A History of Transgressive Feminist Literature

If you've read my recent articles, you might have noticed that I over used this aspect that transgressive feminist literature is a type of literature that doesn’t ask permission not does it uplift or behave. Where traditional feminist texts often center empowerment, equality, or visibility, transgressive feminist writing turns inward and downward. Into desire, madness, rage, apathy, addiction, violence. It carves a literary lineage of women who not only resist the systems that repress them but sometimes burn down the very idea of being “good.”

That said, this is not a genre. It’s a literary mode, one that spans centuries, refuses politeness, and centers women not as victims or symbols, but as fully human: erratic, carnal, cunning, cruel, and often deeply unlikable. Here, I would like to review the history of Transgressive Feminist Literature briefly, so we get a better idea of what I'm aiming for these new set of article.

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Ancient Roots

Long before the rise of the novel, myth functioned as a cultural blueprint—and within it, transgressive women appeared not as heroes, but as warnings. These figures rarely embodied feminist ideologies as we understand them today. Yet their presence marks a literary and psychological rupture: women who refused containment, obedience, or redemption.

Medea, from Euripides’ tragedy (Medea, 431 BCE), is perhaps the most archetypal. When her husband, Jason, betrays her, Medea responds not with silence or suicide, but with calculated vengeance: she murders their children. She is not depicted as irrational or mad. On the contrary, she is cold, articulate, and terrifyingly composed—a woman who weaponizes maternal identity to destroy the man who reduced her to it (Euripides, trans. Rex Warner, 1944). Medea doesn’t apologize. She doesn’t beg for sympathy. She reclaims power through annihilation. And in doing so, she unsettles the mythic order built on patriarchal sacrifice.

In Judaic lore, Lilith—Adam’s first wife—is cast out of Eden for refusing to lie beneath him during sex. Unlike Eve, who is created from Adam and tailored for compliance, Lilith demands equality and autonomy. Her rebellion leads to demonization in later rabbinical texts (Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 1967), where she becomes a night-dwelling succubus and child-killer. But beneath the moral panic lies a more enduring metaphor: the woman who refuses male hierarchy is rendered monstrous.

The Greek sirens, enchanting women whose voices lured men to death—are another enduring image of feminine deviance. Their sin is erotic knowledge. Their punishment is eternal isolation. In Homer’s Odyssey, they symbolize the fear of female pleasure as a force that dismantles male progress (Homer, trans. Robert Fagles, 1996).

So too with Salomé, popularized in Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play. Her dance—often read as sexually manipulative—ends in her demand for the head of John the Baptist. Wilde’s Salomé is not a victim but an icon of erotic agency and theatrical violence. She doesn’t cry. She performs desire as spectacle—and is punished for it. Even Antigone, from Sophocles’ tragedy (441 BCE), is often invoked in feminist discourse. Her transgression is political rather than sexual: she buries her brother against the king’s edict, aligning herself with divine law over patriarchal rule (Sophocles, trans. Robert Fagles, 1984). She speaks truth to power and chooses death over silence.

What links these women is a shared disobedience. They transgress the roles written for them. They refuse to behave. They often die but they never submit. They are, in many ways, the literary mothers of the antiheroine. Their stories laid the groundwork for what would later become transgressive feminist literature: narratives that don’t just critique patriarchy, but explode its symbolic architecture.

18th–19th Century

The late Enlightenment and Victorian eras birthed the novel, a form increasingly open to domestic interiors and psychological depth. For women writers, it also became a covert space to voice dissent. Open rebellion was often unpublishable or perilous, so critique came veiled in moralism, metaphor, or madness. Here are some significant examples:

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798) is often overlooked beside her seminal treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), yet its unfinished narrative is more radical in tone. In Maria, the protagonist is unjustly confined to an asylum by her husband—a reflection of how 18th-century English law treated women as legal minors under coverture. Maria’s confinement is not a descent into madness, but the logical consequence of marriage as state-sanctioned captivity (Wollstonecraft, 1798). Her desire for love, her longing for freedom, and her refusal to be silenced form a narrative indictment of patriarchy through fiction. Though incomplete, it remains one of the earliest examples of feminist transgression not framed as mere social critique, but as a personal, embodied rebellion.

“Marriage has bastilled me for life,” Maria writes.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) has often been absorbed into the idea of “strong female characters,” but its quiet transgressions are more subversive than celebrated. Jane is not simply resilient—she is spiritually and erotically defiant. She desires love but not at the cost of selfhood. She turns down wealth, refuses submission, and walks away from Mr. Rochester when he asks her to become his mistress.

But the novel’s most transgressive figure is hidden upstairs: Bertha Mason, Rochester’s Creole wife, locked in the attic. Bertha has become a symbol in feminist criticism—most notably in Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), as the archetype of the woman whose rage, sensuality, and madness must be concealed for the narrative of moral femininity to proceed. Bertha is fire, literally and metaphorically. Her death clears the path for Jane’s socially acceptable return, but her presence haunts the novel as a literary repression of female wildness.

While Émile Zola’s Nana (1880) was written by a man, its legacy in feminist literary history is significant. Nana is a working-class courtesan who ascends Parisian society by seducing and destroying the men who desire her. Zola frames her as both symptom and curse. A product of decadence, yet powerful enough to ruin empires. Critics at the time deemed the novel obscene, with one reviewer calling it “a laboratory of putrefaction” (Zola, 1880). Yet Nana’s transgression is her autonomy and she does not seek redemption, love, or a moral epiphany. She is sexual, manipulative, and destructive—traits typically reserved for male antiheroes. Feminist critics later reclaimed her as a symbol of patriarchal inversion, a woman who weaponizes the very desires designed to consume her (Showalter, 1993).

I'll explore more about this era in a separate article but I'd like to mention other few: Mary Hays’ Emma Courtney pursued intellectual and erotic autonomy at the cost of propriety; Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon exposed aristocratic betrayal through a scandalous, vengeful heroine. George Sand’s Indiana centered a Creole woman torn between obedience and desire, while Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy imprisoned a daughter in a ruin to critique paternal tyranny. In Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon crafted a beautiful bigamist who weaponizes madness to maintain control, and Ouida’s glittering heroines in Strathmore manipulate love and artifice with no moral debt. Anna Kingsford’s dream-stories blurred mysticism with gender rebellion, while Sarah Grand’s Heavenly Twins condemned sexual double standards through illness and defiance. Emily Lawless’ Grania depicted a poor Irish woman governed not by virtue, but by loyalty and rage. These women—on and off the page—rejected the roles written for them, not always to liberate, but simply to live unsanitized, unredeemed, and unforgettable.

In the Gothic tradition, writers like Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818) and Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794) used horror to explore repression, otherness, and the monstrous feminine. Shelley, in particular, redefined creation and authorship itself to write a story about a man who makes life without a woman, and is ultimately destroyed by it. These writers showed that transgression could be whispered just as powerfully as it could be screamed.

Early 20th Century

The early 20th century, the rise of modernism, changed the neat conventions of narrative and identity. For women writers, it became a portal, not simply to explore mental instability or existential collapse, but to politicize the internal. Emotional breakdown, once dismissed as hysteria, was reclaimed as narrative resistance. Madness was no longer a diagnosis—it was a language.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is a great example that remains a foundational text in this tradition. Based on Gilman’s own experience with the infamous “rest cure” prescribed to women diagnosed with neurasthenia, the story follows a woman confined to a room by her physician-husband. As she obsessively studies the wallpaper, she begins to see a woman trapped behind it—an image that mirrors her own psychic imprisonment. Her so-called madness is not regression but rebellion. “I’ve got out at last,” she declares in the final lines, crawling over her fainted husband. It is a literary jailbreak, where the breakdown is not failure, but the only available form of protest (Gilman, 1892).

"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) performs a radical act of resurrection that gives voice to Bertha Mason, the so-called “madwoman in the attic” from Jane Eyre. Set in post-emancipation Jamaica, Rhys repositions Bertha, here renamed Antoinette, as a Creole woman destabilized by colonial disinheritance, racial ambiguity, and emotional abandonment. Her madness becomes a product not of female excess, but of patriarchal and imperial fragmentation (Rhys, 1966). Rhys does not redeem Bertha—she renders her legible, contradictory, and human.

In Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936), structure itself begins to collapse. The novel rejects linearity, clarity, or resolution. Its women(Nora, Robin, Jenny) move through a shadowed Europe in search of connection but often sink into erotic obsession, grief, and self-destruction. Robin, in particular, drifts from one relationship to another, ghost-like and ungraspable, enacting a kind of slow disintegration that defies psychological labeling. As Dr. Matthew O’Connor puts it: “the truth lies in the ruin.” Nightwood refuses to explain its women or cure them. Instead, it insists that ruin can be exquisite, even illuminating (Barnes, 1936).

Mid-20th Century

In the mid-20th century, my favorite era, we saw women’s literature shift from polite resistance to a mode of confessional rage. Between the 1950s and 1970s, a wave of writers abandoned the feminine ideals of resilience, domesticity, and redemptive suffering. For them, pain, protest, and violence are sometimes literal, sometimes linguistic. These were no longer heroines in distress. These were narrators at war with expectation itself.

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) is emblematic of this turn inward and downward. It's the book that inspired me to write Us, Women recently. Through the character of Esther Greenwood, Plath charts a descent into mental illness. This is not a moral failure, but somehow it's a revolt. Esther is a high-achieving young woman in a world that offers her only one future: To be a wife, mother, or dead.

“I felt very still and very empty,” she says, as she slips beneath the surface of polite American girlhood (Plath, 1963).

Her breakdown is not merely personal, it is a scathing critique of mid-century gender scripts and psychiatric patriarchy. The “bell jar” becomes the metaphor for a society that traps women in their own clarity.

I read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) during a course for my Creative Writing Post Grad Diploma and I loved how wonderfully it's written, it's rageful and angry yet soft spoken and classically feminine. This story defines virginity not as virtue, but as a baited trap, and violence becomes a tool of self-authorship. In her revisionist fairy tales, the heroines are not rescued but they rescue themselves or destroy the entire narrative. In “The Company of Wolves,” Red Riding Hood seduces and kills the wolf. In “The Bloody Chamber,” the bride outwits the Bluebeard figure. Carter rewrites stories of innocence and punishment into allegories of blood, sex, and sovereignty. “She was a wild thing,” Carter writes, “a piece of my own heart” (Carter, 1979).

Valerie Solanas, in SCUM Manifesto (1967) authored a voice that would echo across decades of feminist transgression.

“The male is a biological accident.”

She proposed as the total overthrow of patriarchy through irony, extremity, and refusal (Solanas, 1967). Her screed is often dismissed as parody or madness. But its tone is unapologetic, polarizing, unrelenting and it helped birth a new lexicon of feminist rage, unfit for institutions and uninterested in persuasion. At the same time, Toni Morrison was disrupting another set of narratives: those that tied Black womanhood to endurance and silence. In Beloved (1987), Morrison tells the story of Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman who murders her infant daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured into bondage. It is a moral nightmare but Morrison refuses the reader any easy judgment. Sethe’s act is a political choice made in a context where motherhood and freedom are made incompatible (Morrison, 1987). The transgression here is maternal.

1990s–2000s

By the end of the 20th century, gone were the redemptive arcs and strong female leads of earlier decades. In their place emerged the antiheroine: unlikable, brutal, and uninterested in growth. Take Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997). It detonated the boundary between fiction, memoir, theory, and erotics. Written as a series of letters to an indifferent academic named “Dick,” Kraus uses the figure of obsession to expose how female desire is pathologized and trivialized in both art and life. Her protagonist is married, professionally diminished, and intellectually restless, but instead of collapsing in shame, she makes her longing the project itself.

“Who gets to speak, and why?” she asks (Kraus, 1997).

The text was dismissed as narcissistic and absurd upon release, only to be reclaimed decades later as a feminist classic. In Kraus’s hands, female obsession is no longer a private humiliation but it is a public, political act.

Another is Mary Gaitskill which is the high priestess of discomfort. In Bad Behavior (1988) and Veronica (2005), her women are morally ambiguous, sexually ambivalent, and often complicit in their own degradation. Her characters sleep with men they do not like, endure abuse without dramatics, and want things they cannot name. In “Secretary,” a young woman begins a BDSM relationship with her employer, not as a means of liberation but as a ritual of control and consent complicated by emotional numbness. In Veronica, the narrator reflects on youth, AIDS, and exploitation with a voice that is both cold and elegiac. These women do not heal or overcome. Their stories remain open wounds. As Gaitskill writes, “pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward” (Gaitskill, 2005). She refuses the moral scaffolding that usually props up female suffering.

Released in 2000 and adapted from her 1993 novel (love this book), Virginie Despentes’ Baise-moi (Rape Me) ripped through the early 2000s like a Molotov cocktail thrown into feminist discourse. Following two women, Manu, a sex worker, and Nadine, a porn actress, who goes on a violent killing spree after Manu is gang-raped, the film (and book) shattered expectations around victimhood, agency, and revenge. Again, there is no healing arc. No empowerment narrative. No “strong female lead.” Instead, it offers raw, unflinching nihilism in response to systemic misogyny. Critics called it pornographic, obscene, and irresponsible. But what made it threatening wasn’t sex or blood. It was its refusal to moralize female rage. As Despentes later wrote in King Kong Theory (2006),

“A chick who’s had enough doesn’t transform into a nun. She becomes a wolf.”

In Baise-moi, that wolf drives faster. Shoots louder. And never once looks back.

I can say that this era marked a shift in how women could be depicted. Feminine subjectivity was no longer required to be moral or aspirational. Instead, it could be contradictory, even grotesque. These women were aware, often clinically so, of the stories they refused to tell. The narrative of overcoming gave way to aestheticized inertia, where survival looked less like triumph and more like endurance.

2010s–Now

In the last decade, transgressive feminist literature has no longer coded in allegory or buried beneath gothic ruins, the rage is explicit. It no longer asks permission. It is not tempered by likability, nor softened for mainstream comfort. These are not heroines seeking healing or redemption. They are narrators who dare you to look, then refuse to explain themselves. And I love it. I love to read it, to write it.

In Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), the unnamed narrator is a wealthy, beautiful Columbia grad who decides to sedate herself for a year. Nope, she’s not broken, she’s just bored, grieving, and repulsed by the hollowness of post-9/11 consumer culture. Her inertia is not collapse and it’s a slow, curated erasure of expectation. There is no lesson. No rise from the ashes. and for her “sleep felt productive.” (Moshfegh, 2018). It's a resistance to healing. Another good example is Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation (2021). This is about a female narrator whose self-worth is annihilated by desire. She stays with a man who humiliates and diminishes her and it's not because she doesn’t see it, but because she does and she documents the disintegration. Why does she want to disappear? Why does pain feel like intimacy? There is no feminist rallying cry at the end. It's just a body, a voice, and a brutal honesty (Nolan, 2021).

Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019) is a kinda memoir, very postmodern in my opinion. Using speculative fiction, fairy tale motifs, and genre-bending fragments, Machado recounts her experience of abuse in a queer relationship. The narrative is kaleidoscopic and recursive, refusing to tidy its trauma.

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.” (Machado, 2019).

Machado reclaims queerness from purity politics and gives it back its teeth.

Let's talk about Leïla Slimani’s Adèle (2014). The protagonist is a Parisian wife and mother with a compulsive need for anonymous sex. Her addiction is clinical, cold, and often cruel. She lies, abandons her child, detaches from intimacy. She doesn’t want help. She wants annihilation. “She wasn’t trying to be happy,” Slimani writes. “Only to feel less” (Slimani, 2014). Very similar to one of my characters in Us, Women. Adèle snatches the concept of sex addiction from the male literary imagination and rewrites it in high-definition female alienation.

Learn more about this book here

Other authors of the last decade have pushed the form even further can be Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021) turns maternal rage into body horror. Elisa Victoria’s Oldladyvoice (2019) centers a precocious, foul-mouthed girl in Franco-era Spain whose curiosity about sex, death, and power is met with discomfort by adults. Isabel Waidner’s Sterling Karat Gold (2021) blends queer surrealism with working-class rage, following a genderqueer protagonist navigating systemic violence with absurdist humor and raw defiance. And Natasha Brown’s Assembly (2021) compresses racial and gendered rage into just over 100 pages. A high-achieving Black British woman narrates her psychological withdrawal from white capitalist structures.

What Makes It All “Transgressive Feminism”?

Feminist literature centers liberation. Transgressive Feminism centers truth.

• It refuses resolution.

• It values emotional honesty over likability.

• It does not punish its characters into moral growth.

• It sees rage, desire, apathy, and contradiction as legitimate narrative engines.

Where mainstream feminism often demands women be powerful in digestible ways (very again male oriented) entrepreneurial, sexual-but-safe, self-loving, publicly healed, transgressive feminism asks what if she didn’t want to be saved or healed or improved? It’s the difference between a trauma-to-triumph story and a woman crawling out of the wreckage with no interest in explaining herself. To write this kind of woman is a risk. Publishers want catharsis. Audiences want closure. But women writers today are choosing discomfort, breaking the traditional norms of storytelling and womanhood. They are writing female antiheroes who are not sorry.

This form of literature matters because it refuses to sanitize female experience. It gives space to rage, contradiction, cruelty, and desire without requiring redemption or moral clarity. To be human like men do since the dawn of time. It’s been called anti-feminist by some feminists because its heroines often reject empowerment narratives, embrace self-destruction, or perpetuate harm, seeming to betray “progress.” But that’s precisely its feminist power: it insists that women be written as fully human, not role models. So, in my opinion, it doesn’t betray feminism, it confronts its limits.