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WOMEN'S violence transgresses the boundaries that establish both sex and gender like no other act can-not only are such women not properly feminine, but they cease to be female.l Women's violence was for many the most shocking of all the French Revolution's bloody excesses, simply because the actors were women; even Sade found Charlotte Corday's assassination of Marat disturbing: "Marat's barbarous assassin, like those mixed beings whose sex is impossible to determine, vomited up from hell to the despair of both sexes, directly belongs to neither."2 Images of Charlotte Corday and of the mobs of armed, enraged Parisian women are still with us today, a testament to their power to disturb our lingering concepts of women as inherently nonviolent. Because such violent women are typically described as bestialized or at least as unsexed, it is too often assumed that such descriptions serve only misogynist ends and are found largely in the works of men. Yet because the violent woman violates both the limitations and the virtues of natural womanhood so spectacularly, she is necessarily of interest to us today when feminism's identity, grounded in the problematic existence of "woman," is in crisis.
In exploring British women writers' representations of such violent women, we need to avoid two dangers of interpretation. The first is that these images of aggressive women represent and celebrate unbridled female agency and power. The second, equally dangerous, position is that these images of aggressive women are simply products of male misogyny internalized by women. Each perspective is insufficient, but together they produce a constructive tension that I will focus on throughout this essay. In an important sense, my project is in a similar double-- bind as were late eighteenth-century women: Madame de Stael wrote that women's "destiny resembles that of freedmen under the emperors: if they try to gain any influence, this unofficial power is called criminal, while if they remain slaves their destiny is crushed."3 The autonomous, stable female subject outside history and solely in a negative relationship to power is not, however, the elusive object of this study. Rather, a feminist Foucauldian approach to this double-bind is, I believe, most productive, for the modern subject as both effect and agent of power is most spectacularly illustrated by the violent...