Free Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why by Sady Doyle

violence, there are curse words, for goodness sakes’—but the suspicion, once planted, keeps growing. It would explain everything: the fake name, the dirty content, the general air of secrecy. Jane Eyre is obviously the work of a fallen woman, the dissolute and corrupted mistress of some married man.
    When Ellen asks her about her connection to the Jane Eyre scandal, Charlotte Brontë denies everything: “Whoever has said it—if any one has, which I doubt—is no friend of mine. Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none.” To her publisher, she writes panicked letters about the desperate importance of making sure that her cover isn’t blown, that she is always and only referred to by her pen name. If anyone gets a whiff of who she is, she says, “I should deem it a misfortune—a very great one.”
    Oh, and one other thing: Prior to Jane Eyre , Currer Bell had been shopping a different novel, one which was rejected by every publishing house that saw it. The title of that first book was The Professor .
    Do you know what I would do, Monsieur?
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    As I say: There’s something perversely liberating in this story. Or in reading the Heger letters themselves: long,rambling, increasingly sloppy and hyperbolic and out-of-control. You can read the same descent into tearful begging and desperation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters to Gilbert Imlay.
    In both cases, these women are desperate—but not in any trivial or stereotypical way. We spend so much time pathologizing “overemotional” women that we scarcely ever ask what those women are emotional about. Here, it’s clear: Both women are, in different ways, in fear for their lives. In Wollstonecraft’s case, there is the physical threat of living inside a bloody and anarchic war, and the difficulty of providing a decent life for her daughter as a social outcast; in Brontë’s case, there is the psychological danger of being buried alive, of the demands of daily feminine life slowly eroding her intellect until there is nothing left. Both women are drowning, and they hold onto the men in their lives with the desperate, superhuman grip of a shipwreck survivor clinging to the side of a lifeboat. It doesn’t look pretty. But then, survival in a desperate situation never does.
    And even if it doesn’t: Who cares? Ugly as these relationships may have been, human relationships, or the need to be loved, can look (and feel) a whole lot worse than this.
    There are relationships that are, yes, crazy: co-dependent, or abusive, or just plain toxic. But the cult of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does very little to keep these relationships from happening, let alone to educate people about how they work.
    Think of all the times high-profile rape or abuse cases are framed as the acts of “vindictive” women, looking for revenge or a financial pay-off from the men who’ve dumped them; think of the Julian Assange rape case, during which Naomi Wolf accused the two women who’d pressed charges of using the“dating police” to punish Assange for not becoming their boyfriend. Think about Anita Hill, reporting that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, and the infamous line of questioning pursued by Senator Howell Heflin:“Are you a scorned woman?” he asked. And: “Do you have a martyr complex?”Meanwhile, lawyer John Doggett testified that Hill was delusional, afflicted by “erotomania”; his evidence was a possibly fabricated story about how she had once accused him of “leading her on” after he canceled a date.
    All of this falls under the heading of what lawyers call the “nuts and sluts” defense. When women report men’s sexual misconduct, the standard tactic of a defense attorney is to discredit those women by painting them as either sexually promiscuous, afflicted by an excess of desire, or “unstable” and vindictive, driven to hurt men because they can’t control their own emotions. Sexual overabundance or emotional overabundance: Either one