The Romanticization of Female Rage

I think I’ve always had a bit of fascination with the concept of a violent woman.

When I was around 11 or 12 years old, I watched a film that would change my life for the first time, Princess Mononoke. Directed by acclaimed Japanese animation filmmaker, Hayao Miyazaki, an exiled prince falls into an epic battle between monsters and gods. It’s a deep, complex story with no clear black and white sides and no character interested me more than Lady Eboshi, one of the main antagonists in Mononoke. 

The ruler of the main setting, Iron Town, Eboshi is a foe to our main hero, Ashitaka but isn’t a clear cut villain. While she rules the town with an iron fist (pun very much intended!) and angers the gods by depleting the natural resources of the surrounding forests, she also built the town as a safe haven for outcasts such as former sex workers and those suffering from leprosy. With that, Lady Eboshi is cold and cruel, oh so very cruel that she isn’t afraid to kill, man or god, to get what she wants. 

For young me, Princess Mononoke rocked my world. I had never seen something so deep in my life. It almost overloaded my feeble brain! It did jump start my love of angry, violent female characters though. Characters like Azula from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Faye from Cowboy Bebop, Shego from Kim Possible and more were all my favorites growing up.

Over the past five to seven years or so, the term “female rage” has been used more and more often in the media. A vague descriptor, it’s been used for female characters who have unhinged or violent behaviors, especially in the response to men, whether that’s someone who wronged them personally like a lover or father, or maybe against the concept of the patriarchy as a whole. It’s turned into a sort of reclamation movement, to start loving angry female characters and to examine them in a new modern context. 

It’s not uncommon to go on TikTok or Twitter and see young women making edits of their favorite “female rage” books and movies. The concept of angry women is nothing new to the world of fiction. For as long as women were allowed to pick up a pen, they have told their stories but, I think one movie in particular created this new wave of analysis and fandom for the woman scorned, and that is Gone Girl.

Released in 2014 and based on Gillian Flynn’s novel, Gone Girl centers Amy Dunne, a regular housewife. Regular that is, until she fakes her own murder and frames her own husband for it as revenge for his infidelity. Gone Girl was a cultural phenomenon, grossing over $360 million at the box office and receiving numerous awards and nominations. The most acclaimed part of the film for sure was Rosamund Pike’s alluring performance as Amy. Calling Gone Girl a revenge story would almost be doing it a disservice, it’s scathing critique on modern marriage and misogyny.

As with anything popular, an intense fandom formed for the movie, with many young women in particular relating to Amy Dunne’s feelings of being trapped in society’s expectations for women.

Sharing her infamous “Cool Girl” monologue all over social media seemed to be a weekly ritual at one point. 

From there it seems like the concept of “female rage” was well, all the rage.

Countless articles have been written over the last few years about new female protagonists that break the docile, sweet feminine mold and also recontextualizes older works like Kill Bill or Possession. 

Movies like Jennifer’s Body, Raw, Thoroughbreds, Midsommar and more have a cult following specifically for their portrayal of female anger and violence. This phenomenon has bled over into music and books as well as many old and new works have been slotted into the “female rage” category over the past couple of years. Even bookstores and publishers have cashed in on the trend.

For all the Patrick Batemens and Tyler Durdens of the world that male film fans are allowed to idolize openly, it only seemed fair that women get to indulge in their own powerful violent fantasies. It seems almost even more justified, whereas violent male characters are usually motivated out of their own misogyny, theoretical threats to society or their jealousy of other men, unhinged female characters usually source their anger from much more relatable topics to the average woman. Love gone wrong, sexual assault, harassments and more. I think every woman in the world has wished at one time or another they could just fucking stab someone without consequence. For a lot of women, Amy Dunne and other fictional violent women represented that ideal fantasy where they could get back at the terrible men in their lives and treat them how they were treated. Of course not all of women's frustrations stem from the hands of men, to think so would be demeaning of life's natural varieties.

As fun as this can be, I and many others have started to feel like this intense love and yearning for female rage can be quite shallow and regressive at the same time. For one, as one pours through these eye-catching social media edits of women in slow motion, screaming and covered in blood set to Fiona Apple and Taylor Swift’s music you can’t help but notice how almost all the female characters are conventionally attractive and white. Is there truly anything progressive about mostly white women fancying white violent characters?

Amy Dunne is an amazingly written character but we can’t forget that she’s also a murderer. 

Women of color, Black women especially, have always been labeled angry without all the soft romanticism that comes with it lately. Two of the most prominent Black female TV characters of the millennium, Scandal’s Olivia Pope and How To Get Away With Murder’s Annalise Keating are some of the angriest, most complex characters we’ve ever seen, yet they’re hardly included in the female rage pantheon. 

Reducing female characters just to their anger can be a huge disservice to the writers who take time to craft multifaceted stories. Yes Azula is vicious, but she’s also a young girl manipulated by her dictator father, ignored by her own mother and misunderstood by her uncle. 

Anger is a healthy emotion to feel and young women using fiction to help sort through their own emotions is no problem, but I do worry about the aestheticizing of anger. Owning your anger is important but dwelling in it isn’t. Validating white woman anger especially can have dangerous consequences on those who are not white, no matter the gender. Listen, I didn’t sit through a whole year of #Karen discourse just for people to call all women’s anger “beautiful” and “tantalizing”!

This female anger trope has even bled its way to the music scene, with artists like Fiona Apple, Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers and more getting hit with the label. And even more colorful descriptors are being put on these female musicians as they’re seen to make “femcel” or “female manipulator” music. It’s quite problematic to boil down the complex lived experiences and art these indie rock girls make just to manipulating men or being angry at the #patriarchy. And like I’ve mentioned several times before, this romanticization is almost never extended to Black women and other women of color.

The average female rapper probably makes better rage music than most white alternative musicians. After a particularly tumultuous past couple of years in the spotlight, Megan Thee Stallion just released her second album Traumazine, a blistering hip hop record where Megan blasts her opponents, discusses her struggles with anxiety and grief, and alludes to the pressures of fame after she allegedly got shot by R&B singer Tory Lanez in 2020. Traumazine is easily the angriest work of the year yet Megan and other black women usually get ignored or down right vilified if they display their emotions in their art. I'm not asking for Megan's work to be reduced down to a simple label, but at the same time the omission can be glaring at times.

I also think about one of my favorite shows out right now, Industry. The main character is a young black woman, Harper Stern, who has to manipulate and lie to survive in the harsh competitive investment banking world. She isn’t any worse than a character you’d see in the likes of Mad Men, The Sopranos or Succession, yet there’s been significant backlash to her character compared to similar white counterparts.  

This love for the female rage has led to some shallow works to be made as of late too. Cruella, Disney’s live action take on 101’s Dalmatians villain, Cruella de Vil, felt like a lukewarm attempt at cashing in on the female anger trend. Emma Stone’s performance has all the makings of iconic angry girl boss; she dresses weird, she keeps her hair and make up unkempt, she has angry outbursts and even an adequate enough tragic backstory, yet it all falls apart because at the end of the day Cruella simply doesn’t do anything bad. The movie couldn’t even commit to Cruella hating dogs, let alone killing them for fur coats!

It’s as if screenwriters want the feeling and aesthetic of writing complex female characters without actually putting in the work and care it takes to write nuanced characters.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of fiction that heavily romanticizes anger is also romanticizing mental illness as well. The terms psychopath and sociopath have been so far removed from their original context, that people forget that they can be actual medical diagnoses that real people have and deal with their whole lives. 

I’m not saying the answer is don’t like bad female characters, the quite opposite, I just hope we look at these sorts of things with more nuance going forward and realize that blindly trying to copy how men valorize their favorite stories isn’t the way to even the playing field. 

Anyways, I’m going to go stream Megan thee Stallion’s "Not Nice" right now. :)