This essay takes a phrase that surfaces twice in Webster's The White Devil—in which two different angry women are dismissed by men as having "turned Fury"—as an invitation to think about the pervasive history of delegitimizing women's anger built into the tradition of debates about anger going back to antiquity. That tradition was reactivated in the early seventeenth century by—among other things—the emergence of neo-Stoicism, a phenomenon with which Webster's play is clearly in dialogue. In this history, arguments "for" or "against" anger constantly hinge on the question of gender: justifications of anger associate anger with powerful men and with the defense of masculine privilege (Plato, Aristotle); critiques of anger redefine it as weakness and associate it instead with women, children, the elderly, the ill (Cicero, Seneca). Both traditions, in other words, converge on the same point: men's anger is affirmed, women's anger is delegitimated. As such, this whole debate invites being read from the standpoint of a feminist thinking of anger that, from Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Spelman, Kathleen Woodward, and others, has emphasized the complex relationship between anger and power: anger as a source of empowerment, on the one hand; but anger also as what Koritha Mitchell has called "know-your-place aggression," grounded in what Kent in Lear calls "Anger's privilege": the idea that anger has privilege because it defends privilege. Webster's play stages both the ways in which women's angry speech could be dismissed and sidelined by men, and also the creativity by which one woman, at least—Isabella—finds a way to express her anger precisely by treating it as a fiction or a performance: her words carry a charge that both is, and is not, what she feels, thereby managing to take into account, and yet evade, the force of the rhetoric through which men delegitimize and dismiss women's anger. In that, Webster invites serious thinking about the relationship of anger, gender, and power, and a searching exploration of the problem of women's anger in a patriarchal world.
