In honor of Women’s History Month, this blog post is dedicated to one of the most inspiring books about women that captures the concept of feminine rage. When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill is more than just a story of women spontaneously turning into dragons and taking off toward the sky; it is a raw and emotional tale of womanhood and trying to fit into a society that was never built for that.
This story takes place in America in the 1950s, in a world much like our own. The only difference is that every once in a while, for no foreseeable reason, women spontaneously turn into dragons and take off to the skies, never to be seen again. This all started with what is referred to as “the mass dragoning of 1955” where hundreds of thousands of American wives and mothers suddenly morphed into dragons, causing mass chaos and destruction, and then flew off. This eventually became “taboo” with all other women’s issues and was rarely talked about and never taught formally as a legitimate part of history. The story follows Alex Green, a young girl whose aunt was transformed in the “mass dragoning.” Alex finds herself faced with questions no one will answer. Where is her beloved Aunt? Why is her family forcing her to pretend she never existed? Why are they now referring to her cousin as Alex’s sister? Eventually forced into silence, Alex tries to go on with her life, that is, until her cousin turned sister Bea becomes obsessed with dragons and all the forbidden history behind them.
There are many novels that capture the experience of womanhood and trying to meld into a society that never fully accepts you, but there are none that capture feminine rage the way this novel does. This story uses “dragoning” as something that is so clearly visible and extreme that you think it simply cannot be ignored. It can’t possibly be pushed aside or written out of history, but then it is. This is an extreme version of what society has been doing to women and other marginalized genders for all of time. It’s also a representation of what that dismissal and repression does to women, creating a monster of feminine rage. This book labels “dragoning” or female rage, as just another women’s issue that isn’t important enough to talk about. Women can deal with it internally, or they can allow it to consume them. While society would like you to think that allowing your inner rage to surface is a bad thing, living life as a dragon may prove to be a better option for some than living life as a housewife. Bigger than choosing which path to follow is this: all women are dragons. The issue is that dragons are misconstrued, and seen as mindless violence and chaos. This is because there hasn’t been a place in society for “dragons” because it wasn’t built for them.
In this story, society believed that if they were to ignore dragons, they would go away. But this proved to be impossible because dragons were everywhere. “There were dragons who showed up in Ladies’ sewing circles. And dragons who showed up to labor meetings. And dragons who marched with farmworkers. And dragons who joined anti-war committees. No one knew what to do with them at first. Newspapers didn’t report it. The evening news remained silent. People averted their eyes and changed the subject. Cheeks flushed; voices faltered. Most people simply assumed that if they just ignored dragons that they would go away. The dragons did not go away.”
This book is a must-read for woman identifying people and beyond. This book highlights the importance of the bond of womanhood and embracing femininity for all that it is, which includes strength and rage. This book also touches on LGBTQIA+ themes, mostly in the support of sapphic romance and transgender women as important pillars of femininity. This book talks about how femininity and strength once went hand in hand, and how somewhere along the line, divine femininity and the worship it induced were not only forgotten, but discouraged. Most importantly, the book identifies the pain that women have inside of them that cannot go away or be ignored, and how society can be and must be shaped around women being their full selves, claws and all.
By Ally Orsini, CambridgeEditors Team
CambridgeEditors' Blog 