And yet, there is a long legacy of violent women in culture, from Euripides' play Medea, the ancient Greek myth where a wife seeks bloody revenge on her unfaithful husband, to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1862 novel Lady Audley's Secret, where a woman's murderousness is explained as insanity, to film femmes fatales such as Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past (1947). On screen, violent women have prompted fierce debate. A Question of Silence (1982), about three women's unexplained murder of a shopkeeper, was controversial upon its release, but later deemed a feminist classic. Glenn Close's Alex in Fatal Attraction (1987) was alleged by Susan Faludi in her 1991 book Backlash to have been made the scapegoat for a man's
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