Category Archives: Macbeth

The Female of the Species

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by Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

Medea – public domain

Today’s post is an excerpt from my upcoming book, The Villain’s Journey – How to Create Villains Readers Love to Hate (publication Summer 2025).

In 1911, Rudyard Kipling wrote: “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

From ancient times to contemporary novels, memorable women villains back up his statement.

How do female villains differ from male villains?

The most obvious is physical size and strength. Although there are kick-ass women who can bench press more than their own weight, females generally have smaller builds and are lighter in weight. Instead of brute force often used by their male counterparts, female villains rely more on brains, strategy, cunning, deceit, and manipulation to achieve their goals.

Statistically, men commit more crimes than women. Per the FBI in 2019, males were charged for 72.5% of overall crimes while females accounted for 27.5%. Generally, males account for more violent crimes (78.9%), although female violent offenses are trending up. Women’s crimes tend more toward larceny and theft offenses (42.6%).

Good news for female villains: women tend to receive more lenient sentences than men. According to 2012 research by Sonja B. Starr, University of Michigan Law School, found that, controlling for the crime, “men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do,” and “[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.”

Let’s take a look at several classifications of female villains:

 The Power Behind the Throne – Through history, smart, daring, ambitious female villains allied themselves with powerful men. Although they stayed in the background, they manipulated the strings of the male figurehead puppet.

Medea is a Greek tragedy written by Euripides, first performed in 431 BCE. Medea is a ruthless princess and sorceress with divine powers who helps Jason steal the Golden Fleece to secure his royal position. However, when Jason is unfaithful to her, to strike back at him, Medea murders their own children.

Despite the horrific crime, capricious Greek gods spared her from punishment. She goes on to marry again.

In The Tragedy of Macbeth, Shakespeare’s play originally performed in 1623, the ambitious Lady Macbeth cajoles, belittles, and shames her husband into murder to attain the Scottish throne. Despite her ruthlessness, she still has a human conscience. Although she didn’t commit murders, she instigated them, and her hands are bloody. She sleepwalks at night, mumbling about killings. No matter how much she scrubs she can’t wash invisible bloodstains from her hands. “Out, damned spot, out, I say!”

For Lady Macbeth, the price of being the power behind the throne is too high and she kills herself.

The Femme Fatale– In the Bible, Salome danced for King Herod, who was so taken by her that he granted her request for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. She exemplifies the trope of beautiful women who use allure, mystery, and seduction to gain power and control over males.

Hard-boiled authors James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and other pulp writers popularized the sultry, manipulative female who captivates a male character then leads him to doom. She convinces the man to commit a crime. Afterward, she often leaves him to take the fall.

Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice (James M. Cain, 1934, Knopf) owns a diner with her much older husband Nick. When a handsome drifter arrives on scene, he and Cora have a passionate affair that leads to Nick’s murder and ultimately catastrophe for the lovers.

The bestselling novel has been adapted to sizzling film versions with actors Lana Turner and John Garfield in 1946, and with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson in 1981.

In Double Indemnity, also by Cain (originally serialized in 1936 in Liberty Magazine), a conniving wife Phyllis wants to get rid of her husband for the insurance money. She mesmerizes insurance agent Walter into agreeing to murder. After they kill the husband, the company is suspicious and withholds payment, dooming the adulterers.

In the 1944 film, the characters are memorably played by Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.

In The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930, Knopf), Brigid O’Shaughnessy is a seductive fortune seeker who hires private detective Sam Spade under false pretenses. Her true quest is the Maltese Falcon, a gold, bejeweled statue disguised under black enamel. She leads him on a merry chase through a journey of violence and murder.

Although Spade succumbs to Brigid’s wiles he recognizes her duplicity and ultimately turns her into the police for murder.

The 1941 film version starred Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet, and is hailed among the greatest movies of all time.

Financial gain and independence are often the motivations for femme fatales. They exploit their sexuality to manipulate men into helping them. But their behavior comes with a steep price—life on the run, prison, or death.

By the latter part of the 20th century, the female villain takes power into her own hands, not depending on a proxy male to achieve her desires.

 The Tyrant – Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962) exerts total control over the inmates in a mental asylum. Under her calm, serene demeanor, she is a vicious sadist who punishes anyone who defies her. In the 1975 film, Oscar winner Louise Fletcher etched the bland yet terrifying character in public consciousness.

Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s Misery (1987) is another plain, middle-aged woman hiding a vicious heart. Kathy Bates brought the role of “number one fan” to life.

 Lady Psychopaths – In the 1992 film Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone plays Catherine Trammel, a brilliant psychopathic author who seduces both men and women. Her lovers wind up stabbed to death with an ice pick. Since the murders are eerily similar to those described in her bestselling novels, she becomes the prime suspect. She enjoys playing cat and mouse with the police, teasing and taunting them, and deftly maneuvers her way out of conviction. The chilling end of the movie leaves no doubt that she intends to continue her pattern.

For a fresh take on a psychopath, I recommend the 2019 novel My Sister, The Serial Killer by Nigerian author Oynkan Braithwaite. Family loyalty forces a conscientious woman to cover up her younger sister’s crimes. The thriller is a fascinating study of manipulation by a narcissist who is more distressed by her melting ice cream cone than the terrible harm she causes others.

Mean Girls– Around puberty in real life, the “mean girl phenomenon” often appears. Adolescent young women develop razor-like tongues to shred their victims and perfectly manicured claws to eviscerate them. They form packs, also known as cliques, where they band together to humiliate victims, cornering them to belittle their appearance, clothes, makeup, lack of popularity, and other petty issues. They often turn on each other—their best friend can change to their worst enemy in the blink of an eyelash extension.

Examples in contemporary fiction include the girls who mercilessly bully Carrie in Stephen King’s novel; Pretty Little Liars, a YA series by Sara Shepherd; Dare Me by Meg Abbott.

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Is Kipling right that the female of the species is more deadly than the male?

TKZers, what’s your verdict?

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In the comments, please nominate your favorite female villain of all time and why she’s memorable.

If your own work features a female villain, please share the details with us.

~~~

Cover by Brian Hoffman

 

Jerome Kobayashi’s roots go deep in his cherry orchard on Montana’s Flathead Lake where his wife’s ashes are buried. He refuses to sell his land, but a female billionaire won’t take no for an answer.

Meet my latest female villain in Fruit of the Poisonous Tree. FREE today on Kindle.

Link

To be notified when The Villain’s Journey is published, please sign up for my mailing list. 

Shakespeare on the Potomac

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This week I continued to make good progress on my novel — now up to 40,000 words — and perhaps as a result I’m not so interested in writing about writing. In my last post I went on and on about summer movies, and now I’m going to talk about my new favorite TV series, House of Cards. My son and I were looking for a fun show to watch during the long, dreary interregnum before The Walking Deadresumes in October, and I’d heard good things about Cards.
If, like me, you’re a latecomer to the series, here’s the gist: Frank Underwood, a Machiavellian congressman from South Carolina, executes a sequence of increasingly dirty tricks to gain power and outmaneuver opponents in Washington, D.C. Underwood is played by Kevin Spacey, and he’s the main reason for watching the show. My favorite part is when he turns to the camera and directly addresses the audience. I know this technique is as old as Shakespeare, but it still works. Frank adopts a completely different tone for these soliloquys, a voice that’s knowing and evil but also bracingly honest. “I despise children,” he admits. “There, I’ve said it.” He also badmouths the president, the vice president and just about everyone else in D.C. As he outlines his schemes for the TV viewers, you can’t help but think of Richard III plotting his assassinations and seductions. (“Was ever woman in this humor wooed? Was ever woman in this humor won?”) The resemblance is so strong that it must be deliberate. The creators of the show clearly wanted to stage an updated version of a Shakespearean history play, with all its naked brutality.
There are also strong hints of Macbeth. Frank’s wife Claire, played by Robin Wright, is supposed to be equally cunning and amoral, but like Lady Macbeth, she has a little trouble living with herself. By the end of Season 1 (my son and I haven’t progressed to Season 2 yet) she seems to be yearning for something more meaningful. Unfortunately, this makes me like her less rather than more. I can’t really see inside her head. She doesn’t indulge in soliloquys, so I don’t know what she’s thinking.
Many of the secondary characters are also weak. Frank’s mistress, an ambitious reporter, is too young and witless. Claire’s paramour is a complete caricature, an English photographer who sounds like a cut-rate Jude Law. Worse, a few of the plot points made no sense at all. During one of the episodes Frank’s machinations trigger a nationwide teacher’s strike, which is utterly ridiculous; teachers are organized on the local level. And at one point Frank delegates a fellow congressman to carry out an unsavory task that could’ve been much more easily accomplished by a private investigator or by Doug Stamper, Frank’s wily second-in-command, who is also my second-favorite character in the series. It was poor plotting, a shame.
But Kevin Spacey’s performance makes up for all the flaws. In fact, it’s almost as good as Bryan Cranston’s performance in Breaking Bad. The two shows have a common theme, the realistic and intimate portrayal of evil, and viewers of both series will find themselves rooting for the bad guy. All in all, though, I think Breaking Bad is the better series, mostly because it leavened the dark proceedings with humor. Cranston was very funny at times, and so was Aaron Paul (his confession about “the problem dog” was one of the funniest and saddest speeches ever written for television).

House of Cards is also somewhat educational. My son is fifteen now, and he needs to learn how our government works. I tell him not to worry if he doesn’t completely understand the plot (which, as I just pointed out, doesn’t always make sense anyway). The important lesson here is that politicians will stop at nothing.

Need a juicy plot? Can’t find your tone?Just listen to some good music

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By P. J. Parrish

Last week, I hit the zone. It’s that wonderful stretch in the writing road when the asphalt is smooth and straight and the tires are humming and you know, you just know, you’re on the right track.  This is what writers live for, I think, this special moment when all the cylinders are firing, the top is down and the wind is in your hair, and the music is blaring out of the radio.

I see a little silhouetto of a man,
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?
Thunderbolt and lightning,
Very, very frightening me.
(Galileo) Galileo!
Galileo Figaro
Magnifico…

Sorry…got carried away there for a moment.

When I write, I hear music in my head. Sure, I see the movies, see the scenes playing out. But the music? That’s something special. I know I’m not alone in this. I suspect many of you “hear” your books as well as “see” them in your heads. But let’s make one big important distinction here.

I’m not talking about the music you might chose to listen to WHILE you write. I’m one of those folks who can’t listen to music when I am pounding the Acer keyboard. It’s like the voices of singers drown out the voices of my characters. And I need to listen to those characters very very carefully.

What I am talking about are the soundtracks that play softly in the background of your brain as your book comes to life. All my books seem to have soundtracks that help me define my themes and motifs and maybe more importantly, capture the right tone. Think of all the great movies you have seen in your life. Most had great soundtracks that even when not actively playing on the screen murmured in your mind.

Take that mournful lone trumpet that opens The Godfather. The song’s title is “The Immigrant,” though it’s sometimes called “The Godfather Waltz.” (Did you even realize it’s in three-quarter time?) It’s the first thing we hear when the movie opens, a slow foreboding melody that lasts for only seconds. But it identifies two big themes — the use of power and fear — and it sets film’s chiaroscuro mood.

“The Immigrant” is a motif, appearing throughout the film, sometimes almost sweetly but usually with foreboding. Most memorably in this scene:

Or consider the score of Lawrence of Arabia. Sweeping, magestic, yes. The moment you hear it you are there in the vast scorched beauty of the desert. But the theme song is also elegaic, so we somehow know what we are seeing and hearing is all grand metaphor for our tragic hero’s torment and self-delusion.

But we’re supposed to be talking about books, right? How can we apply this magic to the static page? Well, eBooks have given writers to ability to embed sound and images in their novels. A couple years ago, Stephen Smoke, author of 19 novels and a film director, published Cathedral of the Senses, which is supposedly the first novel with its own embedded soundtrack.

Maybe I’m a Luddite, but I’m not too keen on this idea because I’m thinking that it’s the writer’s job to create a world so vivid in the reader’s imagination that the reader himself can make up his own movies and soundtracks. That’s what reading is all about, no?

But I do think we writers have an obligation to plant the seeds in the reader’s head that enhance the imaginary experience. Our powers of description must be acute so the reader can see, smell, taste and hear things. But we also need to pay very close attention to what the reader is feeling.  And this is where the music comes in.

I’ve written here before about how important tone is to a book’s success. (Click here) Like that moviegoer watching The Godfather for the first time, your reader should be able to know immediately what kind of world they are entering. But if you don’t know the tone of your book — what its soundtrack is — your reader can’t either. Your reader might enjoy the plot, like the characters, have a chuckle or scare or two. But they won’t truly invest themselves emotionally in your story.

Thinking about your book as having a soundtrack can help you identify themes and motifs. A theme is what you are trying to say behind the mechanics of plot; it’s an underground railroad propelling your story and people forward. Likewise, a motif is an element in your story that, through repetition, enhances mood and theme. Think of the green light on Daisy’s deck in The Great Gatsby or the washing of hands in Macbeth.  Or that trumpet solo in The Godfather.

Sometimes, music can inspire the story itself. Years ago, Kelly and I were stuck trying to come up with a plot for our next Louis Kincaid thriller. Then one day I was listening to my favorite J. Geils song Monkey Island.  

It starts out as this funky jazz instrumental but then it slows into this really creepy song:

No one could explain it
What went on that night
How every living thing
Just dropped out of sight
We watched them take the bodies
And row them back to shore
Nothing like that ever
Happened here before.

There ain’t no life on Monkey Island
No one cares and no one knows
The moon hangs out on Monkey Island
The night has dealt the final blow.

We asked ourselves what the hell had happened out there on Monkey Island? Eight months later, we had our sixth Louis Kincaid book finished, Island of Bones. 

The same thing happened with our standalone thriller The Killing Song. My husband Daniel and I were sitting in a cafe in Paris drinking kir royales and I was bemoaning the fact I couldn’t think of a plot set in Paris.  Daniel, a big Rolling Stones fan and a cheap drunk, began to sing the Rolling Stones song, Too Much Blood:

A friend of mine…had a girlfriend in Paris. 
You know he took her to his apartment, cut off her head. 
Put the rest of her body in the refrigerator, ate her piece by piece. 
Put her in the refrigerator, put her in the freezer. 
And when he ate her and took her bones to the Bois de Boulogne….

We didn’t end up writing that book for more three more years and it had nothing to do with those actual lyrics. But that song, with its darkness and dread, was always there in my head, percolating a plot and pushing me along.

Oddly enough, I haven’t been hearing much music of late when I write. Maybe that’s why I’ve been in a bit of a slump. We’re working on two new books right now and both have been going more slowly than normal. One of them is a stand alone that, as I have mentioned here before, is a departure for me. So I am struggling.  I was trying to hear music but it was like I was thirteen again, laying in bed with my transitor radio, trying to pick up the fading in-and-out signal from Cousin Brucie in New York. Only one song was coming through to me: Lucky Man by Emerson Lake and Palmer. I realized it was the theme song for my protagonist’s husband, Alex, who does indeed, have white horses and ladies by the score.

But my heroine Amelia? I wasn’t hearing her at all.

Then, about four weeks ago, I was running with the old iPod and Ruby Tuesday came on. But it wasn’t the Stones version. It was Marianne Faithfull’s rendition. I had heard the Stones song a million times and didn’t particularly like it because it struck me as one of their mildly misogynistic odes to loose women (in this case, it is said, a Keith groupie.) But the song is utterly transformed by Faithfull’s ravaged weary voice:

“There’s no time to lose”, I heard her say
Catch your dreams before they slip away
Dying all the time
Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind
Ain’t life unkind?

Suddenly, I knew who my protagonist was, what she had lost, and what she had to do about it. The theme of my story came into sharp focus. And the motifs, which were there in my pages but not fully exploited, started to glow like neon. Last week, I went back and started over on the book.  I have written four chapters in four days. Where once I dreaded opening the file, now I look forward to it. And I am sure it is because I found the soundtrack.

Listen to your book’s music. You have to hear it or your reader never will.