October Reading Wrap-up: Women vs Society in Literature
Female hatred and anger portrayed in three novels
*Spoiler alert for these novels
As I was trying to get into the Halloween mood during the month of October, I read a couple of books in the thriller and horror genre; The Woman in White (1859) by Wilkie Collins, The Woman in Black (1983) by Susan Hill, and Girls Against God (2020) by Jenny Hval. That’s three centuries of victimized women, evil women, and female hatred portrayed in literature — with vastly different results.
The Woman in White is about two sisters’ struggle to survive two evil men; The Woman in Black is about a tortured woman’s ghost seeking revenge; and Girls Against God is about a young woman’s hatred of Norwegian Christian conservatism. The main characters in these three novels can be seen as natural continuations of one another. The main character in The Woman in White endures and takes on the full lawful power of Victorian misogyny while retaining the ideals of feminine innocence and kindness, while The Woman in Black sees this very ideal of Victorian femininity defiled and turned into blatant hatred and maliciousness. Lastly, Jenny Hval’s anonymous protagonist embraces that hatred, and, joining a black metal band, she channels that hatred into a source of empowerment. These women are three reincarnations of the female resistance to conservative societal values.
Laura Fairle, one of the main characters in the Woman in White, is every bit the ideal Victorian female protagonist; she is naive, kind, delicate, and beautiful. She is tricked into a marriage with Sir Percival Glyde, who plans to steal her entire fortune. The book shows just how much power men of the upper class could wield over women, yet, throughout the deception, intimidation, and lack of agency that Laura endures, she remains as delicate and kind as when she is first introduced. The first line of the book reads, “This is a story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.” The story is the triumph of Laura Fairlie’s patience, and of her trust in her sister and in her lover Walter Hartright. Her marriage is arranged and negotiated to her disadvantage by her late father and her selfish uncle, and then she goes on to be intimidated, verbally abused, deceived, and ultimately imprisoned by her husband. Her sister Marian is her only protector throughout her marriage, and Walter Hartright solves the mystery of a conspiracy against her. But without them she is helpless, reflecting how such lack of agency in a woman’s life was the norm, and how, as was expected of women, Laura’s patience still somehow bears it all.
But what happens when a woman can’t bear it? In The Woman in Black, Jennet Humfrye births a child out of wedlock and is pressured to surrender it to the care of her sister, Mrs. Drablow, and her husband. At first she is not even allowed to see her son, but is allowed into his life on the condition she not tell him her true relation to him. This causes Jennet great emotional strain as the child naturally gravitates towards her, so she plans to take him and run away. In a tragic twist of fate, before Jennet can act, her son and his nanny are drowned in the marsh surrounding Eel Marsh House, all while Jennet is forced to watch helplessly from the window. The trauma and the grief of her son’s death are henceforth imprinted on the house, which, along with the marsh, becomes haunted. Jennet becomes ill owing to the intensity of her grief and resentment. Hatred and revenge consume her so much that when she dies, her spirit seeks out revenge — thereafter, at every sighting of her, a child in the town dies soon after.
Both Laura and Jennet are wronged and left with very little agency over their own life, but they each react completely differently. Laura is portrayed as triumphing over her enemies by surviving and even forgiving her fraudulent husband. Jennet, on the other hand, gives in to her resentment and anger, and so becomes one of the most iconic ghosts in contemporary English literature. The revenge she takes is cruel and reckless; she kills children simply because she suffered the loss of her own child. The main character, Arthur Kipps, is simply a lawyer sent to Eel Marsh to sort out the papers of the late Mrs. Drablow, yet Jennet’s ghost takes his child away from him in the end, despite the fact that he was not connected to the events that cost Jennet her child and her agency in society. This unfocused, senseless rage and hatred is perfect for a ghost story and works well because a scorned woman has always made a great villain in literature. Jennet Humfrye is what Laura could have turned into, had she been allowed by the culture of the time in which The Woman in White was published. Susan Hill published The Woman in Black in 1983 and the story is set in Edwardian England, which is the brief time after the Victorian era of The Woman in White. In these characters we can see women’s personal liberty and agency being seized by patriarchal societal conventions, and we see how at first women survive it, but later are unable to escape it and, worse, cannot escape or control the anger that rises from it. Luckily, the twentieth century breaks that curse and gives validation, and indeed, a home for all that anger in black metal (according to Jenny Hval).
Girls Against God is written from the perspective of an unnamed narrator; a young woman from the conservative south in Norway with a fierce hatred for God and the establishment.
“Hatred makes me happy. My hatred is radioactive, and as a child in 1990, I beam with it. Hatred is my imaginary world, my pleasure dome.” — Jenny Hval
In this experimental novel, the young woman finds friends who also hate God and everything as much as she does, and they form a coven of witches (a.k.a a black metal band), making the project into an experimental film. Their hatred is nourished by each other and they focus it to create art. Here, it is a creative force rather than the destructive one of The Woman in Black. Anger thus becomes an act of liberation rather than enslavement to it and the trauma that caused it.
This anger is not the unrealistic, graceful forgiveness of Laura which so pleases the patriarchy, but it’s also not the cruel, unrelenting haunting of Jennet’s consumed spirit. A balance between, or perhaps an alternative, is presented in Girls Against God, where conservative values and conventions can no longer harm the young protagonist because her hatred, a generational anger passed down from Laura and Jennet, protects her from patriarchy and its constraints on her agency. In its abundance and focus, this hatred is lethal to patriarchy. Thus, the curse is broken and the third generation, or the third incarnation of the scorned, wronged woman in literature, is liberated.
“We step into it, into this space that’s dark and a little thicker than air. The hatred gathers into a compressed texture. There’s so much hope in here, hope that the shadow will finally get so dense that you could take it with you, or hope that you could mount it, step up off the ground and get out of here and into somewhere else. Maybe, inside this shadow, I could get closer to you, maybe in there we could change our own texture, get something and leave something behind, in a place between imagination and reality, life and death, myself and the world. We could hate together.” — Jenny Hval
By: Anael Jordan Ortiz