Let Female Villains Be Villains
Remember when the trailer for Cruella dropped, Twitter mocked the guts out of it. People mocked it for being too much like The Joker; too much like Disney’s earlier film Maleficent; too much like Warner Brothers Birds of Prey — and tweeted after another about what an odd choice it was to revive Cruella DeVil in particular: a character who spent her original 1961 film trying to kidnap and kill puppies to make their skins into a coat.
This does not appear to be the reaction Disney anticipated. The tag line for the trailer was “Brilliant. Bad. A little bit mad,” a reference to Lord Byron’s infamous characterization by his ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb: “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” The allusion subtly positions Cruella as a Byronic hero: a talented, melancholy rebel tragically misunderstood by their society. Cruella’s speech reflects this as well, as she explains: “From the beginning, I understood I saw the world differently than everyone else, which didn’t sit well with certain people, but I wasn’t for everyone.” Cruella de Vil is not a one-dimensional villain who enjoys killing dogs and has inspired a song that matches “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” as a Renaissance blazon of terrible characteristics. She’s a misunderstood #girlboss whose acts will be vindicated by the film, and whose actions were most likely in response to awful things done to her by others… A hard sell for a cartoon villain with a name that is a wordplay on “cruel devil” and who resides in Hell Hall.
Cruella is the reductio ad absurdum of a long trend of redemptive retellings featuring pop culture villainesses.
Cruella de Vil is the perfect embodiment in a long series of redemptive retellings of pop culture villainesses. In many instances, these female villains are introduced in two dimensions — literally. However, when given depth and transformed from antagonist to protagonist, their stories share an interesting resemblance. These re-imagined stories aren’t just re-tellings of events; they’re a complete rewrite of the story. We not only receive the villain’s point of view, but we also get her reason. She had to kidnap Dorothy, curse a newborn, smuggle a machine gun into a mental institution, or murder 101 pups. We, the viewers, just didn’t have all of the information. We were unaware of the circumstances behind her behavior, which exonerates her. And, in the end, she was redeemed instead of punished for her actions, proving that she isn’t truly a villain! She was simply misjudged in a sad way. She had been good all along.
This isn’t something we see with characters like Jafar from Aladdin or Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events. Even Joker let its star to remain in a moral gray area; despite the fact that society structures had failed him on every level, the film makes no apologies for Arthur Fleck’s spiral into murder. When major media corporations turn their villainesses — their cartoonishly wicked villainesses — into prominent characters, they simultaneously turn them into heroines who show remorse of their evil actions while also proving that they were never truly evil.
Because female vileness sits uncomfortably with remaining societal perceptions of women’s purity and innocence, American culture tends to try to justify away the wicked behaviors of women — primarily fictional women, but occasionally actual ones. In the mid-nineteenth century, a movement toward “True Womanhood,” which historians like Barbara Welter have labeled “the cult of domesticity,” the belief that all women must be inherently pure born. The cult of domesticity provided social regulation for the rapidly expanding American middle class and a sense of social stability in a time of great political, economic, and societal confusion, based on the late 18th-century idea of “separate spheres,” which claimed that innate gender differences made men more suited for public life and women for private life. White middle and upper-class women began to be revered for the domestic duties to which they had been subjected: hegemony became institutionalized as near-religion. Women were the heart of the family, the home’s light, and the house’s angel. Domesticity, submissiveness, piety, and purity were characteristics of “True Women,” as Welter described it. Women demonstrated their mastery of the domestic realm by demonstrating these attributes, and the exhibition of these qualities demonstrated that they were naturally qualified for that realm since they were more pious and pure. They were, after all, inherently religious and moral. Criminal men were frequently rehabilitated by the virtue of a true woman in popular fiction at the time. Women’s moral fiber was thought to be so much stronger and purer than men’s that they could never truly commit a crime, and any woman who did commit a crime had to have been tricked or led into it by men’s evil influence. Such a lady therefore becomes “fallen” inside this structure. Despite this, the language of exclusion revolves around woman’s angelic nature. She isn’t wicked, evil, or a villain; she has “fallen” into hell like an angel.
This justification (it isn’t her fault she’s a villain) and the means of showing it (recentering a popular narrative around a female villain) reached popular prominence in 1995, with Geoffrey Maguire’s novel Wicked, and with the musical adaptation in 2003. Both the book and the musical reconsider the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The witch, whom Maguire named Elphaba, does have a song in the second act of the musical where she makes a conscious commitment to give up trying to be good, but the show goes to great lengths to point out that Elphaba was not born wicked, and though she may make a big show of giving up good deeds, she never consciously chooses to do an evil one. Her greatest sin in the show — animal abuse in the form of magically creating flying monkeys — is something she was tricked into, and her villainous reputation thereafter springs mostly from Elphaba setting herself up as the Wizard’s enemy, and the Wizard mounting an extremely effective PR campaign against her. In the end, Elphaba regains her goodness by playing into stereotypes about her villainy and then completely rejecting her wicked reputation. The Wicked Witch dies because her soul is so unclean, water can melt her; Elphaba lives thanks to a trap door, and gets her “happily ever after” with her love interest, outside of Oz.
Maleficent, Disney’s first retelling centering on a female villain, likewise uses its reframed narrative to prove the heroine’s inherent goodness but gives her even less agency in her fall from grace. In the original 1959 Sleeping Beauty animated film, evil fairy Maleficent curses the infant princess out of pique at being left out of the baby’s welcome party. This is an enjoyably petty reason for committing a villainous action — who hasn’t wanted to hex someone for a social snub? — but it’s not deep or detailed or justified, because it doesn’t have to be. Maleficent enters the movie a villain, spends the film acting like a villain, and then dies like a villain. By contrast, in Maleficent, the 2014 live-action movie that revisits the character’s early life, she begins in innocence in an almost Edenic forest, and falls in love with her childhood friend, Stephen. Maleficent is a fairy guardian of a beautiful natural landscape and fights only to protect it. But what turns her into a villain, complete with a costume change from earth-toned gauzes to heavy black draperies, is a heavily implied (the film is rated PG) sexual assault by an intimate partner: Stephen drugs Maleficent and cuts off her wings.
In pop culture, sexual assault is still one of the most common motivators for female vengeance — and, by implication, an acceptable justification for a woman committing a bad or violent action. If Stephen gave her “true love’s kiss” and then cut off her wings, thus proving that true love does not exist, then it is not only appropriate but righteous for Maleficent to curse his baby to die, with the caveat that only true love’s kiss can save her. (Elphaba, at least, chose to oppose the Wizard and thus be branded wicked.) In the end, Maleficent provides “true love’s kiss” herself, and regains her wings, returning her to the angel she really was at heart.
Harley Quinn, in the 2020 Birds of Prey, also ascribes the heroine’s misdeeds to trauma. The film opens by showing how her father abandoned her and her boyfriend abused her and how this led directly to Harley’s transformation from psychologist helping to rehabilitate villains to becoming a villain herself. Once Harley is free of their influence, however, and has real female friends, she becomes a hero of Gotham. She does not choose to be a villain; the emotional abuse she experienced from the men in her life is the true cause of her crimes.
They don’t commit evil actions because they want to; they do it because they have been tricked or because they have been so wronged, they have no other choice.
In an odd way, these updated villains have less agency than their initial incarnations. They don’t commit evil actions because they want to, even if the want is extremely petty; they do it because they have been tricked or because they have been so wronged, they have no other choice but villainy — which is more a reaffirmation of a damaging patriarchal stereotype than a refutation of it. But this still leaves us with the fact that the traditional literary and pop culture canon is dominated by male creators, and many of their best female characters are, in fact, villains. If we want to interrogate those traditional, familiar stories by centering the most interesting and compelling female character, how should we do it?
