Madeleine Davies: It’s strange that until recently, domestic literature is seen as dull and boring compared to tales of male adventure, especially when a woman’s life, beginning to end, is filled with violence. We’re born, we learn to be afraid, learn to be looked at, learn to be quiet, we bleed, we give birth, we age, we’re forgotten, and then we die. So much of what we encounter—marriage, raising children—is meant to hold us painfully still. Those who don’t offer gratitude for this stillness or choose to take control of their own movement—by living openly trans, by loving other women, by seizing autonomy with birth control pills, IUDs, or abortions—are punished, sometimes quietly and other times deafeningly. They’re murdered. They’re jailed for choosing the opposite of motherhood or for being the wrong kind of mother. They’re marked as Bad, as Nasty, and maybe even Wrong or Unnatural.
But it’s the bad women who have always, however grotesquely, provided the limited examples of female resistance: Salome, demanding the head of John the Baptist; Medea punishing her husband’s betrayal with infanticide; Flannery O’Connor’s Hulga, who knew her birth name Joy was all wrong because it was light and airy and she wanted to be dense and ugly, like a swamp; Toni Morrison’s Sula, whose destructive joie de vivre led her to trample on the moral codes of others; the heroines of Ferrante, often cruel and spiteful because they’re too smart for the men who anchor them to the miserable world that they created. All of the women terrible in someway or another—but also strikingly bold in their effrontery. More here.