Notes Introduction 1. This term appears to have originated in a poem by Coventry Patmore from 1854, titled The Angel in the House, which cast women as pious, pure, submissive, and devoted to domesticity above all else. The repercussions of this idea are discussed in more detail on page 13 of this chapter. 2. I use the term “she-warriors” throughout this text to refer to vigilante heroines created by women authors. 3. Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Geena Davis as Thelma, and Susan Sarandon as Louise. 4. Directed by David Slade and starring Ellen Page. 5. Directed by Neil Jordan and starring Jodie Foster. Chapter One: Great Vengeance and Furious Anger: The Female Avenger 1. In the original French, “L’Incontournable volume.” 2. This reading is borne out by the ending of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, wherein Janie Crawford Woods is declared innocent of the shooting death of her husband, who attacks and attempts to murder her after he is stricken with Rabies. 3. Nevertheless, the members of the poor black Southern community where Sykes and Delia live understand the importance of Delia’s actions and do not bother to label them as crimes. Sykes, in fact, alienates himself from the community as a result of his laziness and fecklessness, while Delia remains within the good graces of her neighbors. 4. Helene Deutsch, author of The Psychology of Woman— A Psychoanalytical Interpretation (1944), attests, “While fully rec- ognising that woman’s position is subjected to external influence, I venture to say that the fundamental identities ‘feminine-passive’ and ‘masculine- active’ assert themselves in all known cultures and races, in various forms and various quantitative proportions” (qtd. in Friedan, Feminine Mystique, Ch 5). Although I disagree with this statement, I include it as evidence that this belief once held wide- spread currency. 172 NOTES 5. Rawlings is perhaps best known today for her later work, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Yearling (1938) and the autobiographical Cross Creek (1942). 6. Such characters appear in other of Grau’s novels, for example, Roadwalkers (1994), her most recent novel, narrates the story of two homeless black children, who during the Great Depression travel like gypsies across the southern United States in search of food and shelter. 7. This paradox is a microcosm of the dilemma of vigilantism itself: when facing conflict, should a person rely on their personal morality of right and wrong, or should they abide by public law, which can be unjust and slow to change? Chapter Two: Women Warriors and Women with Weapons 1. The middle- class ideology for femininity “developed in post-industrial England and America, [and] prescribed a woman who would be a Perfect Lady, an Angel in the House, contentedly submissive to men, but strong in her inner purity and religiosity, queen in her own realm in the Home” (Showalter 14). 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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 NOTES 173 a sword and mounted a horse to lead the Armagnac army to victory against the English army in Orleans. Joan was a mystic—she identi- fied 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 accept- able in the world of male values.” Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Joan of Arc: Heretic, Mystic, Shaman (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1986) xvi. 5. 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). 6. The press was Daughters Inc., founded by June Arnold (see Chapter Four), Bertha Harris, and Charlotte Bunch. 7. 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. 8. Quentin Compson, Buck McCaslin, and Thomas Sutpen, for example. 9. 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. 10. The portrait of Colonel Sartoris in The Unvanquished is closely mod- eled 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). 174 NOTES Chapter Three : The Woman Who Snaps, The Woman Who Kills 1. The fact that Beloved is unable to forgive Sethe for what she has done suggests, in a double entendre, that restitution can never adequately make up for the harms done to those forced to endure slavery. 2. Yet such an act would still be problematic, for it would, in the eyes of the slave owner and his men, affirm their opinion of blacks as “savage.” 3. I acknowledge that this might be argued otherwise in certain extreme cases, but I believe it is the exception rather than the rule. 4. Mikolchak argues that such desires “do not have a name,” because they are articulated within the patriarchal language structure that has no need to grant them expression. 5. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” are examples of texts that invoke the metaphor of the caged bird to represent the restricted lives of women. This metaphor was especially common in the nineteenth century. 6. Perhaps arguably, because the reader is not witness to the death of Edna Pontellier. Rather, she swims out to sea until her arms and legs grow tired, and we are left to intuit the ending. 7. Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) was born in Davenport, Iowa, and graduated from Drake University. She is the author of more than 50 short stories, nine novels, eleven plays, and a biography; she won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Chapter Four: The Female Bandit/Outlaw 1. Lesbian feminist June Arnold was born in South Carolina but spent most of her life in Texas. She attended Vassar College and Rice University. After getting married and having four children, Arnold moved to New York City to become a writer. There she wrote and published her first novel, Applesauce (1966). Subsequently, Arnold moved to Vermont, where, with novelist Bertha Harris and political theorist Charlotte Bunch, she founded Daughters Inc. Press in 1973. In its five brief years of existence, Daughters Inc. published thirty titles, most notably Rita Mae Brown’s groundbreaking Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and Harris’s innovative Lover (1976). The press also published Arnold’s next two novels, The Cook and the Carpenter, a Novel by the Carpenter (1973) and Baby Houston (1987) (published posthumously). Arnold died at age fifty-five in Houston in 1982. Carla Williams, “Arnold, June,” glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, NOTES 175 Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture (December 14, 2002), March 10, 2009 <www.glbtq.com/literature/arnold_j.html>. 2. Merriam- Webster’s Dictionary notes that the etymology of the word “fertile” is from the Latin “fertilis” meaning fruitful, which is akin to “ferre” meaning “to bear.” The negative connotations of being infertile are evident in this meaning—to be infertile is to be unpro- ductive or unable to produce.