Free Women in Dark Times by Jacqueline Rose Page A

life?
    To pursue this question into our time I have found myself in some very dark places, where women suffer in ways that are often unseen. In this I am following another vital strand of modern feminism for which making visible the invisible histories of women has always been a key task. It has felt crucial to do this, as a type of caution, as a way of reminding us of the worst that a still patriarchal world is capable of. Honour killing – the fact of it, its prevalence in modern times – stands as a glaring rebuke, perhaps the most glaring, to those who would argue that the task of feminism is done, to the idea that women today are free, that sexuality – so this argument runs – is something that women today control and dispose of at will. Nothing could be further from the picture of sexuality offered here. All of my stories make it clear that sexuality always contains an element beyond human manipulation, however free we think we are. To assert otherwise is a type of daylight robbery which knocks the humanity of all my women down by at least a notch.
    Attributing honour killing to ‘other’ (less civilised) cultures or communities is in fact, I will argue, one way of keeping that bland, evasive image of Western sexual freedom intact. Women are not free today – not even in the West, where the inequalities are still glaring. Certainly it must be one of the goals of feminism for women to be freer in their sexual life. But we must be careful not to exchange an injustice for an illusion. We are nowhere more deceived than when we present sexuality not as the trouble it always is but as another consumable good. Honour killing is the cruellest modern exemplar of how the sexuality of women can provoke a patriarchal anguish which knows no limits in the violent lengths it will go to assuage itself. But we kid ourselves, as everything in this book will confirm, if we think that human fear of sexuality, and then the hatred of women which is so often its consequence, is something that the so-called reason of our modern world can simply and safely dissipate.
    All the women in this book are therefore issuing a warning. They are all reminding us of the limits of enlightenment thinking which believes that we can, with sufficient persistence, simply drive the cobwebs of unreason away. I do not want feminism to hitch itself to this wagon. Indeed, rather than the idea of light triumphing over darkness, my women suggest that confronting dark with dark might be the more creative path. If there is such a thing as a knowledge of women, this, I would venture, is where we should go looking for it.
    This book is intended to change the terms of feminist debate by giving women the task – already embraced by some – of exposing everything that is darkest, most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle for the better political futures we want, women and men, to build for ourselves. My aim is to persuade the reader of the ­brilliance of all these women in showing us how.
     
    Jacqueline Rose
    April 2014

Select Bibliography
    General
    Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism , 1951 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951, 1979)
    —, Men in Dark Times (London: Penguin, 1973)
    —, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age , edited with an introduction by Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978)
    —, The Jewish Writings , edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007)
    Beard, Mary, ‘The Public Voice of Women’, London Review of Books Winter Lecture, British Museum, 14 February 2014, London Review of Books , 36:6, 20 March 2014
    Campbell, Beatrix, The End of Equality, Manifestos for the 21st Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Seagull, 2014)
    Carter, Angela, Angela Carter’s Book of Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (London: Virago, 1986, 2010)
    Klein, Melanie, ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’, 1927, International Journal of Psychoanalysis , 9, 1928, in Juliet