The Feels This Week: Mad Women In Books
This has been a month of discernment and reflection. There have also been fewer selfies but deeper conversations. But yes, a lot of books. I read a lot of fictional women deemed as mad. I’m pondering the nature of our madness and how much of this is gendered. Pointfully gendered. Who are these mad women?
A Korean housewife who turns vegetarian. An Indian daughter who listens to the philosophy of dogs & drunks. An American teenager who escapes familial neglect to fall in with a murderous cult. A Japanese villager condemned for murder after her exes stop eating. A couple of single women who evade male predations only to fall into ethical dilemmas with each other. And a lot of mystical, mythical female beings traversing celestial orbits as well as daily rape culture. I don’t know if these are new patterns in literature.
Publishing is a capitalist business and would follow the current trends of spending. It’s cool to be woke and some of that includes allowing the suppressed emotional vomit of women. All of the above books have been by female authors. And what woman has not felt the terror of being erased for not conforming?
I also got involved in a few different conversations in book groups about literary merit and female ragefests. I’m learning to choose, not just my battles but also my inspirations. One can listen without responding. We can accept without agreeing (or succumbing). In all, there is the lesson of delayed gratification. For what is inspiration but a party of emotions? I guess it can also be the excruciating output of crushed grapes making wine or vinegar.
I enter June open to lessons and with a light but decisive hand on the emotion accelerator. Here are the books I mention above:
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
I did not enjoy the book but I do not regret reading it. It was an important step in my journey as a feminist thinker and for the world’s understanding of female anguish.
Is food a fundamental right? And if so, shouldn’t the right to choose what to eat be just as integral? What happens when this choice is exercise and is met with brutal violence from the people closest to one? When we ponder this story from a distance, we must ask if there is any other reasonable way for a person to behave when this happens. And who is really the mad one in this story?
Maria, Just Maria by Sandhya Mary
I enjoyed this book a little too gleefully. Coming on the heels of The Convenant of Water, I was probably primed for the Malayalee sense of humour. And it felt glorious to see that embraced even more by a female writer.
The book is presented as being the ramblings of madwoman. If so, how does Maria sound so coherent, build such logical connections between her haphazard upbringing, her many thwarted attempts at affection and where she sits in the present?
Catch-22 brought us the idea that if a person deems themselves mad, they probably are not. With all the serendipity of a pretentious novel, I watched a play version of this book in this month too. Nobody calls Yossarian mad. We empathise with the state of PTSD that this novel represents. How do we fall so short when we consider the emotional responses of women under patriarchy to be madness?
The Girls by Emma Cline
I picked this up at a book swap on a whim, simply because it was lying on the table. Nobody uses the word madness in this story. Nobody visits an asylum or gets treated by a mental health practitioner. We bear witness to the fracturing by a thousand knocks of a 14 year old girl. And we see it through the eyes of her middle-aged self.
Nothing about her is particularly remarkable. She doesn’t choose to stand out or be different. She’s just trying to cope and getting left behind. Neglectful parents, cruel older boys, insecure friendships, what is a mere child to do but turn to whoever offers respite. This turns out to be a cult (based on the Manson Family) that systematically builds up towards the murders that made them famous.
We are able to accept that this need for approval and affection never changes, in men. The next book is literally about punishing a woman for withholding these from men. But this book’s protagonist stumbles into rape and gaslighting, has to care about her inept parental figures and stay financially independent while dodging the predations of younger people of all sexes as well as the cult she escaped and the law.
Times like this make me think life is a conspiracy to drive women bonkers and that conspiracy keeps failing but the men rule the world of words so it doesn’t sound it.
Some sentences that stood out to me:
“We all want to be seen.”
“X handcuffed, stunned to discover there were limitations to the bravado that had carried him that far.”
“There was a demented dignity to their resistance-none of them had run. Even at the end, the girls had been stronger than X.”
My Goodreads review of The Girls
Butter by Asako Yuzuki
I read this book months ago but I attended a book discussion about it this month. Many people did not enjoy the book the way I did. But every point of view was interesting and valuable. It also led me to conversations with two strangers, both women of different generations.
I spoke to one, a 75 year old former literature professor about moral policing. And the other, a 35 year old corporate employee about our rights over our own bodies. I love this book because it is for women about women. And it brought me conversations that guide me further into womanhood.
My post and my Goodreads review of Butter
The Housemaid by Freida McFadden
I would not usually have written about this book; it’s so trashy. But a bookstagram post this month reminded me of the greatest joy and value of literature. It is not to check off lists of fashionable titles or produce content. It’s to reflect on ourselves and the human condition. And this trashy book found its place in my journey of madwomen tales this month.
I thought the author was having fun with the more intense things about female living that makes its way into books these days. That fun included blatant rip-offs or hidden hat-tips (depending on how you see it) to other important feminist touchstones. Gaslight was the most obvious one but I also caught a hint of Thelma & Louise and a touch of Gone Girl.
I won’t say more so you can enjoy this one on your own.
Magical Women, an anthology edited by Sukanya Venkatraghavan
This book has been sitting in my bookshelf for years and I finally read it this month, which goes to prove that the right book will show up at the right time for you. Why force it?
It’s a collection by women authors in the genre of speculative fiction. For those who don’t know, this encompasses science fiction, fantasy, mythology and a lot of children’s fiction.
I’ve gleefully pointed out to the brofied ranks of scifi that the first instance of English science fiction was authored by a woman (Frankenstein by Mary Shelley). The fantasy series of our generation that created a whole new series of readers was created by a woman (Harry Potter by JK Rowling). Mythologies have been handed down through oral tradition, often by the female members of the family. Who’s being absolutely insane to call these masculine genres?
This collection lightly glides across all these genres, sometimes within the same story. I had to take breaks between stories because each one is potent. The root of every tale is female rage but it is explored through worlds as diverse as ancient goddesses to future cyborgs, widespread wars to individual rapes. These women are mad and these stories own that madness as power, not illness.
My Goodreads review of Magical Women
I interrupted one readers conversation with this mic drop and I’m not sorry about it.
“Ever notice how men’s coming-of-age stories are about falling in love, losing that love, getting a first job, drifting around? While women’s coming-of-age stories are about getting raped, surviving pregnancy and lack of reproductive rights, getting indoctrinated into a cult and escaping, being beaten to death and then coming back to life?”
Yes, we’re mad.