Vengeful women have scared, entertained, and warned us in stories as old as the Bible, through Greek tragedies. Revenge usually marks them as a villain, rarely, the character to root for and usually unhinged, crazy, driven to murder. Women out for revenge, who I am naming villainesses, are depicted as monsters, harpies, and crazy.  Rebecca Traister, in Good and Mad, points out how angry women are portrayed as “as monstrous or perverse, unwell or unwholesome in their challenge to male authority.” (n.p.) The mythical Medusa is one that is conjured often: she has the hair of snakes and if men look at her, they turn to stone. She is only stopped when she is beheaded.

Villainesses in popular culture are often seen at best, self-serving, and at worst, crazy, driven mad by their anger. This is especially true in so-called low culture, melodramatic television, and films. The villainess is entertaining because she is so far from the social norms of everyday acting and politeness, and she seems to be fueled on pure rage or set on revenge. However, despite this enjoyment, it is important to stop and ask, what is making her so angry? What circumstances have made her like this? Traister also explains how “the idea that women’s anger is fundamentally illegitimate because they have nothing to be rationally angry about, is part of what undergirds the claim that women are fundamentally mentally ill” (Kindle Ed.) The villainess is an obstacle for a hero, one that must be conquered, beheaded like the Medusa, for the hero to succeed. Her actual needs and desires remain largely ignored and dismissed.

In this anthology, I seek to bring together representations of women seeking revenge in mass culture, specifically on television and film. The selections contained within could also be considered low-brow entertainment, often called “mass media.” Supposedly void of artistic value, they are said to pacify the masses, as the scholars of the Frankfurt School predicted: Mass media dulls people into not taking any action. Texts that are categorized as low brow are, by no coincidence, highly feminized. Romance novels, mass-market paperbacks, soap operas, reality television are all feminized cultural products. These offer little artistic value, whereas male auteurs may present on the same medium and foist into the label of “prestige.” Television, largely a feminized text, was elevated after the “prestige” dramas created by and focusing on men: The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad.

These prestige dramas also popularized the anti-hero, justified by their actions due to a moral code, or neutralizing their actions by attractiveness, and the oft-fraught term “likeability.” Female anti-heroes are rare in the scope of the popular media landscape, and if they exist, they are rarely a fully developed character and may exist to be changed, see the error of her ways, or to exist simply to be defeated (Tally). Villainesses are often celebrated, albeit for surface level reasons; often they are the object of camp appreciation: larger than life, excessive, flamboyant. Jean, Maleficent, Ursula, Ms. Hannigan (Annie), and Harriet Olson (Little House on the Prairie), to name a few from my collection of favorites.

In revisiting villainesses from recent and older texts, I aim to critically consider not just the character’s actions or performances, but the situations that have placed them in their revenge-seeking ways. This approach is interdisciplinary: the supplementary texts pull from cultural Studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, and performance studies. By using this approach to vengeful women, spectators and researchers stand to gain a better understanding of the limits and how female desire is contained and punished, hidden, and diffused.  These villains are also trapped by their own prisons of femininity, causing an unsolvable contradiction: they may be angry that they have been trapped in feminine prison of their own making. Conversely, they may see the threat of falling out of femininity and must fight back. This study is not to make excuses or justify violence. It is to bring light to the reasons why villains enact this violence and what is at stake for them. The affect of anger is an affect of desire; a desire to overcome an obstacle or to free herself from external challenges. For the villainess, anger and desire are often not mutually exclusive.

 When examining feminized texts, It is also important to remember that as cultural products, there exists a demand and financial gain for these, so the presence of these villainesses is, in fact, a part of the popularity. As many years of audience reception studies have shown, the popularity of a text does not automatically translate to the audience modeling themselves after it, but perhaps the idea of the villain is an extreme version of women’s desire and what happens when pushed to the limits.  The chosen primary texts are purposefully from various genres and periods. However, they are chosen not just for their existence, but to place the character in the context of not only her surrounding story but how the medium and time of release affect how desire is expressed and portrayed. First, examining the character of Dr. Kimberly Shaw of Melrose Place allows for discussion of emotionality and gendered performance in soap operas. Elektra Abundance, in the recent show Pose, provides an opportunity to discuss intersections of race, class, and gender and the stakes of the character’s desires. Although Valerie Solanas is a real person who existed and not part of a fictional narrative, her remaking and representation in the popular imagination have often distilled her into a mythical figure of madness. Finally, examining the characters of the 1980s young-adult series Sweet Valley High delve into the desires of teenage girls and the deviations from assumed perfect feminine roles.

Several themes and critical questions reoccur across all the pieces in the anthology. The following list of questions are ones that may assist in finding comparative analysis:

• How does the cultural production of women’s revenge narratives in popular culture create an understanding of women’s motivations for rage? In these depictions, what are the circumstances that motivate them?
• Why is the particular text considered low-brow? Does low brow or highbrow status affect the perception? How does a medium that has been feminized set up expectations for the character?
• Consider both the times these narratives were produced, as well as the time period they depict. What does a current depiction of past circumstances illuminate? How would these texts be considered in a current landscape?
• What are the ways in which the affect of anger, rage, and madness are portrayed? Do these create sympathy for the character or stand to discredit them as simply crazy, overemotional, or unhinged?
• Where do these characters exist in gendered expectations? Do they seek revenge because they are denied cultural expectations of their gender (i.e., children, marriage) or because they surpass them? What are the liminal spaces they occupy in the spaces of rage and revenge-seeking?
• What is their object of revenge? Is it a material object, or denial of emotion, interpersonal relationship, or desires?
• How is desire connected to revenge? How does desire show lack or excess in revenge? Is the revenge because of a denial of desire or an excess, or an inappropriate amount of desire?

Works cited

Tally, Margaret, Tally. Rise of the Anti-Heroine in TV’s Third Golden Age. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, GB, 2016.

Traister, Rebecca. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2018.