Abstract
The revenge plot is not a new phenomenon in Western fiction. Rather, revenge can be considered “a fountainhead” of Western epic and drama (Jacoby 14), a subject that has occupied great writers for centuries. The theme is currently undergoing a revival, after falling out of favor for a number of years, relegated, as Susan Jacoby writes, “to the territory of detective and spy novels” (16). Lately there has been a resurgence of literature, television programs, and film that focus on revenge, especially the kind that is realized by the “virtuous avenger.”
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Notes
Ann Jones writes, “properly understood… a motive is not the cause of [a] homicide, but the cause for the sake of which the homicide is committed.” In this chapter, when I speak of the motive for women to engage in armed combat, I am referring to the cause for the sake of which combat is undertaken. Ann Jones, Women Who Kill (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1980) 99.
Flanagan notes that transvestism is “viewed as an adult behavioral fetish, a means of procuring sexual gratification,” while transsexu-alism is a psychological condition that involves individuals who “identify with the opposite sex and may seek to live as a member of that sex.” Victoria Flanagan, Into the Closet: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature and Film (New York: Rutledge, Taylor & Francis, 2008) 3.
One example of this is Spenser’s Britomart from the canonical poem The Faerie Queene (1590). Britomart, disguised as a man, dressed in armor from head to toe, and armed with a phallic sword, fights in the name of Chastity. Spencer got the idea for this character from the fourteenth-century Italian epic poem Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto, which features the female Christian warrior Bradamante. Spenser used the character of Britomart as a tribute to Queen Elizabeth, to justify the rule of an unmarried woman. The legendary Joan of Arc was also purported to be a virgin warrior. In 1429, at the age of 16, Joan donned male clothing and a sword and mounted a horse to lead the Armagnac army to victory against the English army in Orleans. Joan was a mystic—she identified two female saints and an archangel as the source of the voice compelling her to go to war. Anne Llewellyn Barstow writes, “Joan’s lesson for women is… to take themselves seriously… but the further message… is that women must not assume that their truth is acceptable in the world of male values.” Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Joan of Arc: Heretic, Mystic, Shaman (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Meilen Press, 1986) xvi.
Rita Mae Brown was born on November 28, 1944, in Hanover, Pennsylvania, to an unwed mother. She was adopted by Ralph and Julia Brown, a working-class family who lived in Hanover until she was eleven years old, when the family moved to Florida. Brown attended the University of Florida on a full scholarship but was expelled from the school in 1964 for her political activity in the civil rights movement and for her outspoken lesbianism. She went on to receive a PhD in English and Political Science from the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington D.C. and has written more than fifteen novels to date. Harold Woodell, “Rita Mae Brown,” The History of Southern Women’s Literature, ed. Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).
Velazquez’s incredible career continued after her husband’s untimely death, when she became a Confederate spy and then published her shocking memoir. DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2002) 178.
The verbena flower that Drusilla wears in her hair is representative of oppositions. Maryanne M. Gobble attests that it has historically been associated with “war and peace, love and death, and politics and domesticity,” and that according to legend, the early Romans declared war by “launching a spear decorated with verbena into the enemy’s territory” Maryanne M. Gobble, “The Significance of Verbena in William Faulkner’s ‘an Odor of Verbena’” Mississippi Quarterly 53.4 (2000). 572.
The portrait of Colonel Sartoris in The Unvanquished is closely modeled upon that of Colonel William Clark Falkner. (Rubin, Louis D. “Discovery of a Man’s Vocation.” Faulkner: Fifty Years after the Marble Faun. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1976).
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© 2011 Alison Graham-Bertolini
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Graham-Bertolini, A. (2011). Great Vengeance and Furious Anger: The Female Avenger. In: Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339309_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339309_2
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