Wicked! Réécritures, révisions et résistances de la méchanceté au féminin dans les fictions populaires et de jeunesse anglophones (XIXe- XXIe siècles)

23-24 Oct 2025 Arras (France)

FR EN

Call for Papers

November 2024 saw the release of the first part of the film adaptation of the Wicked media franchise (previously a series of children's novels turned into a successful musical), which recounts the formative years and transformation of the “Wicked Witch of the West”, the memorable antagonist of Frank L. Baum's children’s classic The Wizard of Oz (1900). The Wicked phenomenon brings together several features characteristic of contemporary Anglophone mass cultural production, the most salient of which is certainly a form of heroization of the “villainess”. This process of rewriting and revising classical villainesses is obviously fuelled by trends and commodification but it also encapsulates a crisis in the defining contours of this archetype of children’s and youth literature – a crisis which may be further explored and understood through the interlacing questions of gender and genre circulations.

Indeed, the character of the “villainess” or “wicked woman” is far more common in children’s literature than her male counterpart (Belotti, 129). Whereas general literature would rather speak of the “antagonist”, her very name (Propp, 38) is intimately associated with children’s literature, possibly echoing the childish protest that expresses disagreement, even anger (Baussier, 103), and a “vilaine” in French is first and foremost, a mean, wicked girl. The archetype serves several functions in children's literature – pedagogical (moral counterpoint), dramaturgical (guaranteed thrills) and psychoanalytical (release of impulses) – but it also opens up a breach in the tightly controlled fictional regime of children's literature by asking, with varying degrees, the question of the heroization of evil. Indeed, in a literary genre long marked by its desire to instruct and educate its readers, these sometimes repulsive and sometimes fascinating figures expose and question the identifying power of literature (Jouve).

This question proves thorny if we look at contemporary children's fiction, which seems to have removed villains from its narratives (see the latest productions from Disney studios such as Elementary or Encanto), prompting for instance the Revue des Livres pour Enfants to wonder whether “villains [are] an endangered species”. How to identify the “good ones” when there are no more villains, and what moral bearings then guide young readers? This disappearance is all the more intriguing given that, in contemporary popular fiction, particularly in television, villainesses seem to occupy a new, central place, that of protagonist – both in realistic-type series (Killing Eve) and in fantasy genres drawn from children's literature (Cruella, Maleficent, Wicked), offering further evidence of the “juvenization” of popular cultural goods (a phenomenon identified as early as 1985 by Jean-Claude Chamboredon). However, if these fictions offer the promise of a voyage into wickedness and evil, they tend to construct their female villains more as anti-heroines embodying, more or less explicitly, a feminist discourse. By portraying such characters, these fictions also demonstrate the capacity of “illegitimate” forms of culture to reflect and comment on contemporary politics of identity, an issue further complicated by these cultural productions’ anchorage in capitalist logics and contexts of production.

The term wicked seems to embrace the recent twists and turns of these “villainesque” trajectories: wicked has undergone semantic shifts away from the strange language of witches (wicked comes from the Old English wicce meaning witch) and immorality (“Something wicked this way comes” Macbeth 4.1.45) to the admirative colloquial interjections of contemporary British English (“That's wicked!”). Like the stepmother, the witch thus appears as a matrix figure of the villainess. A prototypical embodiment of women “on the margins” of society and its codes, the witch has nevertheless also been a feminist icon since the 1970s, revived by the third feminist wave in the Western world. If this feminist revisionism is to be analysed in light of a social and political context marked by the 2017 Me Too movement, and thus, as a political tool, it commodifies an age-old literary motif. Whether it is Mary Shelleys’ Queen of the Underworld (Proserpine,1820), or Rochester's first wife, the original “madwoman in the attic” (Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, 1966), antagonistic female characters from mythology or literary classics have long been the subjects of feminist rewritings that have endowed them with a voice, a past and an interiority. From the 19^th to the 21^st century, this conference will look at the evolution of these politics of revision of the villainess, whose popularity remains undiminished to this day (as demonstrated, for example, by the current success of Madeline Miller’s Circe). Finally, the fact that Proserpine, a children's play, is the starting point for this movement, which has now spread to all popular fiction, further demonstrates the intimate nature of the relationship between popular and children's fiction, which is at the heart of the questions raised in this conference.

However, in these feminist rewrites, which offer a reason for Cruella's tenacious hatred of Dalmatians and make Elphaba the “green” fruit of forbidden love, the question of the heroization of evil is evacuated in favour of a psychological determinism aimed at relativizing the evil incarnate. What does this disappearance of the villain say about contemporary perspectives on female amorality? Can the villain only exist in a constant negation of her name? And conversely, can there be fictional representations of women whose moral corruption resist heroization and moral rehabilitation? In her now-famous 1994 speech entitled “Spotty-Handed Villainesses”, Margaret Atwood argues in favour of writing monstrous women, in contrast to second-wave feminist discourses that defend the need to represent a feminine heroism, the ultimate embodiment of which would be Wonder Woman. For Atwood, on the contrary, depicting women as villains expands the territory of fiction and the agency of its female characters. This counterpoint to the aforementioned rehabilitation shows the extent to which the rewriting of the female villain by works of popular culture is confronted to the durability of misogynist subtexts relating to issues of sexuality and motherhood.

As figures of unregulated excess and extra-ordinary prowess, villainesses also raise the question of power: that of the permanence of the trope, through the variations brewed by multiple rewritings; that, symbolic, of the villainess’s now central place in popular narratives, fictions and in the collective imagination. This conference will also examine the paradoxes surrounding the notion of empowerment as applied to female characters: does this feminist “coming-into-power” of the villainess take place through processes of moral restoration, or through the resistance of female villainy?

Finally, the popular dimension of these works necessarily implies a questioning of their reception: while TV series villains can become fan favourites, other female characters are unwillingly turned into villains through their reception (think of Skyler White, a character in Breaking Bad that fans have (mis)interpreted as an antagonist, a subject on which the actress opened up in a New York Times op-ed). What kind of rewrites do these cases of erroneous reception offer?

In addition to those already mentioned, proposals for papers may address, but are not limited to, the following themes for reflection:

- unlikeable female characters (Fleabag, the heroines of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels...)

- The predominance of villains in fantasy literature and culture

- Villainesses and motherhood: stepmothers, bad mothers and sterility

Bibliography

Atwood, Margaret. « Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behaviour in the Creation of Literature » [1994], in Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing 1970–2005. Londres: Virago, p.171–86.

Bacqué, Marie-Hélène and Carole Biewener. L’empowerment, une pratique émancipatrice ? Paris: la Découverte, 2015.

Barthelmebs-Raguin, Hélène and Matthieu Freyheit, ed. CriminELLES: le crime à l’épreuve du féminin. Reims: EPURE, 2018.

Baussier, Sylvie. « Ressentir la méchanceté, du regard au point de vue », in La revue des livres pour enfants, n°330, May 2023, p. 102-107.

Belotti, Elena Gianini. Du côté des petites filles [1974], trsl. collective. Paris: Des femmes - Antoinette Fouque, 1994.

Carter, Angela, ed. Wayward Girls and Wicked Women. London: Virago, 2016.

Chamboredon, Jean-Claude. « Adolescence et post-adolescence : la juvénisation. Remarques sur les transformations récentes des limites et de la définition sociale de la jeunesse », in Adolescence terminée, adolescence interminable, ed. Anne-Marie Alléon, Odile Morvan an Serge Lebovici. Paris: PUF, 1985, p. 13-28.

Chesney-Lind, Meda and Katherine Irwin. Beyond Bad-Girls: Gender, Violence, and Hype. New York / London: Routledge, 2008.

Dufayet, Nathalie. « Avant-Propos », in Les « nouveaux » villains, Figures du mal dans la fiction de jeunesse. Paris: classiques Garnier, RLM, n°10, 2020.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination [1979]. New Haven/London: Yale UP, 2020.

Jouve, Vincent. « Le méchant dans la littérature de jeunesse », in La revue des livres pour enfants, n°330, May 2023, p.78-87.

Propp, Vladimir. Morphologie du conte de fées [1928], French trsl. Marguerite Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov et Claude Kahn. Paris: Seuil, 1970.

Reynolds, Kimberley. Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880-1910. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

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