Jacqueline Rose’s Women in Dark Times was a shot against the ‘Lean In’ era, reinvigorating a more ‘scandalous’ feminism that had got lost in the corridors of power. A decade later, can Rose’s text still shine the way?
In September 2014, the theorist and writer Jacqueline Rose published Women in Dark Times, an illuminating and challenging essay collection advancing an idea of feminism that strived not for the corridors of power, but rather the hidden recesses of the soul. Examining the lives of women artists and thinkers, from Rosa Luxemburg to Marilyn Monroe, Rose called for a ‘scandalous feminism… which embraces without inhibition the most painful, outrageous aspects of the human heart, giving them their place at the very core of the world feminism wants to create’. It is a feminism unafraid to look into the darkness and confront our weaknesses, prejudices and fears; one that will not ‘sanitise itself’ by assuming existing models of power. It knows that behind such seductions lies a trap.
I first read Women in Dark Times shortly after it was published, and it seemed a vital intervention. It was a time when Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In (2013) was deemed essential reading; Hillary Clinton’s presidential run invited voters to proclaim ‘I’m with her’; and ‘girlboss’ was still a term of aspiration, not derision. Mainstream feminism in the West was about ascending to power as we knew it, and tinkering around the edges with more womanly compassion and competence (or so was the suggestion). This vision struck me as disappointing and essentialist and untrue.
Over a decade later, Women in Dark Times has been reissued into a more convulsive, unstable world. The girlboss has fallen. Sandberg has left Facebook, whose overlord, Mark Zuckerberg, calls for more masculine energy on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. America has twice rejected the prospect of a woman leader in favour of a felon found ‘liable for sexual abuse’. These are, as Rose notes in her preface to the reissue, even darker times for women. What can the book’s then-radical feminism teach us now?
‘Every one of her books’, wrote critic Parul Sehgal in 2023 of Jacqueline Rose, ‘could be subtitled “In Praise of Shadows”’. Indeed throughout her career Rose has been concerned with unpicking the things that we – individuals, families, nation-states, men – cannot bear to confront, and who thereafter bears the brunt of this refusal to look. In Mothers: An Essay on Cruelty (2018), Rose writes about the demands our culture makes of mothers, burdened with the impossible task of rendering our world clean and safe. On Violence and On Violence Against Women (2022) considers, among other things, all-powerful masculinity as an unreachable ideal, one whose very unattainability results in violence. The Plague (2023) revisits Freud in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, making the case for a culture more attuned to human frailty at a time when the vulnerabilities of the body became impossible to ignore.
Women in Dark Times is perhaps the most pedagogical of her books, as Rose finds women who have lived the kind of challenging, confrontational feminism she holds dear. Rosa Luxemburg and Marilyn Monroe are celebrated as artists who lived freely and boldly and refused to submit to easy orthodoxies. Luxemburg, a Marxist Jewish revolutionary, ‘slipped back and forth across national borders for much of her life’; ‘unbelonging’, Rose writes, ‘was her strength’. (Indeed the notion of ‘rootlessness’ – long a Stalinist antisemitic trope – is reclaimed by Rose, who is also Jewish. The women in these essays ‘have made a virtue of not belonging, of being at odds with the hard-edged – proprietorial – distinctions of the universe’.) Luxemburg never followed the party line, criticising Trotsky and Lenin for ‘supporting the elimination of democracy as such’. Hers was a politics that sought not to master the world from above, but instead give space to the ‘untrammelled, energetic political life of the broadest masses’. Monroe, meanwhile, shows how ‘female beauty can be used to hide from view the other forms of cruelty and injustice which a society blithely perpetuates’. The actress’s luminosity took in the violence and suffering of postwar America and distilled it all ‘into a face and body meant to signify pleasure and nothing else’. The task nevertheless did not inure Monroe to the hypocrisies of her nation, nor undermine her commitment to the public. ‘I have great feeling for all the persecuted ones of the world’, she once wrote; her biographer Carl Sandburg observed there was ‘something democratic about her’.
That idea of democracy is echoed across the essays. The painters Charlotte Salomon and Thérèse Oulton are lauded not only for their confronting interests – Salomon tracked the real-time rise of Nazi Germany (she came from a Jewish family marked by tragedy, and would die at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six) while Oulton considers the violence we inflict on our Earth – but also the way their works forge a new language of equality, a plurality that makes no claims to a centre. ‘Nothing forced on top of anything else, no hierarchy of elements, no overarching or magisterial distance… fragments which slide into without commanding each other’, Rose writes of Oulton’s landscapes; ‘above all, no omnipotence, nothing “overall”.’
Reading the reissue of a book that has been greatly influential to me, I could not help feel my pleasure undercut by a more difficult sense of mourning. Women in Dark Times was first published at a time when the Enlightenment-style rationality the book was writing against was ascendant. A technocratic centrist liberalism had emerged, assured of its role as the final point in human history. (“They are not liberal democracies yet”, I once heard a former Tony Blair staffer say after visiting the Gulf nations in 2016; but, he continued, he was cheered by the changes he saw. As if history could only move one way, like a toy on a factory line.) For sceptics, there was a fear that such liberalism failed to recognise the many brutalities normalised under its seemingly technical governance. Nor did it offer a language that addressed the heart, with its desires and yearnings, desperation and despair. History was supposedly over, and with it came the sanitising of the subconscious.
A decade later, an alternative politics has emerged that, for all its bad faith and cruelty, addresses little else than the heart. It taps into people’s fears. It tells them they will be safe under a brittle and violent nationalism marked by total domination of outsiders (Rose in Women in Dark Times:‘indifference to the other is therefore the underside of fascism, its pre-condition and drive’[1]). It offers nostalgic, regressive fantasies of total greatness under the protection of a bullying and vengeful masculine leader (a mission, Rose might say, that is doomed to fail: nothing can guarantee total safety, and no person – no man – is invulnerable). The subconscious is no longer sanitised, but has been dug up and poked at and bounced around in public. Ten years after its publication, Women in Dark Times offers a prescient diagnosis of today’s heightened nationalism. Yet this time, I began to fear that its principles are increasingly ineffectual against such naked power.
Take, for example, Rose’s discussion of the artist Yael Bartana’s quietly subversive works on Israel and Palestine. In the film A Declaration (2006), a man rows to Andromeda rock off the coast of Jaffa and substitutes the Israeli flag for an olive tree, a symbol of the Palestinian resistance. The action is shown with great ‘slowness’, Rose writes, and attention given ‘to the weight of the gestures, the repeated close-up focus of the breaking waves and foam’. For Rose, Bartana ushers the viewer ‘into creative, contemplative time’; the kind ‘brute nationalism has no time for and has to subdue’. Though as crucial as these appeals to contemplation may be, today it’s hard to see them as effective forces against the brute domination of war – it’s hard, even, to have the time to think. Violence, as Rose has written, robs people of their right to a rich and complex mental life.
We seem to be in a double bind. The kind of restless and confrontational thinking of Women in Dark Times’s feminism is essential, yet it is up against a vast apparatus of material power opposed to letting it take root. For all its interest in the darkness of our minds, the feminism of Women in Dark Times seems profoundly hopeful and generative, always leaving the gap between who a person is and who they can be. Transformation is always possible. The point of the unknowability of our minds is that we do not know who we will become. Such changes, however, require people to enjoin in the invitation to think in the first place – an act that seems increasingly impossible in our time of fear and paranoia and dark billionaire money and interests. After all, many things lie in the shadows – not all of them emancipatory. The book often positions violence as a kind of insecure eruption that results from a lack of thought, the result of an anxious mind running away from itself. But as I read, I thought gloomily about violent political programmes and actors who seem totally in command of themselves, for whom bullying and domination and hatred of the other constitutes not a flight from the self, but – at least, to them – a triumphant act of self-affirmation.
This is not to fault the book for not anticipating the state of the world ten years after it was written: that would be unfair (in fact, Rose’s warnings about the disastrous consequences of failing to tend to the darkest parts of our minds have arguably borne out). But it is illuminating to return to challenging texts over time and discover what fresh lines of enquiry they bring up, and what they, in their anachronism, reveal about the present.
Ten years ago, I took the book’s observations on power and its corruptibility close to heart – a reflection, perhaps, of the unsatisfactory and patronising girlboss-adjacent lens commonly applied to women in power. Its warnings that ‘creating a movement always risks rejoining the trappings of power and authority it most fervently wants to reject’ and celebration of the hidden peripheries made me feel more comfortable on the questioning, critical edges. Now as the devastating price of ceding power has been made painfully clear, I no longer believe I need to fear the idea. What would it mean to hold power, together, maturely and seriously, without lapsing into domination? To hold power that remains self-critical and attuned to our own fallibility? It may be easy to deem the exploration of one’s inner life as privileged naval-gazing, but Rose’s scandalous feminism takes that as a basis to create a new world: one that puts our vulnerability at its very core. What would that world look like?
Rebecca Liu is a writer and commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday magazine.
