Violence and Female Agency: Murderess, Her Body, Her Mind

This chapter zooms in on the trope of the angry, avenging woman, looking at the revisions of the slasher sub-genre and the reinvention of the final girl. After recalling how Woolf explains how she must ‘kill the Angel of the House’ if she wants to execute her profession as a writer and have creative agency, this chapter will first pay homage to several films made by women in the 1970s and 1980s who take up a knife or gun to become symbolic and real murderesses in Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman 1975), A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris 1982) and Welcome II the Terrordome (Ngozi Onwurah 1995). The chapter will then move to the rage and fury of avenging women in contemporary cinema by looking at American Mary (Jen & and Sylvia Sotska 2012) and especially Revenge (Coralie Forgeat 2017) and the more subdued and ambiguous terrors of domestic violence in Retrospect (Esther Rots 2018). The first chapter concludes by addressing the opacities of a poetics of relation in the television series Alias Grace (Mary Harron 2017) based on a historical case of a murderess.