‘Reading for Rage’ and Mary Chudleigh's Anger

Abstract

Drawing from the fields of affect theory and post-critique, this article defines and reflects on the ubiquity of ‘scholarly anger’ in feminist literary criticism. Feminist critique has sometimes approached historical women writers in affective, sympathetic and often identificatory ways. They have been, what I will call in this article, ‘reading for rage’, an affective reading method fuelled by anger and indignation which considers the emotion a key strategy of patriarchal resistance. A focus on locating a sense of identificatory universal anger in women's history, I argue, has sometimes eradicated the intersections of gender with other types of social identities and structural oppressions. This article will read Mary Chudleigh's The Ladies' Defence (1701) as a test case for understanding feminist ‘scholarly anger’. Chudleigh has often been studied as a brash proto-feminist troublemaker who fiercely condemns misogyny. However, such interpretations which singularly read the power dynamics of anger in Chudleigh's text through gender have tended to gloss over the racial dimensions of the imagery she instrumentalises to advance her cause.