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

scenarios. Rather than Chris Brown having a responsibility not to abuse women, it was always Rihanna’s responsibility not to be abused—and, no matter what she did, she was always blamed for any abuse that did or could happen.
    The strange thing is, relationships like hers don’t go against the script about the woman who only exists to be related to, who disappears the moment a man isn’t interested: They’re a literal and faithful read. The romantic trope of the woman who only cares about her boyfriend and the horror-movie trope of the woman who only cares about her ex-boyfriend are more or less the same woman; she becomes wonderful or terrible depending on how the man inquestion feels about her. But that same script doesn’t give a woman any excuses for walking away. She’s supposed to stay until he’s done with her and die (or at least commit to invisibility) when he leaves. And it turns out that, when she does just that, she’s also turned into a punch line.
    Simply because we’ve been taught to value men’s voices over and above women’s, our natural response to a woman’s claims of violence is to see her as delusional (she can’t perceive the real story) or unstable (she can’t handle the real story) or just plain frightening (she knows the real story, but she’s out to get him). Which means that a tremendous number of female stories—perhaps the most urgent and enlightening ones, the stories we most need to hear—have been shut down or silenced. Or it means that women have silenced themselves, believing that if they ever truly admitted what they were going through, they would sound crazy.
    She did come out eventually, Charlotte. She let people know that she was a woman. She even let people know which woman she was; attended parties (Thackeray hosted a few), became a part of the literary scene. She waited until her sisters Anne and Emily had died, and eventually wrote a preface, letting people know their names, and how much she had loved them, and the conditions of their lives.
    “We did not like to declare ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting that our mode of writingand thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’—we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice,” wrote the woman who’d once been told that literature could never be a woman’s profession. “We had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.”
    It was then, nearly ten years into her career, that Charlotte Brontë published her final novel, Villette . It was the account of a young woman named Lucy—not particularly pretty, not particularly wealthy, socially awkward—who is forced to make her way by teaching at a girls’ school in a French-speaking country much like Belgium. She hates it there. She’s lonely, isolated, so desperate that she goes into a Catholic church and makes confession, a sin in piety she cannot forgive herself. But, at this school, she meets a professor—a short, ugly, angry man; a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament—and they fall in love. Notwithstanding the interference of the vile headmistress, an evil woman who wants the professor all to herself, he loves her back, wholeheartedly, and they are engaged to be wed. Nevertheless, they are separated, when he must go across the sea. And yet, Brontë writes, the separation of this young woman and her adored professor does have one consolation:
By every vessel he wrote; he wrote as he gave and he loved, in full-handed, full-hearted plenitude. He wrote because he liked to write; he did not abridge, because he liked not to abridge. He sat down, he took pen and paper, because he loved Lucy and had much to say to her; because he was faithful and thoughtful, tender and true .
    Well: Constantin didn’t write. He didn’t seem to give or love much, either. He was