Right, this is the real story behind why this bride from TikTok is so angry

Category is: Rage. All the girlies on TikTok right now are angry— and they’re using a 157-year-old painting to express themselves . More specifically, Auguste Toulmouche’s 1866 painting, The Hesitant Fiancée, which features a woman glaring – pissed off and tired – at its centre.

If a work of art embodied female rage, this is it. But it’s sort of a surprise that a painting more than 15 decades old is one of the biggest memes on TikTok right now. The trend started after a user called @adownif3rta got 6million views and 1million likes in 10 days after creating a slideshow that read: “literally me when I’m right,” soundtracked by the dramatically operatic song Verdi’s Requiem.

And, although The Hesitant Fiancée has done God’s work and allowed us to project our anger over everything from being mansplained at to being told to smile more onto her, there’s an interesting theory about why Toulmouche’s subject was pissed off in the first place, 157 years ago.

So, why is the angry bride from the TikTok trend so pissed off?

Throughout his career, Toulmouche was known for painting rich Parisian women. In The Hesitant Fiancée you can see four women in boujee outfits getting ready and talking, with one, eyes full of venom and breaking the fourth wall, evidently furious. And experts think the woman’s anger is over being set up with a guy she doesn’t like (understandable, tbh).

“She’s actually showing the emotion of not wanting to get married to the person that her obviously wealthy family has picked out,” Therese Dolan, a professor at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture told The New York Times.

The name of the painting also suggests this theory could be true. Because, although it’s widely known as The Hesitant Fiancée, the work’s original title, Un mariage de raison, can also be translated to: The Reluctant Bride. Now the eye-rolling makes sense.

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Featured image credit via TikTok