ABSTRACT
My thoughts on this subject were initially stimulated by Edith Durham’s comments (1928: 164) on how Albanian village women could be more conservative than men in maintaining traditions and less likely to break with traditional ways of doing things. I wanted to examine this theory with reference to the evidence for revenge culture. Here I argue that the association of women with persistent calls for vengeance and the constant memory of past events and traditions is part of the reason why women have been so closely associated with revenge plots in literature. In the first part of this chapter, I discuss the representation of women and revenge in some modern novels based in vendetta societies. In the second part, I compare these to some literary representations of women and revenge from ancient Greece, especially in democratic Athens. It is not my aim to suggest precise equivalence or continuity in these forms of literature, (although Greek tragedy has clearly been influential in some respects on later revenge plots), but rather, I put forward a way of reading tragedy that is suggested by these modern novels.
