From "Sacrificing Extremity" by Bronfen

Woman is bitter as gall
(said Prosper Merimee in his novella 'Carmen'; picture above)

suggest woman to be venomous, peevish, bitter; a source of vexation, irritation and exasperation; gall also denotes a plant tumour caused by parasites and suggests woman as parasitic, cancerous and generally a 'danger to the healthy and normal order of the community (as a body); connected to the humours, woman is also melancholy and anger this is the C19th women in the mainstream discourse.

it's so textually and metaphorically alive and yet so deadening and hopeless, cutting half the population to the quick with one poisonous stab.

i read on....