The crime was thought particularly heinous as the killer was the victim’s wife, Clytemnestra. By the 1850s, when newspapers had reached the mass market, a voracious appetite for crime stories had grown, particularly for murders involving women. I wondered if it was possible to tell the story of an ordinary middle-class woman driven to kill her husband over hundreds of episodes. As with child killers, it is their very rareness that has both fascinated and repelled us through the ages. Perhaps, by wielding the knife, Lupita Nyong’o’s Adelaide and Jodie Comer’s Villanelle are demonstrating a desire to kill off a 21st-century form of patriarchy just as Clytemnestra did 2,500 years ago.

Source: The Guardian July 20, 2019 09:56 UTC