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Book review : Women in Dark Times

Book review
Jacqueline Rose. Women in Dark Times.
London: Bloomsbury, 2014
Daniela KATO
Hiroshima Jogakuin University
In the current ideological climate, what can one expect from a book thatmakes a passionate plea for a “bold, scandalous feminism?” Perhaps an upbeat feminism that asks us to stand on chairs and shout “Iʼm a feminist,”
while advising us what to do with our pubic hair and reassuring us thereʼsnothing “unfeminist” with having body image issues and eating disorders –another version of the young hip feminism that now colonises the weekly
columns of Anglophone newspapers and magazines, and churns out bestsellers with catchy titles full of “sass” and confidence-building, nonchalantly
equating female emancipation with a self-pampering consumerism?
The high seriousness and integrity of Women in Dark Times could not be
further removed from this. Without decrying the value of other forms ofcontemporary feminism, Jacqueline Roseʼs new book is a radical departurefrom their rhetoric and illusions. “It is time to return to what feminism hasto tell us,” Rose proposes in her preface. And, indeed, Women in Dark Times
is in many ways an attempt to return feminism to what it has lost sight of in
the past two decades, with its focus on the micropolitics of individual
emancipation, at the expense of a more wide -ranging politicalengagement linking the urgent political issues of violence perpetrated
against women, discrimination, inequality, and misogyny with thepsychoanalytic complexities of inner life. In sum, a reaffirmation of themotto “the personal is political” that informed the debates of the second
wave of feminism. And a reaﬃrmation, too, of its founding idea put forward
by Juliet Mitchell in the mid-1960s: feminism is “the longest revolution,” astruggle for women ʼ s freedom that is far from won and continues,

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unabated, despite periodical setbacks and backlashes.
The foregrounding of the link between the deeply personal and thepolitical through an emphasis on “the unspeakable” – that which cannot
be admitted to consciousness and forms thereby the subject ofpsychoanalysis – has been one of the abiding concerns of Jacqueline Roseʼs work over the past thirty-five years. It has given birth to definitive
contributions to feminism, film theory, psychoanalytic criticism, as well tocompelling meditations on the most diﬃcult political and historical issuesof our time: apartheid, Zionism, suicide bombers, and honour killings.
Hence it is perhaps more accurate to say that Women in Dark Times, rather
than a throwback to a feminism that has fallen out of fashion, is adistillation of Roseʼs long-standing interrogations and insights, particularly
in relation to women who, in her view, most compellingly straddle thedivide between political and inner life. In line with her previous work, thebook is a deft combination of psychoanalytic interpretation, politicalmanifesto, feminist art history, and personal reflection, in an ambitious
attempt to connect the conflicts, traumas and struggles that make up thedark times of today with those that shaped the twentieth century, namely
the two world wars and the Holocaust.
And yet, it is not easy for the reader to apprehend all these complex
connections, as the book seems at first sight more a compendium of
engagingly written articles rather than a unified, coherent work. This entails
certain losses, but also significant gains. Reading Women in Dark Times is an
unpredictable journey requiring time and concentration to follow its many
twists and turns. Indeed, only gradually tease do we manage to out thesubtle threads that weave together the diverse life stories and works of thenine women on which Rose focuses.
The book is organised into three distinct sections. In the first section weare introduced to Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary socialist murdered byright-wing henchmen in the aftermath of the First World War, to Charlotte

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Book review : Women in Dark Times

Salomon, the German-Jewish painter who died in Auschwitz, rather
surprisingly, and to Marilyn Monroe. Roseʼs purported aim here is to “addtheir names to the already distinguished ancestry, the foremothers, ofmodern feminism”, not because “they saw themselves as feminists – they
did not,” – but because of the way “each of them trawls the darkness of
their inner life, where their most anguished voices reside, in order tounderstand what impedes them but also in search of the resources to defy
their own predicaments” (p. 2).
In view of this, it becomes diﬃcult, at first, to grasp the purpose of thebook ʼ s central section, where Rose examines “ honour ” killings withreference to the case studies of three victims: Shafilea Ahmed, a teenage
Bradford resident murdered by her parents in 2003, Heshu Jones, killed in
2002 by her Iraqui-Kurdish father, and Fadime Sahindal, a Kurdish
immigrant to Sweden equally murdered by her father in the same year.
Here Rose explores the link between the unconscious and the political at
the level of the nation state, by showing how the hidden anxieties andfears in which honour killings are steeped do not exclusively originate in
non-Western “unenlightened” nations. Such anxieties and fears also betraythe delusions of Western nations in their presumed “ enlightened ”
difference and distance from such horror, delusions that have translated
into an intensifying anti-immigration rhetoric and racism aﬀecting migrant
women with paticular intensity.
The final section turns to the work of three contemporary artists: theLithuanian-born and multimedia artist Esther Shalev-Gerz, the Israeli video
artist Yael Bartana, and the English abstract landscape painter Thérèse
Oulton. This section weaves together all the previous thematic threads –overlooked, invisible working lives, exile and rootlessness, democracy, war
and militarism (also adding, from Oulton, the ravaging of the environment)– to shine an artistic light on the chronic insecurity and darkness of modern
life through the eyes of women who faced such insecurity and darkness

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head-on, despite their intense personal vulnerability.
The intricate dynamic of darkness and light becomes, indeed, the mastertrope uniting all the essays. This is an idea that Rose takes, of course, fromHannah Arendtʼs classic Men in Dark Times (1968). It is worth quoting
Arendtʼs key passage in this respect: Even in the darkest of times we havethe right to expect some illumination, and such illumination may wellcome less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering,and often weak light some men and women in their lives and their works,
will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span thatwas given to them on earth.
What becomes potentially problematic in the appropriation of Arendt in
Women in Dark Times is Roseʼs insistence on women as “custodians of thenight” who confront “dark with dark” (p. ix). I find it hard to accept that thisfollows necessarily from the book ʼ s overarching argument that some
women remain best positioned to tackle the darkness of modern life dueto their ability to immerse themselves in the experience of others, totolerate negative, vulnerable states, to actively accept the unpredictable
and the unruly, to creatively remind us of the limits of enlightenment
thinking. Such perfunctory associations of women with darkness andunreason risk relapsing into old-time “angry” essentialisms and binary
oppositions of which feminism should remain extremely wary.
Yet, we should also remain wary of throwing away the baby with thebathwater. Thus I shall retain what is to me Rose ʼ s most valuable,
heartening proposal in Women in Dark Times: Let feminism, then, be theplace in our culture which asks everyone, women and men, to recognise
the failure of the present dispensation – its stiﬀ-backed control, its ruthless
belief in its own mastery, its doomed attempt to bring the uncertainty of
the world to heel. Let feminism be the place where the most painful
aspects of our inner world do not have to hide from the light, but are
ushered forth as handmaidens to our protest (p. 268).