The Right To Rage

5 minute read

In a playground in Dublin, two little girls are talking under a slide. “Girls aren’t supposed to get angry,” one of them says to the other in a stern voice.
I feel my heart sink a little, wonder if I should appear under the slide and say, oh yes they do.
The other girl flinches. “Why not?”
“It’s not nice,” says the other.

I have always found it difficult to express my anger. I bottle it up, let it fester, and when I find the courage - or the trust - to release it, it comes out in such a convoluted load of nonsense, I feel ashamed. Of course this only silences me further. As for the poor unsuspecting person on the receiving end, well they have great trouble trying to work out what’s going on because the events I am referring to often took place years ago. How to feel - and speak - in real-time?

From birth, women are conditioned to see anger as unfeminine. Good girl. Where’s your nice voice? Manners. Speak nicely, darling. We don’t talk like that, do we? Men are taught to view women who get angry as unbalanced or hormonal. Unless you look like Lara Croft. (Do you know how hot you look when you get angry?) And if you are older, well, you’re just a battleaxe. (Don’t mind her, the auld bat. Nothing better to do…)

As I write this I am reminded of a moment in a mother and baby group after I had had my first child. One of the mothers was experiencing confusion over limits. When do you know when to set the limit? She asked, and another woman said, when you feel annoyed, that’s when you need to set a limit. I will never forget the way the confused woman looked at her, with such surprise and judgment, as if we women should never put mothering and irritation together.

When Virginia Woolf first started to write she came up against this feminine ideal of woman, who she called The Angel of the House.

“I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others….And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room.”

If you are wondering how a piece of writing from the Victorian times could possibly have any resonance now, consider this: in a series of interviews I conducted recently on menopause, a number of women who coach women through this often challenging time told me that women fail to recognise the symptoms of menopause because they are incapable of prioritising themselves. They also told me that a woman is most likely to kill herself is at fifty-one, when after a lifetime of caring for others, she scarcely knows who she is.

Virginia Woolf tried to kill her Angel. “I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.” It wasn’t as easy as she might have hoped. “Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her.” Of course, the great tragedy is that eventually, Woolf killed herself, walking into the water at the age of fifty-nine.

Sarah Peyton is a neuroscience educator who has helpful advice on how to handle anger. “We learn,” she writes, “that it’s possible to be angry THAT, as opposed to being angry AT. In other words, when we direct our rage toward an individual, we often move into the SEEKING circuit, home of blame. But it is possible to practice ‘clean rage’ where we can freely express our anger without moving into predatory aggression toward another. This is where we learn to transform our patterns of reactivity into life-serving emotional expression.” When I try this, I arrive very quickly at the root of all my anger. I am angry, furious, downright livid, that I live in a world where women and children are disrespected. And I fundamentally do not understand why it is not easier to change this.

At home, with my children, I tell them anger is their friend. That it is helpful because it will tell them when something is happening that they don’t agree with. That it allows them to hold others accountable. In other words, that anger is the boundary.

Back to that playground. Behind me, two mothers are talking.
“Didn’t I eat the face off the poor child,” one of them is saying, shaking her head.
“Ah what odds,” says the other. “I can be heard in China.”

Maybe it’s time to hang out with her.

Nikki Walsh, July 2021

For information on Nikki’s creativity workshops, go to @nikkiccwalsh