To be honest, Queen Bey’s “Lemonade” was the final push I needed to get this blog up and running. Here I am now, writing my first post, and what better topic to start off on than our generation’s visual masterpiece?
Now, the tale of a vengeful woman wronged ain’t nothing new. In Japanese lore you have the tale of Dojoji, which goes something like this: after being rejected by a hawt Buddhist priest, a young woman named Kiyohime becomes so enraged and consumed by sexual lust that she becomes a giant, fire breathing serpent and burns the dude to death in a giant bell. Same, Kiyohime. SAME.
Kuroneko (1968) dir. Kaneto Shindo. Two women seek revenge for being violently attacked, assaulted and killed by a group of samurai. So they turn into ghost cats, seduce the men who attacked them and BAM… They strike. Girl power, amiright?
There are tons of examples of “wronged women” in Japanese folklore, but allow me to present to you a Latino tale I grew up hearing myself: the tale of La Llorona (and here’s a SUPER GHOSTLY cocktail recipe named after her). There are lots of different versions of this story, but basically a woman is driven by her rage towards her husband to drown her children. She dies in regret, but legend has it that her ghost still wanders along riverbanks wailing, “Donde estan mis hijos?” (Translation: Where are my children?) and stealing whatever human puppy she spots wandering outside of parental supervision. Hence, her name: La Llorona (Translation: The Weeping Woman). Russians have rusalkas (evil ghostly lake sirens who committed suicide due to unhappy marriages and now drown unsuspecting men) and Greek mythology features Medusa, a story we all probably know. It’s a tale as old as time.
I guess in the American tradition of wronged woman folktales, we now have… Beyonce? I can roll with that. I mean, she’s arguably more, if not equally as, badass as evil ghostly lake sirens or super horny fire-breathing snake demons. LOOK AT HER.
SHE IS TERRIFYING. AND MAGNIFICENT.
What is it about “wronged women” that always reels us in, hungry for a story? Eager to shake our heads and tsk tsk tsk and bond over the trials faced by a woman once in love, now seeking retribution?
Folktales about vengeful women seem to be more cautionary than anything else. I’ve also thought of them historically as male bonding exercises– superficially, at least. Like a crappy comedian doing the whole “I mean, WOMEN, RIGHT? ha HA ha HA what’s up with THAT” bit– you know what I mean. But look a little deeper, and you’ll see that in all these cultures– including our own– femininity has always been seen as a threat to male order. It’s powerful, and a woman who recognizes that power isn’t someone you wanna mess with, my dudes. Which explains why we’re always cast as the monsters, the wild women, the lustful beasts— once a woman is angry enough, passionate enough, determined enough, nothing can stop her. Not even fire hydrants.
By using her creative energy to tackle and adopt this age-old trope, Beyonce empowers women today through the reinterpretation of a centuries old story. I mean, let’s be real. That’s kinda magical. This isn’t the story of some guy going, “Man, my wife is crayyyzay! She said she’d make a skinsuit out of my side-chick! Like, dayum!” This is a story retold by a woman enraged– not only at a man, but at an entire system in which men (particularly the racially and economically privileged ones) have had the upper hand over women in pretty much every way. A woman who takes all that anger into her hands to make something visually and musically stunning, all while giving a voice to the women who aren’t being heard, is a force to be reckoned with.
And if that’s not art, I don’t know what is.
Natalia del Pilar 