Review: Women in Dark Times by Jacqueline Rose

Despite the resurgence of feminist activism on the internet, we have not heard much lately from the more scholarly side of feminism, which makes Jacqueline Rose’s Women in Dark Times very welcome. Through a series of biographies of intellectuals and artists as diverse as Rosa Luxemburg and Marilyn Monroe, Rose presents a re-reading of the traumas of 20th-century history—from the Russian Revolution to present-day “honour” killings. Although several of these biographies are tragic, Rose is insistent that we do not see these women as victims, martyrs or angels. Rather, she argues, their lives, art and ideas offer a lens through which we may see what conventional history has repressed, providing us with tools to expand our thought and to empathise with the despised and rejected. So, just as Rosa Luxemburg fought for a radically anti-authoritarian view of revolution—a standpoint which attracted much misogynistic abuse from male comrades—so too Marilyn Monroe both embodied and decried the hypocritical, cheesecake blandness of the postwar Hollywood dream.

Women in Dark Times is not flawless. Rose’s notion of a particular feminine vision goes against the grain of contemporary feminist thought. Sceptics will note that what her protagonists share is a marginal—usually exiled—status rather than womanhood. And while her psychoanalytic approach to feminism has many strengths, the reader may want more social and historical context—particularly in the otherwise powerful essay on “honour” killings. Even so, Rose’s meditations on feminist thought and 20th-century history are both thought-provoking and innovative.