Females have been routinely associated in the Western tradition with vindictive emotions and vengeful crimes. Colourful examples of the stereotypical vengeful female can be identified all the way from Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, whose spectre wakens the chorus of foul Erinyes (Latin Furies) to avenge her murder in Eumenides, to Alex Forrest in Adrian Lyne's dismally sexist 1987 revenge movie Fatal Attraction and beyond. This essay explores the role played in this triumphant feat of patriarchal ideology by the identity, gender and role of the Erinys.

One stalwart of the Renaissance tragic stage was the vengeful female – and especially the retaliatory mother – and she was fundamentally informed by the classical models, especially Clytemnestra and Medea. Tamora in the late sixteenth-century Shakespearean Titus Andronicus actually dresses up to accost her enemy, Titus, in the costume of ‘the dread Fury’ (5.2.82), called also ‘Revenge, sent forth from th’ infernal kingdom’ (5.2.30). Or remember Tamyra's terrifying speech in George Chapman's The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois of 1613, ‘Revenge, that ever red sitt’st in the eyes / Of injured ladies, till we crown thy brows / With bloody laurel, and receive from thee / Justice for all our honour's injury’ (1.2.1–4). Few invectives have gone so far as the nineteenth-century Swiss-French satirical poet Jean-Antoine Petit-Sens who was believed to have said that an angry woman is vindictive beyond measure, and hesitates at nothing in her bitterness, but many would recognise the sentiments expressed in Rudyard Kipling's famous lines from ‘The female of the species’ (1911), ‘But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other's tale / The female of the species is more deadly than the male’ (15–16).

She-avengers lurk in diverse genres and media at all levels of culture, cumulatively affirming the ideological shibboleth that women are especially vengeful. The subtitle of an anonymous novella purporting to recount a true story, published in London in 1732 as The Perjur’d Citizen, is simply Female Revenge. It is a lurid account of the psychological subjectivity of a slighted woman, a figure ‘actuated by a Fury’. Matilda is spoilt, rich, and outraged when her fiancé Calamus absconds. He prefers a (much nicer) bride called Lucy. Matilda is now ‘ready to burst with Rage and Envy; a thousand different strategems ran thro’ her Mind, to poison the Felicity of this happy Pair’.