The shrew figure represents the revenge of subjugated woman against male society

Evidence

The shrew, a fossilized survival of the bourgeois esteem of woman, is invading society today. With her endless nagging she takes revenge in her own home for the misery inflicted upon her sex from time immemorial. If sufficient deference is not shown to her, a cross old woman will continue her scolding outside the house, knocking off the hat of any absentminded individual who neglects to rise in her presence. That whatever happens, his head should roll, she has always demanded in her politics—whether in recollection of the maenadic era or outdoing man and his organization in her helpless fury. The blood-lust a woman displays in a pogrom outdoes that of a man. Subjected woman in the guise of a Fury has survived and still wears the grimace of mutilated nature at a time when our rulers are already busy modeling trained bodies of both sexes, in whose uniformity the grimace disappears. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 257

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the culture industry thesis from the main text — here Adorno extends the domination-of-nature framework to gender. Also resonates with the novel ‘We’ (Zamyatin), where uniformized bodies erase individuality.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that woman’s ugliness and scolding become ‘a sign of humanity’ against the grimace-erasing uniformity of mass-produced bodies inverts the standard feminist reading — the surviving ‘shrew’ is a remnant of unmastered nature, not liberation.
• DEFINE: Adorno’s term ‘grimace of mutilated nature’ — the trace of suffering nature that domination has not yet fully erased — is a key conceptual coinage worth defining precisely.