When is a Woman’s Anger Truly Feminine Rage?

During my breakup, I have this recurring dream about hiding a body in an old house. It's not a dream about violence but about what comes after. Dusk is swirling. The floorboards underneath me moan and threaten to buckle.

When my partner comes to move the last of his furniture out of my living room, I don't say anything — not about the lost three years or the other women. Instead, at night, I'm on the run.

Gone Girl is a man's nightmare. The ten-year-old film abandons Occam's Razor for a winding and conspiratorial plotline, adapted from Gillian Flynn's smart and startling crime novel by David Fincher and Flynn herself.

If the horror genre is designed to excavate our subterranean fears, then Gone Girl is a horror story about the fear of false accusations. Its villain? Amy Dunne. A beautiful blonde woman whose sociopathy is masked by expensive taste, a feigned love of cold pizza, and a Brazilian wax. Amy is murderously angry, and she puts her Harvard degree to use, carefully planning and staging a disappearance designed to land her husband on Missouri's Death Row. She doesn't get away with it because she ultimately doesn't want to get away with it. Amy backtracks on her plan and grants a stay of execution to her beleaguered husband. The movie's ending is clear: she has outfoxed Nick. He's stuck. Amy's agency is absolute.

Amy is a brilliant villain. Unexpected. Subversive. Terrifying. Rosamund Pike delivers her dialogue with a watchfulness that seems like insecurity but reveals itself as calculating sociopathy instead. Nick is having an affair, and Amy is angry about that, sure. She's angry about his failure to live up to the advertising of his early courtship. She's angry that he's failing to live up to her own expectations. Most of all, Amy's anger is the institution of marriage, the bad bargain she feels she made for love. Perhaps that's what continues to ring true about the iconic "Cool Girl" speech:

Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2.

All of Amy's conniving is in defiance of the rigged game of heteronormative gender roles. She's murderously frustrated by the conditions of womanhood — and who can blame her? She's angry. She's a woman. But does that make it female rage?

Pop culture is rich with moments of women's anger. Kill Bill's katana-wielding Beatrix Kiddo sliced her way toward something like justice, her wrath neatly packaged by male director Quentin Tarantino into an erotic spectacle for a predominantly male audience. If Gone Girl is a horror film for the male gaze, then perhaps Kill Bill is its opposite but equal male fantasy. A fantasy about the vengeance that could follow victimhood — a violence to which the character is practically entitled. This is how Tarantino imagines a victim might respond.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, also directed by Fincher, traffics in a similar rape revenge. When Lisbeth Salander is repeatedly assaulted by her state-designated guardian, and then when she violently assaults him in return, her anger is expressed through direct force and externalized aggression. Is it feminine rage? Or masculine rage performed by an almost incidentally female character?

Female rage is zeitgeisty. Taylor Swift recently trademarked "Female Rage: The Musical." The TikTok girlies are reclaiming the word "femcel" and it was a breakout keyword in May 2024.

In "Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense," philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argues that the conventions of language contain moral expectations. A "uniformly valid and binding designation of things" that reflects cultural conceptions of truth. This is to say that our habituations of language reflect reality as we are socialized to expect it. We are given words for the socially acceptable; taboo feelings and behaviours are banished beyond the realm of language. Our culture has limited narratives for feminine-coded rage precisely because it is so intolerable.

But there are creators who break the conventions of language and story to depict a largely unrepresented, specifically feminine anger that is often disowned, sublimated, and internalized. Terrifying in its own way.

Michaela Coen's I May Destroy You is propelled by a sexual assault when protagonist Arabella is drugged and raped in a bathroom stall. I May Destroy You is a trauma narrative, and it is a good one. Arabella vacillates between functional and erratic. Her rage boils over as a sort of manic charisma — sublimated into supercharged people-pleasing. Her revenge is a fantasy, a rerunning and iterating fantasy looped in her mind. Her violence is always turned most harshly on herself. By the end of the series, the story splinters, moving away from reality into a more surreal format that evokes the truth of Arabella's emotional state. It doesn't fit neatly into a linear Western story arc — defies easy representation — because the show is reaching toward something less conventional. Real life is not a vengeful, blood-drenched action movie.

Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch, about a stay-at-home mom who turns into a dog at night, bends reality to express the inexpressible. It's taboo to acknowledge the ambivalent emotions accompanying new motherhood, so the narrator expresses them as a dog, ranging wild through the neighbourhood and attacking cats. "Her emerging rage was in part a by-product of physiological processes, but how could you not be pissed after having a baby?" asks the narrator.

But it's hard to express female rage — rather than male rage deposited into the convenient framing of a female body — because those narratives defy our social norms. It's easier to write a rabid dog than an angry woman.

When style and metaphor allow us to break out of our existing frameworks, we can access what Nietzche describes as a "free intellect." Here, an artist can depict new truths, not just repeat what has been previously represented.

Maybe that's why there's nothing quite like a Tori Amos song, which always sounds fragile while also scary and discordant. The beauty is always a little bit fucked up, like the pretty girl demigods in "Precious Things, with "their nine-inch nails and a little fascist panties." Womanhood: long nails. Religious violence: nine-inch nails. Girlhood: panties. Political violence: fascism. Unusual combinations of words for an unsettling juxtaposition of ideas.

Literary theorist Kenneth Burke describes the possibility of freeing a word — and, by extension, an idea — by "taking a word usually applied in one setting and transferring its use to a new setting" in violation of all existing connotations. When words are paired in ways that feel inexpressibly wrong, the effect is unsettling. Scary, even. The language is stylistically taboo in a way that mimics its subject matter. Like the bracingly urgent lyrics of Amos' "Tallulah," "I got my rape hat on, honey / But I always could accessorize." It verges on nonsensical but gestures at something that marks sense. Its opacity is eerie.

My anger often hides within other emotions, twisting itself into fawning or tears. To be an angry woman is often to be unwanted, alienated, and exiled. I want to banish my fury like a dog into the night.

It's this ambivalence that "female rage" movies never seem to get quite right. Gone Girl's Amy knows to choke her anger down for appearances, but it is never curdled by shame or fear. That's what makes her a horror movie villain — this sociopathic disregard for anything but the appearance of her actions.

These other, more surreal forms help us get closer to a true feeling that exists beyond the familiar bounds of pop culture narrative. If we live in a culture that is afraid of women's anger, how can we expect that culture to give us the scripts for the dizzying and terrifying experience of being an angry woman?

I'll dream again of the body in the body in the house. The person I will scare the most will be myself.

Rose McMackin is a writer and editor, and writes a weekly newsletter about country music.