'JihadJane' Illustrates Our Fascination With Femme Fatales

(March 10) -- Colleen LaRose, a suburban Philadelphia woman, was indicted Tuesday for allegedly recruiting terrorists online and moving to Europe to try to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had depicted Islam's Prophet Muhammad as a dog. LaRose, who went by the online handle "JihadJane," is not of Middle Eastern extraction, though she converted to Islam.

But what's more notable is what the indictment -- as well as other recent arrests -- does to challenge societal assumptions about women and violence. It was only a few weeks ago that neuroscientist Amy Bishop was arrested after allegedly killing three colleagues during a department meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

"Rampages of this sort have become familiar," Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review, wrote in a recent thoughtful essay. "But with rare exceptions they have been the preserve of men: lonely, alienated psycho killers with arsenals of high-powered weapons and feverishly composed manifestos."

And yet Western culture has explored numerous violent male types -- from cold, calculating Michael Corleone of "The Godfather" to aggrieved sociopaths in the mold of "Cape Fear's" Max Cady to the cheery sadists of Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," to take examples from cinema alone.

Meanwhile, portrayals of violent women have been less nuanced. As Tanenhaus pointed out, they are mainly victims, from Charlize Theron's character in "Monster" to the indelible performance of Glenn Close as the stalker in "Fatal Attraction." Tanenhaus continued:

Much has changed since then, but the topic of women and violence -- especially as represented by women -- remains more or less in a time warp, bound by the themes of sexual and domestic trauma, just as male depictions of female violence are locked in the noir demimonde of fantasy, the slinky femmes fatales once played by Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner more or less duplicated by Kathleen Turner and Sharon Stone.

As today's breathless headlines showed once again, society is both fascinated by female violence and hard pressed to explain it without reverting to tropes. This is not a new phenomenon.

To take just one example, the Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Hungary, who lived from 1560 to 1614, is said to be history's most prolific serial killer, torturing and killing between 50 and 600 girls and women within the confines of her castle. (She was convicted of killing 80.) Despite evidence to the contrary, there was no stopping the legend that grew out of the case -- that the countess had killed in order to bathe in the victims' blood, thereby preserving her youth and beauty.

Centuries later, we rely on similar tropes. But that may change with the cases of LaRose and Bishop, which while different, are nonetheless modern types, offering up versions of female psychopathy that have yet to find their analog in mainstream film or literature.