Everybody Loves a Bad Girl - A Study of Female Evil in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride and Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl

This essay examines the two female antagonists Zenia from Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride and Amy Dunne from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. It explores traditional female evil in literature, and compares the two villains to the traditional roles that evil women often have. In addition to this, it also examines what way Amy and Zenia might not just be evil characters, by adding a feminist perspective to their roles as women who reject traditional patriarchal values. The essay will investigate how we might be expected to label these characters as evil, and I will argue that we are not actually meant to label them, but instead question what makes these women bad