Mad Wives

If your anger only liberates you, what is it good for?

Kate Hamilton begins Mad Wife, her memoir of her marriage and divorce, with a scene depicting her in bed with another man. They are having sex, looking into each other’s eyes, when her husband pounds on the front door, demanding that she return home. He’s furious and his rage frightens her. But she goes to him.

Her lover does nothing except close and lock the door after she leaves.

The anecdote is difficult to parse in a book that is filled with complex truths about the intimacies and betrayals of hetero marriages. Who is the victim? Who is the villain? As Hamilton writes, “Isn’t everyone the villain in someone’s story?”

Readers and authors need to make villains of the men in divorce memoirs. This past year, at my book events, some people asked me to say that what happened in my marriage was abuse. It wasn’t. My ex was not a monster. And I resist the idea that men like Andrew Tate and Donald Trump are monsters. When we divide the world into the monsters vs. the good men, we make the bad abhorrent so we don’t have to see the everyday villainy of the system and our participation in it.

But victims can be victimizers. White women can vote just as cruelly as the men they married. And the good men can be just as evil as the monsters we’ve created.

Writing about the imagined victimhood of Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, Jax Preyer wrote:

We’d like to believe we have an allegiance to one another that is more powerful than any other identifier—race, class, religion, or creed. Presumably, this stems from the notion of a common enemy—controlling, often violent men. It’s a nice idea, but it’s also incredibly naive. It may be a tough pill to swallow, but a considerable number of women, particularly white women, would much rather align themselves with wealthy, powerful men than they would other women. It does not require coercion or manipulation; it is a decision. Culturally, we don’t like to think of women as being cutthroat, or selfish, or willing to suppress their desires in exchange for financial security and power. Let’s cut the shit—

Hamilton’s book doesn’t offer a clear way through this mess. In the first 10 pages, she notes that marriage was a trap for her, but it also provided benefits and status — a beautiful home, the validation she felt for finding and keeping a “good” man. But what is a good man? What is complicity? What is consent?

Those questions rise up, too, when she discusses sex with her ex. Was empty consent actual consent? When she and her husband were swingers, was her sex with those other men consensual or was she performing? It’s hard to say. 

Hamilton writes, “Without a violent stranger holding you down or threatening physical harm, whom do you blame for you feeling that you’ve been violated? Not your husband, who didn’t physically harm you (outside the unwanted sex) and reminds you — for years afterward — that he loved you more than anything. You are likely to blame yourself, because after all, you didn’t fight or flee, you allowed the sex that you found to be so painful. You participated in your own subjugation.”

It’s an uneasy line of inquiry, one that is never fully resolved because it sits at the intersections of so many deeply personal and political questions. When is our giving up of ourselves a sacrifice for love and when is it our undoing? When is our capitulation survival and when is it complicity?

Hamilton’s memoir is written under a pseudonym. The ostensible reason is so she can tell the truth. And she’s deeply aware of these contradictions. It is hard to believe women, even now, especially now. And yet, even a sympathetic reader will come away from Mad Wife with questions about the veracity of the story. The truth of our lives often feels like funhouse mirrors, infinitely reflecting back on our experiences until we can’t even see the full shape of ourselves in them.

But we have to keep telling them — especially the uneasy stories. Especially the ones where the villains are also victims. Hamilton writes, “Abusers start out as men we love. No one ever teaches you that.” 

It’s an important truth. The bad guys don’t start out as bad guys. They start out as the charismatic guy at the party, the charming friend of a friend, the kind professor of English, and the engaging reality TV show host. They don’t start out as the ones that hit their wives or vote for fascists. 

But heterosexual marriage is a system in which women give and men take. 

Hamilton writes, “Marriage can hold many of us squashed and captive by training us to think specifically in terms of what we owe others. But it trains women to erase ourselves altogether by teaching us that we owe more than the external things owed by men — money, labor, houses. Women owe all our intimacy — our care and emotional investment, the insides of our bodies.”

How does she free herself in the end? Anger. Her rage. “Once upon a time, a woman who freed herself from patriarchy had to be dead, mad, or monstrous.”

I’ve been thinking about the rage of women for months now. A rage that did not manifest into a political movement. Or it did, but it was not the movement I anticipated. A person’s rage can set fire to the walls around them; it can liberate and ignite change. But that rage can also be the face of a white woman screaming at Ruby Bridges as she walks into school. A rage that turns on ourselves and those around us.

We all feel righteous in our anger. But whose righteous rage wins in the end? And what good is our anger if it only serves to free ourselves and no one else? If our rage begins and ends in service of our own liberation, it wasn’t all that revolutionary.

Below is a conversation I had with Kate Hamilton about her book, rage, empty consent, and gendered grievance.