THE LAST DINNER PARTY'S FEMININE URGE

In A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf qualifies Emily and Charlotte Bronte’s writings as too driven by anger in comparison to Austen’s « perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use. »

This comment is rather interesting in an essay that tackles female literary works’ often hostile critical and public reception. Indeed, it implicitly demands that women writers be reasonable about their anger, or at least not let it be the sole motive of their creative streak while still acknowledging the often awful conditions they have to work in and that justify that so-called anger . The Last Dinner Party however, do not want to be reasonable about their anger. 

The Last Dinner Party's debut album Prelude to Ecstasy reads like both a love letter and a bitter homage to girlhood. It is delicate at times, exploring fields of cotton candy female gentleness in its tender piano notes but also full of what sounds like a deep sorrow, a fulminating rage that takes shape in anguished guitar solos and singer Abigail Morris' theatrical voice. But what is the source of this so-called rage? 

The song The Feminine Urge gives us an answer. The song is reminiscent of laying in bed as a teenage girl with nothing to do but to stare at the white ceiling - "mastering the art of lying still" and entertaining "the boys" because we can. The scenery is lost somewhere between pale rose ballet flats long abandoned while moving into adolescence and biblical scenes of dying monarchs and agonizing saints. 

It begins with a mesmerizing portrait of a lady, immobile in her luxurious Victorian clothes, signifying a lavish lifestyle, glassy eyes, and a clear expression of boredom somewhere between the forehead and the curls. It might begin like a Jane Austen novel. But it is also filled with bitterness, a wry and disillusioned rage that separates it from the sometimes cold irony of the British author.

It is indisputably and unapologetically angry. It speaks of decay, the dying youth, and, the long-gone purity of childhood, "the innocence of female flesh not yet given over to hairiness and blood."* 

It is an almost sinful passage into adulthood that causes confusion and fury. In The feminine Urge, we are taken to a Suspiria-esque dance studio where ballerinas (yet another symbol of stereotypical feminine delicacy) try desperately to get better - better at dancing, better-looking, smile more, look happy - but fail and fall every time. 

It eventually ends like a catastrophe movie: Abigail Morris is throwing plates on which she dances screaming and laughing as if they were the ruins of who she once was and Georgia Davies - the bassist - is peeling off a glass skin makeup inspired by Pat Mcgrath's work on Maison Margiela's 2024 Couture Runway while we slowly get to discover that the keyboardist Aurora Nishevci's character, a mad chef d'orchestre, was conducting music to an empty crowd. 

The message is explicit and biting: it reminds of Woolf's comment on how the worst that a male artist could ever encounter is critical indifference whereas women are constantly face to face with hostility. But it also sings female rage in an eye-rolling irony rather than self-loathe about it. It is refreshing because it does not tiptoe around the facts. "Oh, pull your boots up, boys, and push me down", Morris jokes as if expecting the action to deploy anyway. 

She's half amused, half-bored with the ongoing scheme of it all, the redundancy and unoriginality of the patriarchal plot as she later sings "Here comes the feminine urge, I know it so well". But this rage, this so-called feminine urge also serves as a gate to express vulnerability at its most shameful. The singer transforms into a "dark red liver stretched out on the rocks", a decaying organ to plain sight and talks of nurturing the open wounds her mother before her already held. 

However, the agony, no matter how strong, how awful, remains glorious, stretched out on the rocks, basking in the sun as if to get rid of the shameful sin, to erase it with the pain. The Feminine Urge is therefore deeply cathartic. It reappropriates a rock sound in the same way the Riot Grrrl movement reappropriated punk in the 1990s.

The Last Dinner Party does not only use music as a medium: the lyrics and the instruments work in unison, both with purpose and intent. As the song ends, the entire band joins in an almost choir-like harmony that echoes how universal the depicted experience is as we get lost in the beautiful chaos. Yet again, the parallels with a ballerina are striking: the characters that the band embodies throughout the song are straight out of a Degas painting: fragile little dancers fixed in their gracious yet seemingly painful immobility, deflowering to puberty as they submit to the viewer's perverted voyeurism, to the "weight of it all" - "all" alluding to the systemic oppression, the psychological and physical weight of it all. 

Finally, no matter the despair, Abigail sings in a last chorus: 

" Give me that dark red liquor stretched out on the rocks, All the poison I convert it and I turn it to love, "

A claim that she's ready to live through it all, that she has seen it all and that the world won't break her anymore. She embodies the feminine urge and sways in its disparaged depravity. This is who she is. This is who women are and they shouldn't be ashamed of it, shouldn't be ashamed of being angry, of saying that they're angry when they could bask in the rage, feel it, transform it even: into creation, into writing, into love.

*: Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985