Perceiving Evil: Evil Women and the Feminine

Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2015. How do we perceive evil? And why are so many notions of evil connected with women? The mermaid, the witch, the femme fatale, the bitch: these are all representations of evil women or women who have subverted the conventional ideas of femininity. Kept alive in oral tradition and hidden in the unspoken rules of society, the dangerous, evil woman lives on to define what we believe a woman should be. Through the various prisms of popular culture, forensic psychology, veterinary medicine and many more this collection aims to examine the ideas of evil, women and the feminine. The collection focuses on why we as a society perceive certain women or aspects of femininity to be evil and why we can have certain emotional reactions to this. It examines the background to these perceptions, whether they are rooted in literature, myth, history or fact and what this means for the development of both masculinity and femininity.