Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Decameron (1353)

  Perceiving that he had been duped, the scholar, whose teeth were chattering so vigorously that he seemed to have been turned into a stork,3 tried the door several times to see whether it would open, and searched all round the courtyard for some other way out. But finding none, he paced to and fro like a lion in a cage, cursing the severity of the weather, the perfidy of the lady, the inordinate length of the night, and his own stupidity. So indignant did he feel about the way he had been treated by the lady that his fervent and longstanding love was transformed into savage and bitter hatred, and his mind dwelt on various elaborate schemes for securing his revenge, which he now desired far more ardently than he had formerly yearned to hold her in his arms. It seemed to him that the night would never end, but eventually the dawn began to appear, and the maidservant, following the instructions of her mistress, came down to open the courtyard gate. Pretending to be very sorry for him, she said: ‘A curse on that brother of hers for coming here yesterday evening. He’s kept us in suspense the entire night, and frozen you to the marrow. But you know how it is! Don’t be disheartened, try again some other night, and perhaps you’ll have better luck. My mistress is heartbroken that this should have happened, she really is.’ Though seething with indignation, the scholar was wise enough to know that menaces simply forearm the person who is threatened, and so, swallowing all the resentment that was striving within him for an outlet, he said to her in a quiet voice, without betraying the slightest hint of his anger: ‘To be honest, it was the worst night I have ever spent, but I could see that the lady was in no way to blame, for she was so concerned about me that she came down in person to apologize and offer me her sympathy. And as you say, perhaps I shall have better luck some other night. So fare you well, and commend me to your mistress.’ Paralysed in every limb and every joint, he returned as best he could to his own house, where, feeling utterly exhausted, he flung himself on to his bed and fell fast asleep. Some time later, he woke up to find that he could scarcely move his arms or his legs, and having sent for physicians and told them about the chilling he had suffered, he placed himself under their care.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Tofano, on the other hand, told them, like an ass as he was, how the case stood and threatened her sore; but she said to the neighbours, 'Look you now what a man he is! What would you say, were I in the street, as he is, and he in the house, as am I? By God His faith, I doubt me you would believe he said sooth. By this you may judge of his wits; he saith I have done just what methinketh he hath himself done. He thought to fear me by casting I know not what into the well; but would God he had cast himself there in good sooth and drowned himself, so he might have well watered the wine which he hath drunken to excess.' The neighbours, both men and women, all fell to blaming Tofano, holding him at fault, and chid him for that which he said against the lady; and in a short time the report was so noised abroad from neighbour to neighbour that it reached the ears of the lady's kinsfolk, who came thither and hearing the thing from one and another of the neighbours, took Tofano and gave him such a drubbing that they broke every bone in his body. Then, entering the house, they took the lady's gear and carried her off home with them, threatening Tofano with worse. The latter, finding himself in ill case and seeing that his jealousy had brought him to a sorry pass, for that he still loved his wife heartily,[351] procured certain friends to intercede for him and so wrought that he made his peace with the lady and had her home again with him, promising her that he would never be jealous again. Moreover, he gave her leave to do her every pleasure, provided she wrought so discreetly that he should know nothing thereof; and on this wise, like a crack-brained churl as he was, he made peace after suffering damage. So long live Love and death to war and all its company!" [Footnote 351: Lit. wished her all his weal.] THE FIFTH STORY [Day the Seventh] A JEALOUS HUSBAND, IN THE GUISE OF A PRIEST, CONFESSETH HIS WIFE, WHO GIVETH HIM TO BELIEVE THAT SHE LOVETH A PRIEST, WHO COMETH TO HER EVERY NIGHT; AND WHILST THE HUSBAND SECRETLY KEEPETH WATCH AT THE DOOR FOR THE LATTER, THE LADY BRINGETH IN A LOVER OF HERS BY THE ROOF AND LIETH WITH HIM

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  The departure of his wife and their six children to a distant corner of the nation gnawed at him day and night. Over time his hurt was transformed into an implacable rage, and most of that anger was directed at the three individuals who, in his estimation, bore responsibility for Dianna’s decision to abandon him: Richard Stowe, Chloe Low, and Brenda Lafferty. Stowe, a pharmacist by trade and a neighbor of Ron and Dianna’s, was president of the LDS Highland Stake. He directed the stake’s High Council Court, which had tried Ron in August 1983 and subsequently excommunicated him. Much worse, in Ron’s view, Stowe had offered crucial financial assistance to Dianna, via the church, which had allowed her to survive while the divorce was being finalized; and Stowe had also provided a great deal of counseling and emotional succor. Chloe Low had been an uncommonly close friend to both Ron and Dianna for a dozen years. Her husband, Stewart Low, was the bishop of Ron and Dianna’s LDS ward, and had handpicked Ron to be his first counselor in the bishopric. Chloe had long admired the Lafferty family, and she went to Dan for chiropractic treatment when her back gave her trouble. As Ron and Dianna’s marriage began to fall apart, Chloe offered unstinting support to both of them, but when Ron’s behavior grew increasingly monstrous, she came down firmly on Dianna’s side of the fence. Once, when Ron was making life particularly unbearable for Dianna, Chloe invited her and her children to stay in the Low home for four days; on another occasion Chloe took them in for ten days. After the execution of the divorce, Chloe had been there to help Dianna and her kids pack up the shards of their broken lives and move to Florida. As Ron saw it, without Chloe Low’s advocacy and assistance, Dianna would never have had the wherewithal to leave. The greatest portion of Ron’s long-simmering wrath, however, was reserved for Brenda Wright Lafferty—Allen’s smart, beautiful, headstrong wife—whom Ron regarded as being instrumental in persuading Dianna to abandon him. Rejected by his wife, scorned by his community, Ron poured himself completely into the School of the Prophets. It became his family, his life, his world. Much of Ron’s time with the school was occupied by expediting the shipping of the pamphlets to LDS leaders, urging them to abandon their ungodly path. But the school’s main thrust, as Onias had conceived it, was to teach the faithful how to receive and interpret revelations from God, and as the winter of 1984 edged toward spring, Ron began receiving this instruction in earnest. On February 24, Ron became the first of Onias’s students to take delivery of a commandment from the Almighty. Sitting at a computer he’d borrowed from Bernard Brady, Ron closed his eyes and waited until he felt the spirit of the Lord cause a finger to depress a key, and then another, and another.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Touched by Pratt’s kindness, Eleanor fell in love with him, abandoned her husband, left her three children in the care of her mother, and then found passage to Salt Lake City working as a cook for a party of Mormon emigrants. Although Eleanor remained legally married to Hector McLean, in Deseret Brigham sealed her to Parley Pratt for time and eternity, making her the twelfth of the apostle’s plural wives. In 1856, while Pratt was in St. Louis doing missionary work, she returned to New Orleans and absconded with her three children, inducing murderous rage in her first husband, who blamed Pratt for wrecking his marriage. McLean set out in hot pursuit of Pratt and managed to intercept a letter from Pratt to Eleanor in which the apostle described his plans to meet her on the Arkansas River. Armed with this information, and working in cahoots with a federal marshal who hated Mormons, McLean had Pratt arrested and jailed in Van Buren, Arkansas. The non-Mormon magistrate assigned to hear the case quickly saw that the charges against Pratt were without merit. Concerned that the Mormon apostle would be lynched by vigilantes if he remained locked up, the brave magistrate surreptitiously released Pratt, but McLean was notified immediately by jailhouse spies. The obsessed McLean and two accomplices tracked Pratt down twelve miles outside of Van Buren, where they stabbed him, shot him for good measure, and then left him by the side of the road to slowly bleed to death. Afterward, McLean boasted that killing Parley Pratt was “the best act of my life,” and he was cheered as a hero across western Arkansas for the deed. He was never arrested or charged with any crime. After her husband’s death, Eleanor Pratt gradually made her way back toward Utah, destitute and dispirited. On the trail near Fort Laramie, she crossed paths with Porter Rockwell, who gave her a ride to Great Salt Lake City as he hurried to inform Brigham, on Pioneer Day, of the invading army. About the time the Fancher wagon train was crossing the border into Utah Territory, Eleanor delivered a detailed account of her husband’s murder to the leaders of the church. Her report heaped blame on the entire state of Arkansas and implored the Saints to avenge Parley’s innocent blood. On August 3, 1857, the same day the Fancher train arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley, Apostle George A. Smith (first cousin to Joseph Smith), who held the rank of general in the Nauvoo Legion, rode out of Great Salt Lake City in a carriage bound for southern Utah. Six years earlier, General Smith had led the settlement of this distant corner of the territory. * The Saints who had colonized the region under his direction were known to be the most fanatical in all of Mormondom.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  An editorial in the Nauvoo paper declared, “The murderers can rest assured that their case, independent of earthly tribunals, will be tried by the Supreme Judge of the universe, who has said vengeance is mine and I will repay.” A month later, on the first anniversary of Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham spoke bitterly of the trial verdict and proclaimed that “it belongs to God and his people to avenge the blood [of His] servants.” Toward this end, he instructed church authorities to issue a formal “Oath of Vengeance,” which was immediately made part of the temple endowment ceremony, one of the church’s most sacred rituals. The oath required Mormons to pledge, “I will pray, and never cease to pray, and never cease to importune high heaven to avenge the blood of the Prophets on this nation, and I will teach this to my children, and my children’s children unto the third and fourth generations.” This solemn vow to take vengeance was recited by every Latter-day Saint who participated in the standard temple ritual until it was removed from the endowment ceremony in 1927, after the oath was leaked to the non-Mormon press, sparking an outcry from politicians and the Gentile public that it was treasonous. In the months following Joseph’s murder, most residents of Nauvoo didn’t need any prodding to seek revenge against Gentiles. Ever since the assassination, non-Mormons had stepped up their violent campaign to drive the Saints from Hancock County. Emboldened by the acquittal of Joseph’s killers, throughout the summer of 1845 anti-Mormon vigilantes led by Levi Williams (the primary defendant in the murder trial) roamed the county setting fire to Mormon homes and farms. By September 15, 1845, forty-four Mormon residences had been burned to the ground. On September 16, Porter Rockwell was on his way to help a Mormon family salvage possessions from the ruins of one such incinerated home when he chanced upon Lieutenant Frank Worrell of the Carthage Greys—the same man who had been in charge of guarding the jail on the evening Joseph was murdered. Worrell had commanded the militiamen who’d conspired to fire blank cartridges at the approaching mob and had then stepped aside so the vigilantes could assassinate the prophet without impediment. When Rockwell encountered Worrell on that September afternoon, the latter was on horseback, chasing a local sheriff who’d had the temerity to express sympathy for the Mormons. As Worrell galloped after the terrified sheriff, Rockwell fired a rifle ball into Worrell’s gut. The victim “jumped four feet in the air,” said a witness to the shooting, “and rolled away from his horse dead.” The killing of Worrell significantly worsened relations between the Saints and their adversaries. A few days later, a band of Mormons captured a youthful Gentile man named McBracking, whom they suspected of burning Mormon homes. McBracking begged for his life, but the Saints weren’t in a forgiving mood.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She was our neighbour too, which made it more awkward, and not only that—her position in the county—oh, Ralph, you must help me, I’m completely bewildered. How on earth does one answer this sort of thing? It’s quite mad—I believe the girl’s half mad herself.’ And she handed him Stephen’s letter. He read it slowly, and as he did so his weak little eyes grew literally scarlet—puffy and scarlet all over their lids, and when he had finished reading that letter he turned and spat on the ground. Then Ralph’s language became a thing to forget; every filthy invective learnt in the slums of his youth and later on in the workshops, he hurled against Stephen and all her kind. He called down the wrath of the Lord upon them. He deplored the non-existence of the stake, and racked his brains for indecent tortures. And finally: ‘I’ll answer this letter, yes, by God I will! You leave her to me, I know how I’m going to answer this letter!’ Angela asked him, and now her voice shook: ‘Ralph, what will you do to her—to Stephen?’ He laughed loudly: ‘I’ll hound her out of the county before I’ve done—and with luck out of England; the same as I’d hound you out if I thought that there’d ever been anything between you two women. It’s damned lucky for you that she wrote this letter, damned lucky, otherwise I might have my suspicions. You’ve got off this time, but don’t try your reforming again—you’re not cut out to be a reformer. If there’s any of that Lamb of God stuff wanted I’ll see to it myself and don’t you forget it!’ He slipped the letter into his pocket, ‘I’ll see to it myself next time—with an axe!’ Angela turned and went out of the study with bowed head. She was saved through this great betrayal, yet most strangely bitter she found her salvation, and most shameful the price she had paid for her safety. So, greatly daring, she went to her desk and with trembling fingers took a sheet of paper. Then she wrote in her large, rather childish handwriting: ‘Stephen—when you know what I’ve done, forgive me.’ CHAPTER 27 1 T wo days later Anna Gordon sent for her daughter. Stephen found her sitting quite still in that vast drawing-room of hers, which as always smelt faintly of orris-root, beeswax and violets. Her thin, white hands were folded in her lap, closely folded over a couple of letters; and it seemed to Stephen that all of a sudden she saw in her mother a very old woman—a very old woman with terrible eyes, pitiless, hard and deeply accusing, so that she could but shrink from their gaze, since they were the eyes of her mother. Anna said: ‘Lock the door, then come and stand here.’

• From Trash (1988)

  My aunt, like my mama, understood everything, expected nothing, and watched her own life like a terrible fable from a Sunday-morning sermon. It was the perspective that all those women shared, the view that I could not, for my life, accept. I believed, I believed with all my soul that death was behind it, that death was the seed and the fruit of that numbed and numbing attitude. More than anything else, it was my anger that had driven me away from them, driven them away from me—my unpredictable, automatic anger. Their anger, their hatred, always seemed shielded, banked and secret, and because of that—shameful. My uncles were sudden, violent, and daunting. My aunts wore you down without ever seeming to fight at all. It was my anger that my aunts thought queer, my wild raging temper they respected in a boy and discouraged in a girl. That I slept with girls was curious, but not dangerous. That I slept with a knife under my pillow and refused to step aside for my uncles was more than queer. It was crazy. Aunt Alma’s left eye twitched, and I swallowed my tears, straightened my head, and looked her full in the face. I could barely hold myself still, barely return her look. Again those twin emotions, the love and the outrage that I’d always felt for my aunt, warred in me. I wanted to put out my hand and close my fingers on her hunched, stubborn shoulder. I wanted to lay my head there and pull tight to her, but I also wanted to hit her, to scream and kick and make her ashamed of herself. Nothing was clean between us, especially not our love. Between my mama and Aunt Alma there were five other sisters. The most terrible and loved was Bess, the one they swore had always been so smart. From the time I was eight Aunt Bess had a dent in the left side of her head—a shadowed dent that emphasized the twitch of that eye, just like the twitch Aunt Alma has, just like the twitch I sometimes get, the one they tell me is nerves. But Aunt Bess wasn’t born with that twitch as we were, just as she wasn’t born with that dent. My uncle, her husband, had come up from the deep dust on the road, his boots damp from the river, picking up clumps of dust and making mud, knocking it off on her steps, her screen door, her rug, the back rung of a kitchen chair. She’d shouted at him, “Not on my clean floor!” and he’d swung the bucket, river-stained and heavy with crawfish. He’d hit her in the side of the head—dented her into a lifetime of stupidity and half-blindness. Son of a bitch never even said he was sorry, and all my childhood he’d laughed at her, the way she’d sometimes stop in the middle of a sentence and grope painfully for a word.

• From Trash (1988)

  Some of these stories are easily ascribed to rage. “Monkeybites,” “River of Names,” “Her Thighs,” “Muscles of the Mind,” “Demon Lover,” “Steal Away,” “Violence Against Women Begins at Home”—all of them began with me walking back and forth in front of my desk in the dark of night. Sometimes it was a person that had filled me with outrage, but sometimes it was someone else’s story. I had to figure it out. I did it on the page. Reading these stories again, I go back to the time in which they were written. The early women’s movement was a genuinely remarkable moment in history, perhaps most of all because we were all so sure that we were going to change the world. Talking to twenty-year-olds these days, I find it difficult to get them to understand what it was like being part of the early liberation movements that so impacted this country in the sixties and seventies. We were fighting for our lives, I say, and I mean it literally. The life I was meant to have is what I was fighting. I did not want to be a waitress my whole life, to be poor or to come to accept being treated with contempt. I did not want to be ashamed of my family, my sexuality, or myself. I did not want to despair or commit suicide out of hopelessness. One generation back, I can name people who did just that—who despaired and died. They were no fiction. When I talk to young people, I find myself telling very specific stories. I tell them about my first decent job, the one with the Social Security Administration, where I was put on probation and almost fired for wearing pantsuits to the office—tasteful, respectable outfits with high-buttoned white blouses, paired with low heels and nylons, even in that Tallahassee humidity. A shinyhaired eighteen-year-old boy at Stanford laughs and says, “What were they thinking?” What indeed? I tell how when, at twenty-three with my respectable government job, I tried to get a credit card, I was asked to have my stepfather cosign the application. We were never quite adults, I explain, we women. You have no idea how different was the world we set out to change. That was the world in which I began to write these stories. That was the context. Reading them over, I fall back in time and remember the writing of them. I remember working long hours, hurrying home, and napping briefly in order to have the ability to spend more long hours at my desk in the night. I never went after a grant, never believed I could get one. I took it as a given that a woman like me would have to do it the hard way, steal time from my day job, work without an editor or ready reader, and never have any confidence that what I was writing would be anything anyone would want to read. But I never imagined not writing.

• From Trash (1988)

  I couldn’t help myself. I’d sit and listen, open-mouthed and fascinated, while this shining creature went on and on about decapitations. She loved best little children who had fallen in the way of large machines. It was something none of the grown-ups knew a thing about, though once in a while I’d hear a much shorter, much tamer version of one of Shannon’s stories from her mama. At those moments, Shannon would give me a grin of smug pride. Can’t I tell it better? she seemed to be saying. Gradually I admitted to myself what hid behind Shannon’s impassive pink-and-white features. Shannon Pearl simply and completely hated everyone who had ever hurt her, and spent most of her time brooding on punishments either she or God would visit on them. The fire that burned in her eyes was the fire of outrage. Had she been stronger or smarter, Shannon Pearl would have been dangerous. But half-blind, sickly, and ostracized, she was not much of a threat to anyone. “I like your family,” Shannon sometimes said, though we both knew that was a polite lie. “Your mama’s a fine woman,” Roseanne Pearl would agree, while she eyed my too-tight raggedy dresses. She reminded me of my stepfather’s sisters looking at us out of smug, superior faces, laughing at my mama’s loose teeth and my sister’s curls done up in paper scraps. Whenever the Pearls talked about my people, I’d take off and not go back for weeks. I didn’t want the two parts of my life to come together. We were living out past Henderson Road, on the other side of White Horse Highway. Up near the highway a revival tent had been erected. Some evenings I would walk up there on my own to sit outside and listen. The preacher was a shouter, something I had never liked. He’d rave and threaten, and it didn’t seem as if he was ever gonna get to the invocation. I sat in the dark, trying not to think about anything, especially not about the whipping I was going to get if I stayed too long. I kept seeing my Uncle Jack in the men who stood near the highway sharing a bottle in a paper sack, black-headed men with blasted rough-hewn faces. Was it hatred or sorrow that made them look like that, their necks so stiff and their eyes so cold? Did I look like that? Would I look like that when I grew up? I remembered Aunt Grace putting her big hands over my ears and turning my face to catch the light, saying, “Just as well you smart; you an’t never gonna be a beauty.” At least I wasn’t as ugly as Shannon Pearl, I told myself, and was immediately ashamed. Shannon hadn’t made herself ugly, but if I kept thinking that way I just might. Mama always said people could see your soul in your face, could see your hatefulness and lack of charity.

• From Trash (1988)

  On Sundays the counter didn’t open until after church at one o’clock. But at one sharp, we started serving those big gravy lunches and went right on till four. People would come in prepared to sit and eat big—coffee, salad, country-fried steak with potatoes and gravy, or ham with red-eye gravy and carrots and peas. You’d also get a side of hogshead biscuits and a choice of three pies for dessert. Tips were as choice as the pies, but Sunday had its trials. Too often, some tight-browed couple would come in at two o’clock and order breakfast—fried eggs and hash browns. When you told them we didn’t serve breakfast on Sundays, they’d get angry. “Look, girl,” they might say, “just bring me some of that ham you’re serving those people, only bring me eggs with it. You can do that,” and the contempt in their voices clearly added, “Even you.” It would make me mad as sin. “Sir, we don’t cook on the grill on Sundays. We only have what’s on the Sunday menu. When you make up your mind, let me know.” “Tourists,” I’d mutter to Mama. “No, Yankees,” she’d say, and Mabel would nod. Then she might go over with an offer of boiled eggs, that ham, and a biscuit. She’d talk nice, drawling like she never did with friends or me, while she moved slower than you’d think a wide-awake person could. “Uh huh,” she’d say, and “Shore-nuf,” and offer them honey for their biscuits or tell them how red-eye gravy is made, or talk about how sorry it is that we don’t serve grits on Sunday. That couple would grin wide and start slowing their words down, while the regulars would choke on their coffee. Mama never bet on the tip, just put it all into the pot, and it was usually enough to provoke a round of applause after the couple was safely out the door. Mama said nothing about it except the first time when she told me, “Yankees eat boiled eggs for breakfast,” which may not sound like much, but had the force of a powerful insult. It was a fact that the only people we knew who ate boiled eggs in the morning were those stray tourists and people on the TV set who we therefore assumed had to be Yankees.

• From Trash (1988)

  All you ever talk about—you and her and all of you. Like that was the end-all and be-all of everything. Never mind what happens to them once they’re made. That don’t matter. It’s only the getting of them. Like some goddamned crazy religion. Get your mother a grandchild and solve all her problems. Get yourself a baby and forget everything else. It’s what you were born for, the one thing you can do with no thinking about it at all. Only I can’t. To get her a grandchild, I’d have to steal one!” I was wringing my own hands, twisting them together and pulling them apart. Now I swung them open and slapped down at my belly, making my own hollow noise in the room. “No babies in there, aunt of mine, and never going to be. I’m sterile as a clean tin can. That’s what I told Mama, and not to hurt her. I told her because she wouldn’t leave me alone about it. Like you, like all of you, always talking about children, never able to leave it alone.” I was walking back and forth now, unable to stop myself from talking. “Never able to hear me when I warned her to leave it be. Going on and on till I thought I’d lose my mind.” I looked her in the eye, loving her and hating her, and not wanting to speak, but hearing the words come out anyway. “Some people never do have babies, you know. Some people get raped at eleven by a stepfather their mama half hates but can’t afford to leave. Some people then have to lie and hide it ’cause it would make so much trouble. So nobody will know, not the law and not the rest of the family. Nobody but the women supposed to be the ones who take care of everything, who know what to do and how to do it, the women who make children who believe in them and trust in them, and sometimes die for it. Some people never go to a doctor and don’t find out for ten years that the son of a bitch gave them some goddamned disease.” I looked away, unable to stand how gray her face had gone. “You know what it does to you when the people you love most in the world, the people you believe in—cannot survive without believing in—when those people do nothing, don’t even know something needs to be done? When you cannot hate them but cannot help yourself? The hatred grows. It just takes over everything, eats you up and makes you somebody full of hate.” I stopped. The roar that had been all around me stopped, too. The cold was all through me now. I felt like it would never leave me. I heard her move. I heard her hip bump the pool table and make the balls rock. I heard her turn and gather up her purse.

• From Trash (1988)

  “They don’t all hang on the men, you know.” Lenore didn’t even look in my direction. “Twenty tables in there and never less than five of them have women playing each other—some pretty tough-looking women. The men stay out of their way, and that’s nice to see.” “If you ask me there’s no difference between those women and the men in there anyway.” Judy took the bowl of sunflower seeds out of her lap and pushed it at Mona. Her face was twisted in disgust. “There’s always a couple of them punching each other in the arm, arms all ugly with ink tattoos, and their girlfriends in tight skirts sitting up on stools behind them, not daring to say a word. That’s what people think we are when we say we’re dykes, and that’s not what we are at all.” “I like tattoos,” I said, “and I like women who can really play pool, play it well enough to make all those men bite their tongues. They play for money, you know. Some of them pay their way out of what they earn off those boys, and I like that, too.” “Well, I don’t like it.” Judy looked like she was going to spit. “Competition games, swinging those sticks like they were holding swords, carrying knives—they do, you know—it’s a cesspit of violence in there, and they all get off on it. People are always getting beaten up in that parking lot and women get hassled on the sidewalk all the time. I think it should be closed down.” “I think it must be different for you, all of you,” Anna said after a while, carefully not looking in my direction. “When I was your age, places like that were the only way you could find other lesbians. I used to go in there and nod at women I would see nowhere else. There’s a lot of women work down in the paper mills come all the way up here to sit on those stools and watch other women play pool.” “Exactly.” I took another deep breath, trying not to get too angry. “You always talking about class, Judy, the working classes supposed to make the revolution. They’re the ones over there in that parking lot, leaning on tailgates, holding their own meetings.” “It’s not the same thing.” “But maybe we ought to go over there and pass out leaflets some time, invite those women to a dance or something.” Mona put her embroidery down. Her face was flushed and excited. Anna looked uncomfortable. Judy stared directly at me, and I could feel my neck getting hot. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t think what. Lenore cleared her throat and cracked a few sunflower seeds. “I don’t know,” she giggled. “Don’t really feel like playing feminist evangelist to the pool hall set myself.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  I hope Adèle’s filled your hot water bottle; she’s rather light-headed over her Jean.’ ‘Never mind, I can fill it myself,’ smiled Puddle. She went, and Stephen sat on by the fire with her eyes half closed and her lips set firmly. She must put away all these thoughts of the past and compel herself to think of the future. This brooding over things that were past was all wrong; it was futile, weak-kneed and morbid. She had her work, work that cried out to be done, but no more unworthy books must be written. She must show that being the thing she was, she could climb to success over all opposition, could climb to success in spite of a world that was trying its best to get her under. Her mouth grew hard; her sensitive lips that belonged by rights to the dreamer, the lover, took on a resentful and bitter line which changed her whole face and made it less comely. At that moment the striking likeness of her father appeared to have faded out of her face. Yes, it was trying to get her under, this world with its mighty self-satisfaction, with its smug rules of conduct, all made to be broken by those who strutted and preened themselves on being what they considered normal. They trod on the necks of those thousands of others who, for God knew what reason, were not made as they were; they prided themselves on their indignation, on what they proclaimed as their righteous judgments. They sinned grossly; even vilely at times, like lustful beasts—but yet they were normal! And the vilest of them could point a finger of scorn at her, and be loudly applauded. ‘God damn them to hell!’ she muttered. Along in the kitchen there was singing again. The young men’s voices rose tuneful and happy, and with them blended Adèle’s young voice, very sexless as yet, like the voice of a choirboy. Stephen got up and opened the door, then she stood quite still and listened intently. The singing soothed her over-strained nerves as it flowed from the hearts of these simple people.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Stephen stood still in the nursery doorway. She could feel her heart thumping against her side, thumping with anger and pity for Collins who was answering never a word. There she knelt mute, with her brush suspended, with her mouth slightly open and her eyes rather scared; and when at long last she did manage to speak, her voice sounded humble and frightened. She was timid by nature, and the nurse’s sharp tongue was a byword throughout the household. Collins was saying: ‘Interfere with your child? Oh, no, Mrs. Bingham, never! I hope I knows my place better than that—Miss Stephen herself showed me them dirty nails; she said: “Collins, just look, aren’t my nails awful dirty!” And I said: “You must ask Nanny about that, Miss Stephen.” Is it likely that I’d interfere with your work? I’m not that sort, Mrs. Bingham.’ Oh, Collins, Collins, with those pretty blue eyes and that funny alluring smile! Stephen’s own eyes grew wide with amazement, then they clouded with sudden and disillusioned tears, for far worse than Collins’ poorness of spirit was the dreadful injustice of those lies—yet this very injustice seemed to draw her to Collins, since despising, she could still love her. For the rest of that day Stephen brooded darkly over Collins’ unworthiness; and yet all through that day she still wanted Collins, and whenever she saw her she caught herself smiling, quite unable, in her turn, to muster the courage to frown her innate disapproval. And Collins smiled too, if the nurse was not looking, and she held up her plump red fingers, pointing to her nails and making a grimace at the nurse’s retreating figure. Watching her, Stephen felt unhappy and embarrassed, not so much for herself as for Collins; and this feeling increased, so that thinking about her made Stephen go hot down her spine. In the evening, when Collins was laying the tea, Stephen managed to get her alone. ‘Collins,’ she whispered, ‘you told an untruth—I never showed you my dirty nails!’ ‘ ’Course not!’ murmured Collins, ‘but I had to say something—you didn’t mind, Miss Stephen, did you?’ And as Stephen looked doubtfully up into her face, Collins suddenly stooped and kissed her. Stephen stood speechless from a sheer sense of joy, all her doubts swept completely away. At that moment she knew nothing but beauty and Collins, and the two were as one, and the one was Stephen—and yet not Stephen either, but something more vast, that the mind of seven years found no name for. The nurse came in grumbling: ‘Now then, hurry up, Miss Stephen! Don’t stand there as though you were daft! Go and wash your face and hands before tea—how many times must I tell you the same thing?’ ‘I don’t know—’ muttered Stephen. And indeed she did not; she knew nothing of such trifles at that moment.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Toulouse paid a bitter penalty for being the head centre of heresy.1095 According to Innocent III., the larger part of its nobility was infected with heretical depravity, so that heresy was entrenched in castles as well as professed in the villages.1096 The count of Toulouse, the first lay peer of France,—owing fealty to it for Provence and Languedoc,— brought upon himself the full wrath and punishments of the Apostolic see for his unwillingness to join in the wars against his own subjects. A member of the house led one of the most splendid of the armies of the first Crusade to Jerusalem. At the opening of the Albigensian crusades the court of Toulouse

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  These testimonies are found in tracts, manuals for the treatment of heresy, occasional notices of ecclesiastical writers like Salimbene, Vitry, Etienne de Bourbon, Caesar of Heisterbach, or Matthew Paris, in the decrees of synods and in the records of the heresy trials themselves. These last records, written down by Catholic hands, have come down to us in large numbers.942 Interesting as they are, they must be accepted with caution as the statements of enemies. As for Catharan literature, a single piece has survived943 and it is a painful recollection that, where so many suffered the loss of goods, imprisonments, and death for their religious convictions, only a few lines remain in their own handwriting to depict their faith and hopes. The exciting cause of this religious revolt is to be looked for in the worldliness and arrogance of the clergy, the formalism of the Church’s ritual, and the worldly ambitions of the papal policy. In their depositions before the Church inquisitors, the accused called attention to the pride, cupidity, and immorality of the priests. Tanchelm, Henry of Lausanne, and other leaders directed their invectives against the priests and bishops who sought power and ease rather than the good of the people. Underneath all this discontent was the spiritual hunger of the masses. The Bible was not an altogether forgotten book. The people remembered it. Popular preachers like Bernard of Thiron, Robert of Abrissel and Vitalis of Savigny quoted its precepts and relied upon its authority. There was a hankering after the Gospel which the Church did not set forth. The people wanted to get behind the clergy and the ritual of the sacraments to Christ himself, and, in doing so, a large body of the sectaries went to the extreme of abandoning the outward celebration of the sacraments, and withdrew themselves altogether from priestly offices. The aim of all the sects was moral and religious reformation. The Cathari, it is true, differed in a philosophical question and were Manichaeans, but it was not a question of philosophy they were concerned about. Their chief purpose was to get away from the worldly aims of the established church, and this explains their rapid diffusion in Lombardy and Southern France.944 A prominent charge made against the dissenters was that they put their own interpretations upon the Gospels and Epistles and employed these interpretations to establish their own systems and rebuke the Catholic hierarchy. Special honor was given by the Cathari to the Gospel of John, and the Waldensian movement started with an attempt to make known the Scriptures through the vulgar tongue. The humbler classes knew enough about clerical abuses from their own observation; but the complaints of the best men of the times were in the air, and these must also have reached their ears and increased the general restlessness. St. Bernard rebuked the clergy for ambition, pride, and lust. Grosseteste called clerics antichrists and devils.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Protestant Reformers, in their indignation against the Scholastic theology, could not do justice to Thomas Aquinas. Luther went so far as to call his Summa the quintessence of all heresies, meaning papal doctrines. He spoke of him as "the fountain and original soup of all heresy, error, and Gospel havoc,

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Without the context of spiritual marriage, there would be no debate that these are acts of pedophilia. . . . A man committed what amounts to statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl and, basically, won’t serve any time for it. David Leavitt was also dismayed by Green’s lenient sentence. “People in the state of Utah,” he proclaimed, “simply do not understand, and have not understood for fifty years, the devastating effect that the practice of polygamy has on young girls in our society.” But Leavitt went on to say that a change in how polygamy was regarded by Utahans had begun: “The ball is rolling. Time will demonstrate that this society will understand that the practice of polygamy is abusive to children, is abusive to women, is abusive to society.” Leavitt prevailed against Green in court, and he won plaudits from the LDS Church and establishment editorial writers. But like Arizona governor Howard Pyle, who was voted out of office for masterminding the Short Creek raid of 1953, Leavitt discovered that his anti-polygamy crusade was not popular with the people. In November 2002, the voters of Juab County responded to the conviction of Tom Green by giving the boot to prosecutor David Leavitt. Ever since the conviction of the Kingstons—even before Tom Green was first charged with bigamy—Mormon Fundamentalists have received support from the American Civil Liberties Union and gay-rights activists in advancing their claims of religious persecution. It has been an especially curious, and uncomfortable, coalition: FLDS doctrine proclaims that sodomy and homosexuality are egregious crimes against God and nature, punishable by death—yet gays and polygamists have joined forces to keep the government out of the bedroom. This partnership is made even more incongruous by the fact that on the other side of the issue, radical feminists have allied themselves with the resolutely antifeminist LDS Church to lobby for aggressive prosecution of polygamists. * As they have been forced out of the shadows into the probing glare of the news media, polygamists continue to insist that they are simply trying to live in accordance with their deeply held, constitutionally protected beliefs. “What goes on in our homes here is nobody’s business,” asserts Sam Roundy, Colorado City’s polygamous police chief. “We’re not infringing on anybody. Don’t we have the right to practice our religion?” But polygamy is a crime in all fifty states, as well as in Canada, and police officers are sworn to uphold the law. This point became problematic for Chief Roundy on February 6, 2002, when Ruth Stubbs—the third wife of one of his police officers—fled Colorado City with her two children and appeared on the evening news in Phoenix, complaining that she had been beaten by her husband, Rodney Holm, and that polygamy is intrinsically abusive. Ruth, nineteen when she left Holm and visibly pregnant with her third child, had been pulled out of school following the sixth grade.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The end came abruptly as is often the way, and it came when the child was alone in the garden, still miserably puzzling over Collins, who had been avoiding her for days. Stephen had wandered to an old potting-shed, and there, whom should she see but Collins and the footman; they appeared to be talking very earnestly together, so earnestly that they failed to hear her. Then a really catastrophic thing happened, for Henry caught Collins roughly by the wrists, and he dragged her towards him, still handling her roughly, and he kissed her full on the lips. Stephen’s head felt suddenly hot and dizzy, she was filled with a blind, uncomprehending rage; she wanted to cry out, but her voice failed completely, so that all she could do was to splutter. But the very next moment she had seized a broken flower-pot and had hurled it hard and straight at the footman. It struck him in the face, cutting open his cheek, down which the blood trickled slowly. He stood as though stunned, gently mopping the cut, while Collins stared dumbly at Stephen. Neither of them spoke, they were feeling too guilty—they were also too much astonished. Then Stephen turned and fled from them wildly. Away and away, anyhow, anywhere, so long as she need not see them! She sobbed as she ran and covered her eyes, tearing her clothes on the shrubs in passing, tearing her stockings and the skin of her legs as she lunged against intercepting branches. But suddenly the child was caught in strong arms, and her face was pressing against her father, and Sir Philip was carrying her back to the house, and along the wide passage to his study. He held her on his knee, forbearing to question, and at first she crouched there like a little dumb creature that had somehow got itself wounded. But her heart was too young to contain this new trouble—too heavy it felt, too much over-burdened, so the trouble came bubbling up from her heart and was told on Sir Philip’s shoulder.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Mathematics and algebra, Latin and Greek, Roman history, Greek history, geometry, botany, they reduced Stephen’s mind to a species of beehive in which every bee buzzed on the least provocation. She would gaze at Miss Puddleton in a kind of amazement; that tiny, square box to hold all this grim knowledge! And seeing that gaze Miss Puddleton would smile her most warm, charming smile, and would say as she did so: ‘Yes, I know—but it’s only the first effort, Stephen; presently your mind will get neat like the schoolroom, and then you’ll be able to find what you want without all this rummaging and bother.’ But her tasks being over, Stephen must often slip away to visit Raftery in the stables: ‘Oh, Raftery, I’m hating it so!’ she would tell him. ‘I feel like you’d feel if I put you in harness—hard wooden shafts and a kicking strap, Raftery—but my darling, I’d never put you into harness!’ And Raftery would hardly know what he should answer, since all human creatures, so far as he knew them, must run between shafts—God-like though they were, they undoubtedly had to run between shafts. . . . Nothing but Stephen’s great love for her father helped her to endure the first six months of learning—that and her own stubborn, arrogant will that made her hate to be beaten. She would swing clubs and dumb-bells in a kind of fury, consoling herself with the thought of her muscles, and, finding her at it, Miss Puddleton had laughed. ‘You must feel that your teacher’s some sort of midge, Stephen—a tiresome midge that you want to brush off!’ Then Stephen had laughed too: ‘Well, you are little, Puddle—oh, I’m sorry—’ ‘I don’t mind,’ Miss Puddleton had told her; ‘call me Puddle if you like, it’s all one to me.’ After which Miss Puddleton disappeared somehow, and Puddle took her place in the household.