Feminist Revenge Fantasies, Coercive Control, and Intimate Partner Violence

And today, because I’m grappling with this in two other forms of writing, a brief foray into intimate partner violence and proposed Canadian legislation about coercive control.

My former Member of Parliament, Laurel Collins, twice brought forward legislation in the House of Commons to address a gap in the law related to “a pattern of controlling behaviour that takes place over time in the context of intimate partner relationships, as well as familial relationships, and serves to “entrap” victims, eliminating their sense of freedom in the relationship (Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights 2021).” It passed unanimously in the House–unusually for an opposition private member’s bill–and then stalled out in the Senate, where many important bills go to die, as the clock runs out on the parliamentary session. Some bills pass and move to Royal Assent, but our “sober second thought” chamber is all too often the site of protracted delays. If you don’t have a Senate champion for a House non-government bill, that’s the end of it, usually.

So it’s very good news to see the federal government putting forward omnibus criminal law changes that include coercive control.

A few weeks has made a significant difference in how I feel about the film adaptation of The Housemaid.

A colleague was murdered early in January and her former partner–who was due in court the day she was found, having breached a protective order–has been charged with second-degree murder. It’s horrific.

The Housemaid, novel and film, describe how a young woman takes a role as a domestic servant, living-in (in a tiny and rather ominous attic bedroom that locks from the outside) while she is on parole. We later learn that when she was a boarding school student she sought to defend, with rather too much vigour, a friend who was being sexually assaulted. But the inexorable legal system, when the victim of this assault refused to testify in her favour, sent Millie to prison for 10 years. Now she’s out, but she needs to sustain a stable living situation and employment or she’ll be sent back.

Here, we see coercive control writ large, in the form of the carceral/punitive criminal justice system, which first failed to “read” Millie’s crime accurately and now burdens her with the impossible dilemma of finding secure housing and a job as an ex-con with a record any potential employer or landlord can look up.

So Millie feels fortunate to have landed a position at the home of the wealthy Winchesters (I sense a link, perhaps not deliberate, to the Winchester Mystery House).

True, it’s an odd household. Nina Winchester, who seemed so warm and friendly when she interviewed Millie, is prone to temper tantrums in which she breaks the crockery and blames Millie for her problems; her daughter, dressed in weirdly anachronistic white frilly dresses, seems to the poor housemaid like the kind of child in a gothic novel or movie who might murder you in your sleep.

And remember, Millie can’t lock anyone out at night. Or even open the attic room’s one tiny window, which is sealed shut.

Fortunately, the man of the house, Nina’s long-suffering and very attractive husband, is a far more interesting proposition. This is one of many rewritings of Jane Eyre, so while Millie is initially banished to the attic [SPOILERS AHEAD], she will soon have the satisfaction of seeing Nina (fifty pounds overweight, and far less gorgeous than her husband) depart the house in disgrace, her mental health history exposed, including her attempted murder of her own daughter.

And here’s where the book gets interesting (and the film): as Nina departs, she is blissful. This was her plan along.

What starts out as one kind of novel turns into another, and readers, we should have seen this coming, because what is Jane Eyre if not an early take on coercive control? Rochester lies, impersonates a gypsy, teases and mocks Jane at every turn, and allows his guests to demean her. He lets Jane think he will marry the lovely and talented and cruel Blanche Ingram, because he’s trying to provoke Jane into revealing her feelings. When he finally succeeds, he insists on marrying her–immediately.

Too bad he already has a wife tucked up in the attic.

What Freida McFadden does with Jane Eyre is a lot more interesting than what I did in my attempt at a mystery novel a few years ago. But so many of us keep re-writing this story, this cultural script, in such obsessive ways.

The enigmatic, elliptical men who insult the protagonist are, of course, exerting emotional abuse and coercive control through their arch teasing and putdowns.

But there’s an allure to what the younger generation calls “negging”: half-teasing, half-insulting repartee that is just a shade off from flirting, because the power dynamic is that an interesting man is implicitly conveying to the woman he wants to sleep with (or his colleague, or his friend) that there is something fundamentally lacking about her that he sees and maybe wants to fix. He cares enough to criticize.

It’s a long, complicated road from negging to physical and sexual abuse. But it’s a first step.

Jane Eyre is on my mind because Jane does two crucial things: she leaves, and finds a way to survive elsewhere; and then she comes back, summoned by the mysterious voice.

The Housemaid, conversely, is about a woman who needs to implicate another, younger and arguably even more vulnerable woman in her life in order to escape. That’s a very different twist.

But in the end [MORE SPOILERS], both women come back. And the consequences are very different. The feminist revenge plot of Jane Eyre is symbolic: Jane isn’t at Thornfield Hall when the mad wife sets the fire that kills her and maims (sight and hand) her loathed husband. But Jane achieves a second-hand punishment of the would-be bigamist who loved her but lied.

The Housemaid‘s ending is more viscerally satisfying as a female (I don’t think I can stretch this to feminist, precisely) revenge plot. It’s no Jane Eyre (because what could be?). But it’s an antidote to the despair that follows in the wake of losing gifted, hardworking women who were trying to protect themselves and their daughters.