eyresses

I think of Bertha’s violence as part of a genealogy of feminist rage – from Valerie Solanas (“If SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade”) to Lorena Bobbit – and Jane, too, another woman who refuses to be silent and disappear. Re-reading Jane Eyre after all this time, I’m reminded of a bitchy thing Susan Sontag once said about Adrienne Rich, calling her a “phenomenologist of anger.” That was in 1975, in the New York Review of Books, two years after Rich published “Jane Eyre: The Temptation of a Motherless Woman” in Ms. Magazine. Sontag resented Rich’s overvaluation of emotion, and of course, her explicit feminism.” Sontag also famously said: “Like all capital moral truths, feminism is a bit simple minded.

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