Photograph by Gregory Crewdson, untitled from the “Beneath the Roses” series
Wartime psychiatrists coined the term “passive aggression” when they needed a label for soldiers who only grumblingly followed orders. Their resistance wasn’t disobedient, but their smoldering resentment was its own force, an acceptable alternative to expressing anger outright.
In Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America, psychologist Carol Zisowitz Stearns writes that prior to psychoanalysis, Americans held a certain amount of male anger in high esteem; marriage magazines promised that a “spirited and quick-tempered” man made a “generous and lovinghearted” husband. Freud’s introduction of psychoanalysis, though, spurred a connection between anger and aggression that persisted in spite of the fact that his work focused far more heavily on aggression than on the emotion of anger itself. Feeling anger, then, became synonymous with aggressive acts.
This was especially problematic for women who, it was widely held, were biologically prevented from feeling anger at all. Men, held to no such standard, were expected to keep their inevitable anger under strict control. As parents strove for an anger-free household, young boys were encouraged to emulate their mothers rather than their fathers, in hopes of obliterating any residual anger.
This notion that anger is unfeminine would have made me laugh a year and a half ago, when I thought such ideas had been buried for over a century. Then I moved to Seattle. Seattle is known for a lot of things: rain, coffee, progressive politics, legal weed, mountains, forests, Nirvana, Frasier, the Space Needle, Amazon. Less known are the city’s struggle with homelessness and the debated existence of the barrier to socialization known as the Seattle Freeze. Still less discussed is passive-aggression, making your disapproval known through silent actions rather than direct from communication. With this passive-aggressive culture comes an egalitarian approach to anger that Victorians would approve: No one, male or female, is expected to feel anger.
Anger, demonized as out-of-control and irrational in the 1860s, defied the constraints of both quiet femininity and stoic masculinity that were supposed to represent stability in the Victorian home. The home as sanctuary, cut off from society’s bustle and noise, made this silence paramount. Seattle is, in its own way, cut off from the rest of America, a forested city surrounded by water that natives also consider a sanctuary.
In a society where it’s considered socially unacceptable to show anger, the trade-off is a constant uneasiness that inevitably results from knowing that you’ve upset someone but never finding out why. You can feel it in the way they cut off your words, quick to make sure you don’t say anything that upsets them rather than having to respond if you do, and, in the most flagrant cases, you know you’ve upset someone when they literally walk away from you. The passive-aggressive model considers this dismissal appropriate for a situation in which you could otherwise risk expressing anger.
I believe that a crucial component of adult respect is accepting the continued existence, and emotions, of the person in front of you. True that if you walk away from someone, you’ll never risk yelling something hurtful, but you also shield yourself from another risk: hearing out the person that you’re arguing with and realizing that perhaps you’ve misstepped.
Passive-aggression, then, purports to be a peaceful way to eliminate conflict, but turns out to be a fundamental means of self-protection. A passive-aggressive society gets to dictate that anyone who displays anger could be a potential abuser, and this is far more selfish than it is protective. Unless we’re talking about a traumatized population who truly believes that anyone who speaks with unwavering conviction could get violent at any point, what’s really at stake here is the person that the passive-aggressive discussant doesn’t want you to see them become. If you’re going to condemn anger, you can’t show it yourself.
Back, then, to the question of where this fear comes from. Maybe the Tea Party and their loud right-wing followers have given anger a bad name, and we’ve, in Freudian fashion, come to confuse their bigotry with the expression of anger itself. Maybe too, also in Freudian fashion, we haven’t fully let go of our parents. I didn’t have a militaristic father — in fact he was about as bohemian and easy-going as you could expect a folksinger-turned-limousine-chauffeur to be — but I’ve been on the receiving end of some irrational anger; I’ve been scared.
But I don’t think the world outside should have to conform to ideas that I’ve based purely on what’s freaked me out in the past. I’d like, in fact, to move beyond all those things, and not have to conflate some childhood episode with someone I’m talking to now. The idea that we shouldn’t express how we feel because we have no idea who we might remind someone of is absurd. That’s a challenge to be overcome, not catered to.
We’re also doing ourselves a tremendous disservice if we write off the expression of anger because we’re afraid we might express it the way someone else once did toward us. While it can be shattering, initially, to see that you’re capable of becoming that person you don’t want to be when you’re angry, there’s no chance of becoming anyone else if you keep them locked up, untouched, a dirty secret that no one will ever find out about as long as you walk away the moment you feel upset.
Stearns asks if the social justice movements of the 1860s could have been fueled in part by the fact that they served as a socially acceptable outlet for anger. In observing Seattle’s political landscape, I wonder to what extent the city’s defining activism serves a parallel purpose. Anger in service of a cause is altruistic and comfortably anonymous at the same time. It’s also structured, rational, and crafted with purpose. No individual anger plays a large enough role in a vibrant activist movement to warrant attention; this makes it an ideal form of release.
Even grunge, Seattle’s signature contribution to the larger American music scene, has an air of passive-aggression about it. That same catharsis — albeit for primarily white male circles — defines it, while at the same time, none of it is so weird as to sound wildly unpredictable.
Unpredictability is a passive-aggressive society’s undoing, because order exists in part to drive out anger. If the order is upset, any emotion could seep in, and while tears are more readily accepted than shouts, too much emotion in any direction is not readily invited. All feelings are subject to conflict, and if conflict must be avoided at all costs, so must too much feeling of any kind. Victorians were not in agreement here, and Stearns goes so far as to suggest that part of the reason Victorian women cried with such fervor is that tears, just like social reform causes, were an acceptable outlet for their anger. For the less activist set, it is theorized that maladies were another socially acceptable outlet for expressing undesirable emotions. I can’t help but wonder, then, if Seattle’s profusion of homeopathic clinics is in any way related to this.
Also relevant is Seattle’s reputation as a city of introverts: if Seattle, an isolated isthmus in the middle of endless forest which discourages unnecessary social interaction between strangers, is a sanctuary both from and within America, the home is the retreat-within-the-retreat. I like to think that the doors in this city are bursting from the emotions that are at last expressed in privacy, but if my thin-walled apartment building is at all representative, this is not the case.
While it’s to the city’s credit that mental health resources are better-funded and more solid here than in many other places throughout the country, there’s also a Victorian element to the pervasive assumption here that anyone who shows their anger most likely belongs to the homeless population, the only subset for whom expression of anger is acceptable. This is not so far from nineteenth-century diagnoses of hysteria, even if this affliction — the refusal to demonize and repress anger — is not gender specific.
There is certainly an idea present, though, that rage and vaginas don’t mix. A woman is cheerful and well-controlled, just as a man is cheerful and well-controlled. Anger wrecks the picture, which is why it can and should be silently written off the page by walking away. If I hadn’t actually lived in Seattle, I might have theorized that this was due to the lack of sunlight, but the shocking truth about Seattle summers is that the sun blazes for three months out of the year, late into the night. There isn’t so much a lack of sunlight in Seattle as there is an imbalance in the annual sunlight distribution.
I don’t know how a city could come so far on social justice issues and stay so firmly rooted in the distant past where anger is concerned. This is why I’ve come to wonder if anger itself is a social justice issue — the right to speak forthrightly, not as a member of a particular group or identity but as part of the human experience. Elsewhere in America, particularly in the Northeast, the expression of anger is not considered an infringement, aberration, or defect. Conflict underlies every worthwhile risk we take and most of the more frivolous risks as well.
Before Freud compelled us to conflate anger and aggression, we understood that anger gave us impetus to act. Because of its correlation with generosity, anger also indicated a level of presence and attentiveness that passive-aggression stands in opposition to: it is fundamentally apathetic. Anger, like sadness, joy, compassion, and empathy, is not only inescapable; it is an integral part of being conscious of oneself and the world.
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