The Nag Trope - It’s Time To Write It Out

Many iconic onscreen relationships are made up of three characters: a man, his wife, and her nagging. The henpecked husband traverses centuries and genres, but why, after decades of feminism, is the nagging wife a character we still accept?

The “nag” in film and TV has some common patterns:

She’s often with a guy who’s kind of mediocre — not as driven or smart or organized as she is.

She might be cast as materialistic, and pushes her husband to strive for more success than he actually wants.

She’s frequently unfaithful, or painted as generally having bad values .

She’s typically middle-aged or older, not framed as especially appealing.

She’s not afraid to raise her voice.

And even if what she asks of her partner is actually pretty reasonable, her tone or the incessantness of her demands is played as insufferably annoying. Thus she can serve as a kind of emotional “scapegoat” allowing viewers to excuse her male partner’s blatantly irresponsible behavior.

Increasingly, stories from the nag’s perspective explore how she’s often an overstretched wife and mom juggling a lot and carrying an intense mental load, while feeling let down by a partner who’s not committing the same effort or showing her due respect.

Here’s our Take on where “the nag” comes from, what we learn from hearing her side, and why it’s time to finally write her out of the story.

The History of the Nag: A folkloric cliche

The shrew character has cropped up in stories for millennia; she even appears in the Bible, in Proverbs 21.9 - ‘It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a quarrelsome wife.’ Perhaps her best known historic appearance is in Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew, whose plot centers on the attempt to break in an unruly wife and putting an end to her quarrelsome ways. At the time Shakespeare was writing, the stock ‘shrew’ character was often conflated with a witch.

Historian Louise Jackson writes that some women punished for witchcraft were also condemned as ‘scolds’; she documents one who was persecuted for witchcraft because (quote) “instead of fulfilling the expected role of a ‘good’ wife and mother, she had been cursing and shouting at her husband and children.’ In the 1950s and 60s, as white-collar work overtook blue-collar employment for the first time in US history, the American domestic ideal became the Company Man with his picture-perfect housewife keeping everything running behind him.

Countering the housewife ideal, starting in the 1960s second-wave feminism also gained momentum, with women becoming increasingly empowered in and outside of the home. As a result, this era is where the nag really emerges in earnest; she’s a symbol that exists to put women back in their place.

https://the-take.com/watch/the-nag-trope-its-time-to-write-it-out

As I was reading this, the show "Everybody Loves Raymond" comes to mind.