By Matilda Sidel
Women in Dark Times
Jacqueline Rose, Fitzcarraldo, 2025
‘What makes you shape and reshape yourselves so brightly from this much pain and suffering? Who gave you the right?’
To the second of these questions, originally posed by German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, Jacqueline Rose offers us no answers. None of her titular ‘women in dark times’ were given such a right. Having this right all but stripped from them, they seized, impossibly, upon it, fashioned it from ‘bare life’, to echo Rose’s borrowing from Giorgio Agamben. Women in Dark Times, first published by Bloomsbury in 2014 and now reissued by Fitzcarraldo, draws together nine women who shone through circumstances of extreme precarity and suffering. It begins with ‘Stars’ from the early twentieth century: Rosa Luxemburg, Charlotte Salomon, and Marilyn Monroe. They are followed by three women in the ‘Lower Depths’ who lost their lives in so-called honour killings: Shafilea Ahmed, Heshu Yones and Fadime Sahindal. Rose concludes with three contemporary artists, ‘The Living’ who bear witness to the dark: Esther Shalev-Gerz, Yael Bartana and Thérèse Oulton.
Rose’s selection seems idiosyncratic, but is perhaps inevitably so, because there are so very many women in different kinds of ‘dark times’ to choose from. On the eve of the book’s republication, there are already far more such women than in 2014, as calculated, virulent strains of misogyny continue both to surface and to deepen. Readers of the 2025 edition will no doubt find their minds turning repeatedly to Gisèle Pelicot, an especially distinguished example of sheer dignity and poise against violence and shaming.
Rose’s title comes as a reworking of Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times, which argued that in ‘dark times’ — a worldview derived from Bertolt Brecht — the light of exceptional individuals breaks through with piercing clarity. Their brilliance persists even as they remain embedded in, and may be unable to overcome, the ‘dark’, a capacity that Rose reads as distinctive to women. Adamant that the lens of victimhood does nothing to lend feminism the new tools and verve it desperately needs, she insists that these women, even those who did not survive their oppression, were more than survivors. They modelled revolutionary ways of living.
Uninterested in framing her chosen women as ideal feminists, undiluted lights in the dark, Rose wants to show us that these women’s exceptional, creative resilience derives from their very proximity to, and affinity with, the dark, ‘the courage of their contradictions’. This is no choice-feminist celebration of ‘messy’, ‘unruly’, women, nor a second-wave exhortation to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in hard times. The violence and oppression surrounding us are indeed ‘dark’, but, Rose emphasises, so is the good and necessary darkness latent in our unconscious internal worlds.
Where Rose’s argument risks running into trouble, however, is in her ambiguous implication of something universal: what makes women especially able to make meaning out of ‘bare life’? Rose avoids rigid explanations in favour of ineffable qualities like outrance — literally, excess, but perhaps closer to something like ‘beyondness’. Her chosen women form fittingly inconclusive responses to the first of Salomon’s questions. Tempting as it is to identify with a womanhood of indeterminacy and unpredictability, doing so tends dangerously close to the essentialising of ‘womanhood’, from which Rose has elsewhere distanced herself so strongly.
Rose’s claims are too allusively presented to steer entirely clear of essentialism. Yet in the particulars she invites a different understanding of how these women could act so bravely — one grounded in their experience of marginality, even existential danger. Charlotte Salomon, author of those two unanswerable questions, lived at constant risk of annihilation. A German Jewish artist who survived sexual abuse and a family haunted by suicides, she eventually died in Auschwitz. She was the only Jewish student accepted into the State Art Academy of Berlin in 1936, because, awfully, it was thought that her ‘reserved nature’ would minimise her sexual appeal to ‘Aryan’ male students. Rose’s note that ‘putting women and [the possibility of] children first’ is a bellwether for genocide is not to be forgotten.
Salomon’s art did the opposite of foreclosing futures; the unknowable opened things up, like her ‘dreams on a blue surface’. Her work ‘Life? Or Theatre?’ (Leben? Oder Theater?) contains hundreds of gouaches overlaid with musical and textual accompaniments. It features characters based on her family members that ‘strut across the page’, according to Rose, prefiguring Salomon’s later determination to preserve their memory: ‘I will live for them all’. Under a Nazi regime that progressively deprived Jews of rights and dehumanised them, Salomon dared to assert her humanity and individuality, inverting violent tropes of Jews as vermin by joining together ‘human-Jewish’ (Menschlich-Jüdischen) into a single adjective in her art.
Rose describes the psychoanalytic notion of ‘free association’ — allowing passing thoughts to surface randomly, unfiltered — as a ‘theoretical handmaiden’ through which we may understand the revolutionary nature of Salomon’s creativity. Under Marion Milner’s formulation, which Rose cites here, free association becomes a political ‘ethics of otherness’ involving the ‘free reciprocal interplay of differences… with equal right to be different’. Creative play asserts identity for its own sake, the right to expression without a determined goal. Salomon’s radicalism, Rose argues, lay in a kind of losing herself. Her aesthetics of ‘clutter’ bravely ‘makes room’ for difference, an artistic mode Rose pointedly reads in structural opposition to the Other-annihilating Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum. Intuitive free association might similarly help us understand the sometimes frustratingly obscure connections between Rose’s selection of ‘women in dark times’. Put together in shared subconscious space, they might each be said to figure as a kind of ‘handmaiden’ to the others, a mutually enriching subtext that suggests new threads, rather than fixing interpretation.
Salomon’s embrace of sheer uncertainty (in art – in life we cannot presume to know) thus finds common ground across space and time in Polish socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘capability of imagining otherwise’. For Rose, the political imagination is always personal, inseparable, here, from Luxemburg’s ‘rootlessness’ as a woman blindsided by male Marxist contemporaries, and caught between alienation from her Jewish community of origin and looming antisemitism from outside it.
The same recognition that public and private life are contiguous helps Rose to propose a tentative diagnostic for how so-called ‘honour killing’ works, in a middle section that departs starkly from the rest of the book. Leaving behind the form of three discrete biographies shared by Rose’s first and final sections, the ‘Lower Depths’ consists of a single extended essay that weaves several stories together. It sacrifices neatness of form to give this intractable, horrific subject due weight. Neither ‘religion’ nor ‘culture’ proves a good enough explanation: Islam, which Westerners often conveniently blame for ‘honour killings’, does not teach femicide. Associating these killings with ‘archaic’ cultures masks their continued ubiquity across the world, and abdicates our share of collective responsibility since, ultimately, we all occupy different, synchronous parts of the same ‘pathological modernity’.
In making visible this connectedness, Rose places honour killing as relational, often symptomatic of dysfunctional dynamics between migrant communities and hostile governments, especially Britain’s. She traces how these dynamics can tightly circumscribe the existence of first-, second-, or third-generation migrants, some suspected of terrorism at every turn. They can also refract through family and social relationships, often placing conservative patriarchs as (misrepresentative) spokespeople for internally diverse communities. ‘The hand that kills in Acton, West London, is not the same as the one that would have done so in Kurdistan’ – even, Rose acknowledges, if it imagines itself to be.
Honour killing is also relational in a second, interpersonal sense, simultaneously an attempt to police women’s ‘right to public speech’ and to control their sexuality ‘behind closed doors’. In each case Rose unpicks the most delicate of familial loyalties and betrayals: brothers killing sisters, mothers complying with murderous fathers against daughters, surviving sisters lying for or testifying against their parents. Turkish-Swedish Fadime Sahindal ‘sought publicity in the belief that it would save her life’, securing convictions for her father and brother who threatened to kill her, and addressing the Swedish parliament on violence against women. She was murdered by her father two months later.
Over and over, women at risk appeal to the public and to outside authorities that fail to protect them. Before she was murdered, Shafilea Ahmed had applied to the British government for emergency rehousing. Heshu Yones, a Kurdish-British victim of ‘honour killing’, was disbelieved at her West London school when she confided her fears of forced marriage in her teachers, who put her at further risk by informing her parents of her relationship with a Christian Lebanese boy. Law and civil society, necessary as they are, ‘can only do so much’. Feminism, Rose finds, is our best hope, although no feminism we have seen yet has reached as far as she would like — that is, into the psyche of the brother about to murder his sister. There alone might it be possible to ‘wrench open’ a gap for ‘reflection’ between perpetrator and crime, a gap wide enough for him to remember that he does not really want to kill his kin, nor make a murderer of himself.
In these stories hope is too fragile, life too violently curtailed, and the cloud of male violence too heavy, for us to feel through the pages anything like the luminosity of Rosa Luxemburg (although, of course, she herself was murdered). It is in the aftermaths that women speak again, or reactivate the voices of others, giving home and life to displaced ‘ghosts who once belonged’. Contemporary artist Esther Shalev-Gerz excavates the histories of many different marginalised women. Probing beneath what Mallarmé called ‘blancs soucis’ — blank anxieties, or, as Rose offers, the unconscious ‘noises off-stage’ — she gets through the public to the private: an early twentieth-century female industrial worker at a Singer sewing machine, wearing a pearl necklace. Her whim, or pride, as it may be, glints at us through the archive, inviting as it is inscrutable.
MATILDA SIDEL is reading, and occasionally writing, for a Master’s in Early Modern History at Jesus College. She hopes you’re not too afraid of the dark.
Artwork by Poppy Williams
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