Rhetoric of women aggression: the experience of analysis of artistic texts of the new age

The article is devoted to the rhetoric of women aggression in the visual arts and literature. Aggression was sufficiently studied as a phenomenon. Description of women aggression in artistic texts, although quite common, was not sufficiently studied. A woman deprived of her voice in a patriarchal society was mythologized: her image in the process of this mythologization received the traits of the mother of all living things and simultaneously of the bloody goddess of death. Women were credited with weakness, irrationality, cunning, cruelty. This is the archaic fear of men, expressed in the fact that women qualities were attributed to the enemies. All these stereotypes reiterate in European culture and emerge from certain archetypes. Oswald Spengler and Otto Weininger predicted the feminization of civilization. The anthropomorphism of thinking endows biological and social phenomena with female traits: thus Gustave Le Bon sees the female character in the revolutionary crowd, and Charles Lombroso sees in crimes committed by women the features of heredity and physiology. It is a common tradition, that artists and writers furnish the allegories of revolutions, victories and angry rebellious crowd with female traits, women appearing bloodthirsty, leading both to victory and to death. Historical shocks contribute to the emancipation of the masses and are often accompanied not only by male but also by female aggression, which shock the society, that habitually perceives a woman as a weaker and gentler sex.