Hell Hath No Fury: Rage in Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto
Chapter
Abstract
The quotation I’ve alluded to in this chapter’s title is incorrect—like so many of our favorite lines, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” is actually a mis quotation. The original is found in William Congreve’s 1697 tragedy, The Mourning Bride, when the “beauteous” Zara, a captive queen, turns her anger on the man who has deceived and betrayed her. Vowing revenge, she warns him that “Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d,/Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.” But Zara’s anger is quickly forgotten when she thinks that the man she loves is dead—in her despair, she kills herself.
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Cover Image Oxford English Dictionary Title Page Woman Writer Modest Proposal
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Chapter 6 Notes: Suggestions for Further Reading
- If you are interested in seeing the cover of the 1968 Olympia edition of Solanas’s manifesto, published by Maurice Girodias, there are several copies posted on Google Images. The text of Girodias’s edition is reprinted in Mary Harron and Daniel Minahan’s book, I Shot Andy Warhol (New York: Grove Press, 1996), which includes the screenplay for Harron’s 1996 bio pic, I Shot Andy Warhol.Google Scholar
- Three recent critical reassessments of Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto have been very important in the evolution of my thinking: Dana Heller, “Shooting Solanas: Radical Feminist History and the Technology of Failure,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 167–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Amanda Third, “‘Shooting from the Hip’: Valerie Solanas, SCUM and the Apocalyptic Politics of Radical Feminism,” Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation 32, no. 2 (2006): 104–32.Google Scholar
- Breanne Fahs, “The Radical Possibilities of Valerie Solanas,” Feminist Studies 34, no. 3 (2008): 591–617. These are excellent reconsiderations of Solanas and her work, but some caution is needed. Heller, for example, relying on Harron’s reprint of the 1968 Olympia Press version of SCUM Manifesto, concludes that “there is no reliable evidence that Solanas intended SCUM to stand as an acronym for the ‘Society for Cutting Up Men.’” Heller also cites an unpublished 1975 interview with Solanas that implies “Society for Cutting Up Men” was “the fabrication of her publisher, Maurice Girodias” (168). Although “Society for Cutting Up Men” does not appear in the text of the manifesto, Solanas did, in fact, identify SCUM with the Society for Cutting Up Men—it’s right there, on the title page of her self-produced 1967 edition, following the title: “Presentation of the rationale and program of action of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men).….”.Google Scholar
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© Sharon L. Jansen 2011