The most fascinating villainesses in fiction (and in criminology)

When a man kills in fiction, we tend to ask how. When a woman does it, we ask why —and, almost always, what happened to her. That difference in treatment is not innocent: it reveals how uncomfortable the woman who breaks the law still makes us. The best villainesses in film, series and anime fascinate us precisely because they touch that nerve. And there is a school of thought that has spent half a century explaining it: feminist criminology.

// THE THEORYWhy the 'bad woman' was studied so badly

For decades, classical criminology treated the female offender as a statistical oddity that deserved no theory of its own. When it did address her, it did so through the worst of lenses: Cesare Lombroso, in La donna delinquente (1893), described her as a biological anomaly, more 'masculine' and more monstrous than any male criminal. The underlying idea —that female wickedness is unnatural— survived long after science had buried Lombroso.

In 1976, the British scholar Carol Smart published Women, Crime and Criminology and hit a nerve: the discipline had either ignored women or caricatured them. Frances Heidensohn added that women offend less, in part, because they are subject to a far more rigid informal social control (the family, reputation, the eyes of the neighbourhood). And Meda Chesney-Lind showed how the penal system punishes girls who step outside their expected role more than for the actual harm they cause.

From this come three labels that pop culture repeats endlessly: mad (her violence is explained by a pathology), bad (a monstrous, almost inhuman aberration) or victim (she didn't really choose, she was pushed). Notice which one you're tempted to use for each of the villainesses that follow: hardly any of them fits entirely into a single box, and that is where it gets interesting.

// THE CATALOGUETen villainesses who break the norm twice

Cersei Lannister (Game of Thrones). Her fascination lies in the fact that she plays the game of power by the same ruthless rules as the men of her world, yet she is asked to do twice as much to get half as far. She is the perfect portrait of how the glass ceiling drives ambition to turn brutal: she isn't 'mad', she's a strategist whom the system left only one open door —that of cruelty.

Villanelle (Killing Eve). An assassin who enjoys it, has fun and dresses in haute couture: she shatters at the root the stereotype that a woman only kills when cornered or out of love. Her guilt-free pleasure is exactly what makes her so unsettling —and so marketable—, because it denies the 'victim' script the audience expects in order to be able to forgive her.

Esdeath (Akame ga Kill!). She embodies the fantasy of absolute military power with no emotional alibi: she sincerely believes that the strong should crush the weak. She is the 'bad' villainess in its purest state, and that is why she unsettles: she offers us no trauma to reconcile ourselves with.

Himiko Toga (My Hero Academia). Here the 'mad' box does apply, but with a nuance: her violence reads as the overflow of a teenager whom her society branded a monster for feeling differently. She is a textbook case of how the label creates the deviant it claims to describe.

Kathryn Merteuil (Cruel Intentions). Her weapon is reputation: she manipulates from privilege and behind the mask of the 'good girl' because she knows a woman is judged by her image before her actions. She turns the informal social control that should repress her into her favourite tool.

Mystique (X-Men). She literally changes shape: the perfect metaphor for female identity as a forced performance. Her radicalization is born from a refusal to hide, and it poses an uncomfortable political question: is the woman who refuses to play the role assigned to her a villainess?

Sofía Falcone (The Penguin). One of the best recent illustrations of double deviance: she is locked up in a psychiatric hospital not so much for what she did as for being inconvenient to the men of her family. When she 'turns bad', the audience understands that the system manufactured her.

Annie Wilkes (Misery). The terror of the ultimate caregiving figure —the nurse, the devoted fan— being the predator. Her dramatic force comes from perverting the 'safe' gender role: no one suspects the angel of the house until it is too late.

Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). The institutional villainess: she needs no weapon because her power is bureaucratic and cold. She represents how control can be dressed up as care, and how a woman in a position of authority is read as more sinister than any male jailer.

Bellatrix Lestrange (Harry Potter). Fanaticism made character: her sick loyalty and sadistic pleasure make her the exception that proves the rule, the woman who is 'mad' and 'bad' at once. She is compelling because her devotion to a male leader portrays her as both a force and a cage at the same time.

// THE MIRRORWhat it says about us that they fascinate us

The pattern is obvious: when a script doesn't know what to do with a villainess, it puts her in one of the three boxes. It declares her mad (so her violence questions nothing), monstrous (so she is an exception and not a symptom) or a victim (so we recover the 'damaged' woman we do know how to pity). The villainesses who truly endure —Villanelle, Cersei, Sofía Falcone— are the ones who resist fitting into a single box.