Introduction 1 Defining the Femme Fatale
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Notes Introduction 1. Knox herself disputes this: see Knox 2013a, p. 35. 2. Guede’s sentence was reduced to 16 years on appeal in December 2009; such a decision is not uncommon in Italy when the accused opts for a ‘fast track’ process that does not include a full trial. 3. There is some dispute over whether Sharon Stone chose or was required to film the infamous scene without underwear (see Simkin 2013, pp. 15–17). 4. Belle Gunness (born 1859, date of death uncertain) was responsible for at least a dozen murders, and possibly 30 or 40. She is thought to have killed some or all of her children, husbands, suitors and others. For more on Wiggington and Wuornos, see below. 5. British serial killer Rose West was convicted of ten sex-related murders in 1995, carried out in collaboration with her husband Fred West. 6. Aileen Wuornos was convicted of killing six men between 1989 and 1990 while working as a prostitute in Florida. She was executed in 2002 after spending ten years on Death Row. 7. See Nick Broomfield’s engrossing but deeply upsetting documentaries Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1993) and Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003), which raise disturbing questions about executing the insane. 8. The term is Stephen Greenblatt’s: see his ground-breaking new historicist text Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988). 9. AmyFisher:MyStory(aka Lethal Lolita) (1992), Casualties in Love: The Long Island Lolita Story and The Amy Fisher Story (both 1993). 10. The character of Ivy was selected as number six in a chart of ‘Lethal Ladies: 26 Best Big-Screen Bad Girls’ by Entertainment Weekly in 2008 (available at: http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,20194359,00.html#1041227, accessed 5 January 2014). For further discussion of Barrymore’s star persona, see Williams (2007). 11. Dominguez’s book is a definitive account of the case and the media cover- age. Fisher has published two autobiographical volumes, My Story (1993) and If I Knew Then ... (2004). Since around 2009, she has exploited her notoriety viaacareerasapornstar. 1 Defining the Femme Fatale 1. MacGowan 2007, p. 152. 2. For more detailed discussion of Lilith’s place in Jewish scriptures and other religious writings, see Hurwitz (2009). 3. The Royal Shakespeare Company production was directed by Trevor Nunn and starred Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. It was first staged at The Other Place in Stratford in 1976 and subsequently adapted for television and 200 Notes 201 broadcast in 1979. The scene in question can at the time of writing be accessed via YouTube (available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Fe5uRWnzUig), accessed on 30 July 2014. 4. See Dijkstra 1988, especially chapters 8 and 10. 5. David Lean’s film Madeleine (1950) is a straightforward account of the affair, although it takes the unusual step of refusing to commit on the matter of Madeleine Smith’s guilt or innocence – compare the approach the TV movie Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy adopts (see p. 179). Other films loosely based on the case include Letty Linton (1932) and Dishonored Lady (1947). Winifred Duke’s Madeleine Smith: A Tragi-Comedy in Two Acts (1928) is a feeble drama that attempts to dramatise the night L’Angelier’s death is discovered in the first act, and the immediate aftermath of the trial in the second. It relies on long, clunky soliloquies from Madeleine and broad stereotypes for her tyrannical father and ineffectual mother. Smith appears self-centred, scornful and manipulative, noting at one point her own ‘pretty ankles’ and remarking: ‘The jury had an excellent view of them. I took good care of that’ (Duke 1928, p. 46). 6. Stories of what happened to Madeleine following the trial are disputed. What is not in doubt is that she could no longer remain in Scotland without leaving a permanent blight on her family, and she moved to London with her younger brother. There she met and in 1861 married George Wardle, an artist who worked as the manager of Morris & Co., and who was well acquainted with the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, including William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. Later, she was to become involved in the Socialist movement, and she met George Bernard Shaw through that association. The marriage to Wardle lasted 28 years, before Wardle moved away, alone, to Italy. What put an end to their marriage is not known. He died in 1910, and after that, Madeleine’s story is much harder to trace. She may have remarried and moved to America. Some believe that a woman named Lena Sheehy, who died in 1928, may have been Madeleine, but certainty about her final years is as difficult to pin down as the extent of her involvement in Emile’s death. 7. The correspondence, which is housed in the National Library of Scotland, was voluminous, though one-sided: Smith had destroyed all the letters sent to her by L’Angelier for fear of discovery, but he had kept almost all the letters she had written. 8. This is not an uncommon phenomenon, with both male and female con- victed killers. Chris Rojek notes that ‘the serial killers Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, Rosemary West, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Harold Shipman and Timothy McVeigh were all deluged with fan mail while in prison’, and that McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, had received ‘four proposals of mar- riage’ (2001, p. 15). In a bizarre instance, Rose West became engaged to Dave Glover of the rock band Slade in 2003. Their plans to wed were cancelled almost as soon as they were announced, and shortly afterwards Glover was fired from the band. 9. Other major accounts of Smith’s life include Hunt 1965 (first published 1950), and two revisionist studies by MacGowan and Campbell (both 2007). 10. Karla Homolka participated in the rape and murder of Karla’s sister, Tammy, and two Ontario schoolgirls, crimes for which her husband Paul Bernardo 202 Notes was convicted in 1995; Tracie Andrews murdered her partner Lee Harvey in 1996 and attempted to blame his death on a road rage attack; on Rose West, see pp. 8, 200n5. 2 Frances Howard (1590–1632) 1. Frances Howard went through a number of name and title changes: from Mistress Frances Howard, to Lady Frances Howard, to the Countess of Essex, to the Countess of Somerset. Although my preference has been to refer to the women studied in this book by their surnames, for the sake of convenience and to avoid confusion, I will generally refer to Frances Howard as Frances throughout. 2. Sanderson cites Arthur Wilson in corroboration (in Scott 1811, p. 240n). 3. Lindley’s feminist-inflected reassessment of the case, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James, is a study to which my own work in this chapter, and in the book more generally, is indebted, and this idea of ‘back-formation’ is a particularly important one. 4. Many of these texts are referenced via Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus’s invaluable sourcebook Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 (1985). The term ‘H&M’ refers from this point on. 5. They base their conclusion chiefly on the evidence of Constantia Munda’s level of education, which very few women would have had access to – see Shepherd 1985, p. 126 and Roberts 1998, pp. 45–6. 6. See Lancashire (1983). 7. For further discussion, see Bruzzi (1998). 8. Jeanne Addison Roberts (1998) also argues that Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry (?1602–12) probably contains references to Frances Howard. She believes that the printing of Mariam, The Insatiate Countess and The White Devil in 1613 was inspired by the Howard affair (Roberts 2002, p. 208). 9. Note that Anne Somerset ascribes this quotation to Edward Sherburn (1997, p. 388). 10. The play also incorporates a subplot, a standard narrative of an old husband (Alibius), a young, beautiful wife (Isabella), and a suitor (Antonio), the latter disguising himself as a madman to gain access to Isabella at the asylum run by Alibius. 11. Most famously, Shakespeare uses it in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, but Marliss C. Desens claims that at least 44 extant plays from the period include examples of the bed-trick (1994, p. 11). 12. See Bromham 1980; Lancashire 1983; for a dissenting view, see Brooke (ed.) 1990, pp. 65–6. 3 Ruth Snyder (1891–1928) 1. A sash weight is a length of lead, weighing anything from 7 to 24 pounds, which counter-balances the sliding sash in a sash window when it is open. Notes 203 2. It is possible that the jurors’ apparent reluctance gave Snyder some false hope: on 8 May, the day before the verdicts were announced, she was reported by the New York Times as being of the opinion that ‘no jury would be willing to send a woman to the electric chair’ (NYT 8 May 1927, p. 3). 3. This is another familiar feature of such trials, and is a significant factor in both the Smith case and the Knox case although it should also be noted that this is not a phenomenon specific to female killers: a num- ber of infamous male killers have attracted similar attention. See p. 201 endnote 8. 4. Gray in his testimony placed an emphasis on Snyder’s active role in the relationship: ‘She called me considerable and wrote to me very often.