Meaning:
An obsessive and dangerous female, in pursuit of a lover who has spurned her.
Background:
The expression `bunny boiler' derives from the 1987 film Fatal Attraction,
written by James Dearden and Nicholas Meyer. The plot centres around Alex
Forrest (Glenn Close) obsessively pursuing her ex-lover Dan Gallagher
(Michael Douglas). The phrase comes from the plot device whereby Forrest, in
a fit of frenzied jealousy, boils her erstwhile lover's daughter's pet
rabbit. Gallagher's suspicions should have become aroused earlier, when
Forrest was trying to persuade him to meet her, and she said "Bring the dog,
I love animals... I'm a great cook."
At the time that the phrase first came into general use it referred to
someone unable to remain rational at the end of a romantic relationship. Very
quickly that usage became moderated and it came to be used, often with some
degree of irony, in much less extreme situations. Any needy, possessive or
even just mildly annoying woman is now liable to be described as a `bunny
boiler'.
One of the more evocative phrases that has established itself in the language
in recent years.
The phrase is the modern equivalent of the woman referred to in the
expression `Hell has no fury like a woman scorned` which, in the competition
for `best-known phrases attributed to Shakespeare that were actually by
someone else', runs `music has charms to soothe the savage breast` into a
close second place. Both these phrases were coined by William Congreve in
1697, in the play The Mourning Bride. For reasons that I'll leave others to
explain, it is only women who are thought to become unhinged by being what is
now graphically known as `being dumped'. There's no male equivalent of `a
women scorned' or a `bunny boiler'.
As `bunny boiler' is a recent phrase with such a clear source we are able to
trace how it has found its way into popular use. It wasn't directly from the
film, as the epithet isn't used in the dialogue or in any of the advertising
blurb used to promote it. As to who coined it, that's not clear, although it
may well have been Glenn Close. The first use of it in print is from an
interview Close gave to the US magazine the Ladies' Home Journal, reported in
the Dallas Morning News on 6th December 1990:
"There's nothing like portraying a psychopathic bunny-boiler to boost one's
self-esteem, Glenn Close tells Ladies' Home Journal."
Popular phrases that have found their way into the language since the
emergence of the Internet appear first in online discussion groups, blogs and
online newspapers. The earliest large archive of online colloquial messages
is that of USENET groups, but `bunny boiler' isn't found there until 1994,
nor does it appear more than once or twice in the archives of US or British
newspapers before that date.
The section of the public that most enthusiastically adopted the term into
its language was street-wise young adults - not a group that would normally
be expected to read the Ladies' Home Journal. The phrase became a commonplace
on TV reality shows and soap operas; for example, in an August 2004 piece by
Danielle Lawler and Emma Cox about the UK TV show Big Brother, headed Big
Brother: Bunny Boiler,we find:
And the love-struck Geordie has already warned her boyfriend Stuart
Wilson's army of female fans to stay away. She hissed: "I can be an
extremely jealous girlfriend ... and Stu won't even be looking at another
girl when he comes out. I can see how people think I'm a bunny boiler."
If the phrase were a commercial product then marketing people would say that
it reached its target audience in 1994. It certainly saw a sudden and
widespread use from then onwards and became a commonly used phrase. Fatal
Attraction was released in 1987 and Close referred to the phrase in 1990.
Newly coined terms appear to spread in the community like viruses and, like
flu viruses, they float around in the populace until they reach a threshold
of infected cases, above which they spread rapidly. It appears that `bunny
boiler' got to that point sometime in 1994.
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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Fatal Attraction came out just a few years before I went to college. I heard of
it a lot yet have never watched and, after seeing its official trailer today, do
not plan to. I have never owned and don't share the American soft spot towards
pets. I don't hate them. They are a godsend for my depression-afflicted
neighbors. And I do not approve torturing animals. Only that I came from a
culture where cruelty invokes images at a whole different level than poaching
rabbits.
Nonetheless, "bunny boiler" is a vivid phrase worth learning for a transplant in
order to, as Bruce Lee used to say, honestly express themselves. I knew the
type and Mr. Martin's writing is engaging.
