a gay man was eventually forced to gnaw the turnips of his own bitterness in a cell of his own in Reading Gaol. Before that, though, he and his literary compeers wanted to divest themselves of all responsibility for the bourgeois grotesqueries of the world. Bigotry. Elitism. Sanctimony. Narcissism. Unsullied by anything like politics, they wanted to engage the human imagination. For their time they were probably right, but Woolf ushered in a new cry. A room of one’s own! Ironically, it was almost identical to Jane’s as she looks out over the world wishing for “exercise for [her] faculties and a field for [her] efforts,” Bertha somewhere below, chuckling.