小说中的十大女杀手

今天是莉齐·博登 (Lizzie Borden) 拿着斧头（可能）用不同次数的斧头砍死了她的父亲和继母的 125 周年纪念日。 125 年是一段很长的时间，但我们仍然惦记着 Lizzie Borden，孩子们仍然在操场上互相讲述她的故事，而且还押韵。当然，部分原因是未解决的犯罪总是有吸引力。人类对神秘事物很着迷。但这也是因为莉齐·博登是一名女性。看看一些关于谋杀案的高度性别化的理论就知道了：她是一个秘密的女同性恋！她被月经逼疯了！作为一种文化，我们病态地痴迷于女性凶手的概念。但是，您可能会问，为什么？

首先，是数量问题。无论是在生活中还是在文学中，暴力犯罪更有可能由男性实施。至少在生活中，其原因很复杂且尚未完全了解，但这似乎是不同性别大脑的神经生物学差异以及美国男性和女性的社交方式的共同作用。也就是说，这里不存在“硬连线”——男性的大脑可能使他们更容易受到暴力行为的影响，但男性暴力似乎与这样一个事实有关：我们的文化将暴力视为对负面情绪或刺激的可行的、可接受的反应。对男性来说，对女性则不然。可以这样想：在电视或电影中，您有多少次看到一个男人因侮辱或以其他方式令另一个男人不高兴而殴打另一个男人？有多少次你看到它被认真对待？你看过多少次它让你开怀大笑？您见过多少次一个女人出于某种原因殴打另一个女人？那么你认为谁更有可能殴打激怒他们的人——小男孩还是小女孩？

女性凶手相对稀缺，这让我们在基本层面上感兴趣——如果神秘感有吸引力，那么不寻常的事情也同样令人感兴趣。但女性凶手不仅让人感觉不寻常，而且几乎是 禁忌——因为她不仅代表了对预期性别角色的颠覆，而且代表了相当重大的逆转。她的存在是对我们根深蒂固的社会女性观念的暴力（双关语）侵犯。尤其是对于女性读者和消费者来说，还有一种非常美妙的权力感——权力，特别是身体的权力，而在我们的文化中，女性经常被剥夺这种权力。美国女性经常被告知，她们的身体是他人的职权范围——街上的人、叫嚷者和政府最高层都告诉我们这一点——所以在刀刃上夺回这个机构是令人兴奋的。

别误会我的意思：美国文化作为一个整体仍然更痴迷于美丽的死亡女孩，而不是美丽的致命女孩。当你（或者至少是我）想到“文学杀人犯”时，首先浮现在脑海中的名字几乎全是男性。帕特里克·贝特曼、亨伯特·亨伯特、汤姆·雷普利、拉斯科尔尼科夫。但正是电影和文学中充斥着死去女孩的尸体，才让女杀手变得如此有吸引力——她不仅摆脱了受害者的身份，而且步入了侵略者的角色，从而彻底扭转了自己的命运。

有些人不愿意相信。 “我认为社会否认女性有如此可怕的能力，”进化心理学家玛丽莎·哈里森（研究连环杀手）告诉 《纽约客》的艾米丽·安西斯。但同样，正是这种奇幻元素让这个人物如此迷人。她不可能是真实的——或者她可以吗？

还有一个问题是，当女性出现时，她们会成为什么样的杀手——无论是在媒体上如何描绘她们，还是在小说中如何写她们。正如犯罪小说作家梅兰妮·麦格拉思所指出的，女性杀手在小说中出现时，几乎总是出于复仇，或者（较少见的）精神错乱：

我们很少质疑动机的性别语言，这种语言强化了本质主义假设并解释了女性暴力。 “女性友好”的暴力动机在很大程度上是被动的。它的前提是，妇女诉诸暴力只是作为对过去难以忍受的虐待的最后一搏，或者因为她们担心自己的生命或患有精神疾病。因此，这个论点认为，我们使用暴力并不是为了得到我们想要的东西，或者只是因为我们喜欢它，而是因为我们被迫这样做。还有一种公认的“女性”杀戮类型。妇女在家中或家附近杀人，我们杀死我们认识的人，目标是伴侣、儿童或老人，主要是通过投毒或其他间接方法。

These typologies are borne out by the data in the aforementioned Marissa Harrison’s studies of actual female serial killers, with one exception: in real life, female serial killers most often kill for financial gain, not epic revenge.

Female violence is also tied into the perpetrator’s sexuality in a way that male violence isn’t, or isn’t as often. As Katharine Quarmby writes, “[t]ypically, a woman who is violent will have her sexuality portrayed as deviant, and her sexual attractiveness examined. Her role as a woman will also be scrutinized—is she a bad wife, or a bad mother? We need to keep the very essence of womanhood separate from, and untainted by, women who kill.” Overt sexuality often accompanies violence, and paradoxically, it can be a way of de-feminizing the woman in question, or at least reducing her down to a lurid trope; violence and sex are two parallel ways for women to subvert expectations of submission, nurturing, and kindness. I can’t help but think of Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money,” which ends with a blood-stained, naked Rihanna bathing in a trunk of cash. My first thought: has there ever been anything more badass? But my second thought has to question my own delight in the image—do I only think it’s so cool because she’s subverting ideas of femininity that I don’t even believe in? And if I really don’t believe in them, why so much visceral pleasure in their subversion? You can’t subvert something that’s already been conquered.

By the way, this is all not even approaching the issue of race, which is a major factor in Rihanna’s video, and certainly in the ways we understand both sexuality and violence in both sexes in America. Honestly, I couldn’t find very many good examples of female killers of color in literature who fit into my parameters for the list below—and the three crime fiction experts I asked couldn’t either, except for Sax Rohmer’s very racist character Sumuru, whom I will not include—though I’m sure more do exist, and I’d be very interested in an essay that examines them and their scarcity in the genre.

A lot of literature tries to split the difference with the gender tropes, letting female characters goad male ones into murder, so they get the blame without actually doing the deed. (Think Lady Macbeth, Phyllis Dietrichson, and Abigail Williams.) But below, I’ve collected ten actual female murderers from literature for your reading/gawking/gasping pleasure. NB that I’ve left out any novels with supernatural or science fictional elements, because death and murder are typically treated somewhat differently in these genres, and I don’t want to muddy this pot any further. Also NB that spoilers do lurk below, as the identity of the murderer is sometimes a reveal—though most of these books are pretty up front about their femme fatales.

Lizzie Borden, See What I Have Done, Sarah Schmidt

You all know how it goes: Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks. When he saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. Sarah Schmidt climbs into the mind of the notorious Lizzie Borden—as well of the minds of her maid, sister, and a mysterious stranger—in this hot house of a debut novel, which tells the story of that fateful day, but more importantly, the story of all of the intersecting bonds, desires, and desperations of this doomed family. See also “The Fall River Axe Murders,” by Angela Carter.

Katerina, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Nikolai Leskov

This one’s on my mind because of the recent (and excellent) film adaptation, but also because Katerina is so deliciously unrepentant (unlike, say Lady Macbeth proper, who actually didn’t kill anyone but still drove herself mad over it). When her horrible husband leaves her alone, she picks up a lover, and then, to protect their relationship, murders her father-in-law, her husband, a small child, and ultimately, her rival (along with herself). Like the Lizzie Borden story, it’s a murderous fairy tale from which it is wildly difficult to look away.

Cathy Ames, East of Eden, John Steinbeck

“They thought they were so smart,” Cathy says in Steinbeck’s classic. “They looked at me and thought they knew about me. And I fooled them. I fooled every one of them. And when they thought they could tell me what to do—oh! that’s when I fooled them best.” Steinbeck’s most monstrous female character—the intensity of her evilness is rivaled only by the intensity of her sexuality—is a force of destruction. Among other things, her “malformed soul” causes her to drive her teacher to suicide, burns down her family home with her parents still inside, becomes a prostitute, then murders her madame to get her job. She’s not the greatest person, and nor does she want to be. “I’d rather be a dog than a human” she said. “But I’m not a dog. I’m smarter than humans.”

Annie Wilkes, Misery, Stephen King

Annie Wilkes is a prime example of the archetypal Bad Nurse. When novelist Paul Sheldon crashes his car, a kind—if strange—woman rescues him. She turns out to be a fan of his work. She turns out to be extremely angry that he has killed off her favorite character. She turns out to be a serial killer who has murdered a slew of people, including patients, babies, her father, and the state trooper that she’s buried up at her “laughing place.” Truly one of the most terrifying characters of any gender to be committed to paper. (For the record, I also love King’s Carrie, but I’m counting her tale as supernatural, and so Annie will have to stand in for them both. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.)

Merricat, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

When this novel begins, almost all of Merricat’s family members are dead. Someone, it seems, mixed arsenic into the sugar bowl. The angry townies seem to think the fault lies with Merricat’s older sister Constance, and ostracizes the sisters because it, but it soon become clear to the attentive reader that the eighteen-year-old Merricat, who wishes she were a werewolf, is the real killer. Beware the weird girls, my friends. They have more powers than you may think.

Yayoi, Out, Natsuo Kirino

This truly captivating novel centers on a group of women who work the night shift at a bento factory outside Tokyo. One of them, Yayoi, strangles her cheating, good-for-nothing husband to death after he comes home drunk yet again, having, this time, lost every cent of their money in the casinos. Yayoi convinces her co-workers to help her dispose of the body, which they do, before promptly beginning to blackmail one another—all while the police start asking questions and another killer begins to target the women.

Marion Seeley, Bury Me Deep, Megan Abbott

Abbot’s murderer Marion is based on the “Trunk Murderess” of the 1930’s—a woman named Winnie Ruth Judd, whose two best friends were found dead, their bodies stuffed (and in one case, chopped up and then stuffed) into two large trunks and abandoned outside a Los Angeles train station. This novel reimagines Judd’s story, diving into the relationships she might have had with these so-called friends, and her path to violence. As Abbott herself put it: “I wanted to write a novel that would look at this “tiger women,” Judd, from another vantage point, free of the tabloid trappings—a novel that would place at its center the kind of woman so frequently portrayed as a femme fatale, as a party girl hoping to snag some sugar daddy, or as a vengeful mistress bringing ruin on her married lovers. I wanted to look at such a woman from the inside.”

Grace Marks, Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood

Here’s another novel based on the story of a real life murderess: Grace Marks, who in 1843 was convicted, with co-conspirator James McDermott, of killing her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper. Marks was 16, and while McDermott was hanged, she was thrown in jail, to be made a spectacle of. In Atwood’s retelling, a young doctor comes to assess the prisoner, and her claims that she can’t remember anything of the murder—and winds up rather in over his head.

Thérèse, Thérèse Raquin, Emile Zola

另一种由激情驱动的犯罪——尽管与卡特琳娜不同，佐拉的经典女主人公对她和她的情人谋杀了她的丈夫感到难过。就像，真的很糟糕。她每天晚上都会幻想他出现在她的卧室里，很快，她和她的同谋兼新婚丈夫洛朗都发疯了。他们计划互相残杀，但最后却自杀了。这就是爱茉莉！

美狄亚、 美狄亚、欧里庇得斯

在令人难忘的古希腊悲剧世界中，最令人难忘的角色之一是野蛮公主美狄亚，当她听说她的丈夫（因金羊毛而闻名的杰森）计划离开她去娶一位更好的公主时，她并没有很高兴。她杀死了她的对手，她对手的父亲（都是通过同样的有毒长袍，天才）和她自己的孩子。她知道孩子的死会给她带来痛苦，但她非常想伤害不忠的丈夫，所以她愿意忍受。然后她带着他们的尸体逃跑了，留下他永远孤独一人。