The furious housekeeper:Rage in the works of Martha Nussbaum and Magda Szabó

In her philosophical work, Martha Nussbaum studies the role and value of emotions, including anger, by using fiction as extended experience. In line with her own approach, this article examines the ontological and moral value of anger in Martha Nussbaum’s philosophy, against the background of examples of female rage in The Door, the famous novel of the Hungarian novelist Magda Szabó. It argues that Nussbaums cognitive account of emotions is only partly fit to explain and understand the main characters outbursts of anger. Some aspects of their rage only seem to be fully comprehensible with a non-exclusively cognitive account of anger. By contrasting Nussbaum’s prescriptive account of anger, according to which anger is always morally problematic, with two other philosophical perspectives on emotions, those of Jesse Prinz and Matthew Ratcliffe, it arguse that it falls short as an analysis of the experience and the moral value of anger