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WE SEE THESE WOUNDED WOMEN EVERYwhere:
Miss Havisham wears her wedding dress until it burns. The bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress. Belindas hair gets cut-the sacred hair dissever[ed] / From the fair head, for ever, and for ever!-and then ascends to heaven: thy ravish'd hair / Which adds new glory to the shining sphere! Anna Karenina's spurned love hurts so much she jumps in front of a train-freedom from one man was just another one, and then he didn't even stick around. Mimi is dying in La Bohème and Rodolfo calls her beautiful as the dawn. You've mistaken the image, she tells him. You should have said "beautiful as a sunset."
Women have gone pale all over Dracula. Mina is drained of her blood, then made complicit in the feast: His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom... a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk. Maria in the mountains confesses her rape to an American soldier-things were done to me I fought until I could not see-then submits herself to his protection. No one has touched thee, little rabbit, he says. His touch purges every touch that came before it. She is another kitten under male hands.
How does it go, again? Freedom from one man is just another one. Maria gets her hair cut, too.
Sylvia Plath's agony delivers her to a private Holocaust: An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. And her father's ghost plays train conductor: Every woman adores a Fascist / The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you. Every woman adores a Fascist, or else a guerilla killer of Fascists, or else a boot in the face from anyone. Blanche DuBois wears a dirty ball gown and depends on the kindness of strangers. The bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress. Men have raped her and gone gay on her and died on her. One of her final stage directions turns her luminescent: "She has a tragic radiance in her red satin robe following the sculptural lines of her body." Her tragedy is radiant; it makes her body...