“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. … We make them feel as though by being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot see they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up … to be women who turn pretense into an art form.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Women are asked not to be too much, too angry, too sad, too happy, too passionate, too emotional. A good woman is a quiet woman, who smiles in the face of frustration, and manages to keep her voice calm. As soon as you start expressing emotion, you lose. I am aware that men are also taught to suppress certain emotions, like fear or sadness, and I’m not saying that isn’t a significant problem, I am, however, right now concerned with women and their portrayal in the media.
I want to talk with you about three relatively recent examples where women were told to control and suppress their emotions and in the end let their complicated mix of feelings out into the world in an explosion of power.
I) Captain Marvel (Spoilers)
Let’s start with Captain Marvel. I am really, truly baffled by the people who complain about Brie Larson’s lack of visible emotion in the movie. Her stoic countenance and often neutral facial expression are on purpose. And you don’t have to go searching for the reasons in the subtext. It is said, explicitly, multiple times, in dialog that the Kree value logic and stoicism, they value rationality and control, especially over one’s emotions. Even the little bit of emotion that Carol does show, a smirk, a chuckle, an uncontrolled fighting move, is immediately and strenly admonished, strongly discouraged and presented to her and the audience as a failure on her part and a definite negative thing.
Not only does this make sense in the context of the movie, @EveryJacob on twitter pointed out that women in real life have a similar experience, even though our society isn’t as rational and war-oriented as Kree society is portrayed to be.
Only when she learns about who she was, who she is, and regains some of her memories with the help of her closest friend, does she express emotion more freely. She learns about the truth behind the war and her part in it and comes to recognize that the Kree’s focus on suppression and rationality has purposefully limited her and held her back, so that she, and the power she carried, was easier to control.
In a stunning and emotional scene where Carol fights with the Kree’s Supreme Intelligence in her own mind, she reclaims her name and her identity and with it her passion and emotionality, which unlocks her potential and helps her break free from the prison they constructed for her. In the end, she chooses to be kind, she chooses to be compassionate, she chooses to be loud and opinionated and stubborn and true. She chooses to be a hero and she chooses to burn bright. And it is celebrated by the narrative as a triumph. What a healing thing to see.
II) The Witcher (Spoilers for season 1)
Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) is characterized by her wants and her wants are characterized by what she feels she lacks. From her very first scene onwards, Yennefer is a creature that hungers, for love and affection first, for power and influence later, and always, always for respect. She is, also, denied, by her family, by her mentor, by society.
In her training to become a sorceress she is told to control her feelings, that her emotions make her weak and that her magic will suffer from it. Here, too, any expression of passion labeled as “too intense” is portrayed as a failure on her part. She is trained to be an advisor, to put herself behind, to achieve power ultimately through - at least outward - subservience to men who, as she learns, do not deserve her help.
Yennefer on her own, after she rejected the teachings and broke with the academy, is honest with her desires but holds her true feelings close to her chest still because she has been taught that feelings make one vulnerable and are a sign of weakness.
It is not until her former mentor tells her to access the pain and rage and sorrow she feels, to connect to her inner chaos and let it out, that Yennefer allows herself to fully feel the years of anguish and as she cries and screams a storm of fire bursts forth from her hands burning everything in its path and destroying their enemies.
III) The Umbrella Academy (Spoilers for season 1)
Vanya (Elliot Page) is, maybe, an extreme case. Extreme because her emotions aren’t (only) suppressed by an environment or society that tells her to be rational but literally by medicine that makes her unable to feel anything strongly - a fact that prevents her from forming bonds with people and playing the violin well. Extreme also because her explosion of emotion causes the literal end of the world.
But let’s back up. Vanya is the black sheep of the family because she has allegedly no powers, nothing that makes her special. From the seven children born under special circumstances that Reginald Hargreeves adopted - read, bought - she, alone, did not exhibit superpowers, or so everyone, her included, thinks. In truth, she has strong sort of telekinetic powers that can be canalized through music and are inextricably tied to her emotions. When she was four years old, her powers had violently destructive consequences and Reginald Hargreeves decided that instead of teaching little Vanya how to deal with her emotions in a productive non-destructive way and helping her work with her power, he’d rather make her forget that she has one and permanently cripple her ability to feel emotions with medicine.
Adult Vanya has long since internalized this. She fully believes herself to be a failure and believes any emotions that’s only slightly stronger than neutral to be negative and in need to be suppressed by her pills.
Even though her expression of heightened emotions later in the season are notably destructive and damaging, she is not villainized for them and instead allowed a second chance along with her siblings. And I’m excited to see where she’ll go from here.
There are a few more female emotional explosions of power I could talk about. And it’s honestly one of my favorite things in fantasy/superhero media, if done well, because it not only lets women characters express messy unphotogenic emotions but also reinforces that we aren’t weak for having or expressing feelings that they can be a source of strength instead.
Satori over and out
Addendum: Of course, a genuine expression of emotion does not have to be connected to a supernatural power explosion. I am thinking, for example, of Furiosa’s wail of sorrow in Mad Max: Fury Road when the movie takes the time to let her grief for the green place, a dead paradise that she never got to see again. In this post-apocalyptic action movie, we get to see our tough heroine express her pain and we focus on her doing so.
