Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of Coverture

Abstract

In the 1998 film A Perfect Murder, a woman who is beautiful, brilliant, and heiress to loo million dollars kills her sinister husband-who has hired someone to kill her so he can get her money-in the midst of a struggle in which she has struck the first blow. Although the character played by Gwyneth Paltrow is far more active than the character Grace Kelly played in the original 1954 film Dial Mfor Murder, her pro-active approach to the problem of the murderous husband is to kill him. After she does so, a sympathetic policeman reassures her, what else could you do? What interests me is why do stories about spousal conflict so often come to this?