At the end of Hamlet, on a stage littered with corpses, Fortinbras enters with drums and colors asking: “Where is this sight?” Horatio responds with a question: “What is it you would see?”

It is the question that inspired us to write this book, a question we asked one another and ourselves in the course of teaching a seminar on gender issues in the psychology and politics of democratic societies, a question that came into sharp focus as we became aware of a darkness, visible but repeatedly obscured. The image comes from Milton, from Book I of Paradise Lost: “No light, but rather darkness visible/ Serv'd only to discover sights of woe.” It is also the title of W. R. Johnson's remarkable study of Vergil's Aeneid, where he traces Vergil's use of “blurred images” and profound uncertainties to reveal the underside of heroism and glory, and of William Styron's haunting memoir of his struggle with depression. In all these works, we find echoes of our theme. Our title conveys our impression that this darkness is now deepening, posing a threat to democracy's future, but we also were inspired by Freud, who writes in a letter to Lou Andreas Salome of his need to deepen the darkness so as to see what has faint light to it. We embarked on our study of loss and patriarchy in this spirit, with an eye to discerning the shoots of ethical resistance.