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NSFW: Fumetti Nightmares: Ulula the Werewolf Woman
🕑 Added 2022-05-30 20:00:03 +0000 UTCAs a warning, this article is most certainly not safe for work. The comic discussed here includes explicit sex and violence, including a combination thereof that some readers may find uncomfortable or upsetting.
Note: This article incorporates material originally published in two posts from 2015 that have since been removed from the site.
By Doris V. Sutherland
One of the most memorable anti-heroines of Italian erotic-horror comics is the lycanthropic femme fatale Ulula, whose exploits were drawn primarily by artist Giovanni Romanini (1945–2020), although the lushly-painted covers were handled by other artists.
Two of Ulula’s encounters with stock horror monsters (note the almost certainly unauthorised cameo from Christopher Lee on the right)
Ulula’s covers often depict the title character in a strange costume—a sort of one-piece, midriff-bearing swimsuit, sometimes with a cape attached. It seems safe to say Ulula owes a debt to the American anti-heroine Vampirella, who wears a similar skimpy red number. But Ulula—whose name means “howls”—does not sport Vampirella’s trademark bat motif. Her hair is styled to suggest a pair of wolfish ears, while her choker has two claws dangling from it. She is an example of a fairly uncommon breed: a sexy werewolf woman.
Today, we tend not to associate werewolves with femininity, let alone physically attractive femininity. Cinematic werewolves have been portrayed as grotesque creatures from the genre’s beginning in The Werewolf of London (1935) and The Wolf Man (1941); this reached a height in the 1980s, when films such as An American Werewolf in London (1981) emphasised the visceral body-horror implications of the transformation from human to wolf. More recently, the likes of True Blood and Twilight have cast werewolves as earthy, conventionally masculine counterparts to refined and effete vampires.
But things were once very different. In the literature of nineteenth-century Britain, the favoured variety of werewolf was a beautiful—even ethereal—woman who acted as a temptress. This character type owes something to the widespread folktale motif of the animal bride, variations on which include swan maidens, frog princesses, and—yes—wolf women.
Perhaps the ur-example of the Victorian werewolf temptresses is the White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains, who turned up in a chapter of Captain Frederick Marryat’s 1839 novel The Phantom Ship. Similar werewolves who followed in her lead include Ravina in Sir Gilbert Campbell’s “The White Wolf of Kostopchin” (1889), Lilith in Count Eric Stenbock’s genuinely weird “The Other Side: A Breton Legend” (1893), and White Fell in Clemence Housman’s allegorical “The Were-Wolf” (1896). These women all have their brutal sides, but they are still essentially beautiful, as summarised by Housman’s description of White Fell:
She was a maiden, tall and very fair. The fashion of her dress was strange, half masculine, yet not unwomanly. A fine fur tunic, reaching but little below the knee, was all the skirt she wore; below were the cross-bound shoes and leggings that a hunter wears. A white fur cap was set low upon the brows, and from its edge strips of fur fell lappet-wise about her shoulders; two of these at her entrance had been drawn forward and crossed about her throat, but now, loosened and thrust back, left unhidden long plaits of fair hair that lay forward on shoulder and breast, down to the ivory-studded girdle where the axe gleamed.
In more recent decades, however, female werewolves have been less common. They have their place, certainly: Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and the film Ginger Snaps (2000) both associate lycanthropy with menstruation, for example, while series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Being Human have included werewolf women amongst their ensemble casts. But contemporary lycanthropy, by and large, remains something of a boy’s club.
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The fairer sex…? The monster finds a mate in Bride of Frankenstein (1935).[/caption]
The reason for this is not hard to guess. Even in horror, women are generally expected to be conventionally attractive: just compare the Bride of Frankenstein with her male counterpart. The rending hides and grotesque distortions of the Hollywood werewolf—a world away from the fairy tale creatures described by Victorians—is hard to square with traditional feminine good looks.
A werewolf woman who is not only attractive but sexy is an even harder sell. Admittedly, one 1976 Italian film was released in English as Naked Werewolf Woman, but it is hard to imagine raincoat-clad punters queuing up for a film with such a name (unsurprisingly, the movie in question is better known simply as Werewolf Woman). So, Ulula perhaps did not have the odds in her favour. When she made her debut in a story entitled “La Lupa Manara” (which translates as “The Female Werewolf” and, maybe coincidentally, is the original Italian title of Naked Werewolf Woman) how did her comic present itself to the fumetti-buying public…?
The cover to the first issue, which shows Ulula as a barely-dressed woman with the head of a wolf, is remarkable. If we rule out the possibility of Ulula being aimed at a very specific audience of paraphiliacs, then we are left with two possibilities. One is that the cover artist attempted to showcase the concepts of “sexy girl” and “scary werewolf” at the same time with little regard as to whether or not the result actually worked in either respect. The other, perhaps less likely but nonetheless more interesting possibility is that the scene is deliberately surreal. It is almost as though the artist is saying to the prospective buyer, “you want sexy women? Well, we’ve got a sexy woman for you… but she’s not like any sexy woman you’ve seen before.”
She had enough appeal for publisher Edifumetto to give her a fair run. Debuting in 1981. Ulula ran for 36 main issues plus a pair of bumper-sized supplementary editions. The first seven issues were also collected in a 1989 edition of Fumetti Record, but not without alteration. While the original run used an average of two panels per page, the Fumetti Record collection compressed these into layouts of around six panels per page. By way of illustration, here are three pages from issue #6 of Ulula:
While here is the corresponding page in Fumetti Record:
But let us not get too far ahead of ourselves. It is time to trace the Ulula saga back to its beginning in Ulula #1 -- or, rather, the version of Ulula #1 reprinted in Fumetti Record...
The story introduces its protagonist working as a model, strutting her stuff before an eager crowd in the swimsuit beloved by cover artists. Significantly, her name is one letter short: for the time being, she is simply Ulla.
The next major character to turn up is a handsome fellow named Jo. A narrative caption identifies him as “friend, manager and secretary to Ulla … but not lover, because Jo has other tastes.” To demonstrate this point, Jo arranges a date with another man. While Ulla proceeds to strip, shower and pleasure herself, the two men engage in anal sex.
Still frisky, Ulla calls room service and immediately seduces the waiter. At first, she expresses a degree of anxiety: it is only half an hour before midnight. The waiter suspects that she has to return to her husband by then; Ulla denies that she is married and begins fellating the man before he can ask any further questions.
The comic does not scrimp here, delivering an explicit sex scene that takes up just over three pages. The dialogue contains a notable element of racial fetishisation: Ulla regards the black waiter as a “stupendo mulatto,” while he refers to her as “bella troiona bianca.”
On a panel-by-panel basis, Ulla’s naked form is shown more than those of the men, but this is largely because she is the central character. The truth is that the idea of the male gaze—or even the gynophilic gaze—simply does not figure in Ulula. The heroine’s mounds and the waiter’s erect penis are depicted in the same loving terms, apparently on the assumption that the readership will find both subjects equally stimulating.
As the post-coital pair lie in bed, the clock strikes midnight and Ulla transforms beneath the full moon: “Ulla is gone … now there is Ulula”, proclaims a caption, "ulula" being Italian for "howls". The process turns out to be rather less thorough than depicted on the cover, however, simply giving her claws, fangs and a bestial scowl. On the sliding scale between human and wolf, Ulula stays fairly close to the former; nonetheless, she is bestial enough to kill the waiter by biting his throat. Before this, however, she makes the curious decision to tear off and eat his penis.
[caption id="attachment_144253" align="aligncenter" width="835"]
From Ulula #1, published by Edifumetto. Art by Giovanni Romanini. 1981. adapted for reprint in Fumetti Record, 1989.[/caption]
When the topic of sexual violence in horror films is brought up, concerns about misogyny are usually not far behind. And yet, if we look at how the motif of genital mutilation is used in the genre, we can see that horror cinema has shown quite a fascination with violation of the male member. As early as 1932, Tod Browning intended to imply the castration of a male villain in his film Freaks, although the idea was ultimately left out. Since then, I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Cannibal Holocaust (1979), Night of the Demon (1980), Don’t Open Till Christmas (1984), Bad Karma (1991), and others have all depicted men having their knobs chopped off.
In the case of Ulula, the scene does not quite make logical sense--is there any species of predator that eats its prey genital-first?--perhaps the visual pun was too hard to resist. After all, two of the earlier panels showed Ulla eating that man’s cock in a less literal manner.
After Ulula transforms back into a human and realises her crime (“This curse haunts me! Sigh! Sigh!”) Jo arrives in time to help her dispose of the body. The entire story up until this point turns out to have been an in medias res prologue, and the comic now divulges Ulula’s origin story: “It happened five years ago, in January, in the Black Forest … Ulla was guest of a maternal uncle, a famous specialist in blood diseases: Count Wilfred von Hagen …”
Ulla is shown crashing her car while on her way to visit her uncle. The Count happens to live in a stock Gothic castle: “The castle of my uncle is really chic, like Dracula,” muses Ulla before her accident. Meanwhile, Wilfred himself is surrounded by the kind of nondescript apparatus beloved of comic book and b-movie mad scientists.
Confronted with the unconscious and bleeding body of his niece, Wilfred decides to give her a blood transfusion. Alas, with no suitable human donors in the immediate vicinity, his only option is to use blood from one of his test animals—specifically, a wolf.
Ulla recovers and appears to be in good health. However, her uncle shows a decidedly shady side. When she kisses him on the cheek in gratitude, he thinks to himself, “Troietta! Me lo fa anche tirare!” (this means something along the lines of “Slut! She’s turning me on!”)
The twist should not surprise us too much, as Wilfred appears to have been conducting a TUBE (Totally Unnecessary Breast Examination) during the blood transfusion:
Wilfred agrees to let Ulla throw a party to celebrate her recovery, but he is still troubled by impure thoughts. “I have to stay away from her,” he thinks to himself. “So sensual that she excites me, but she is the daughter of my sister! Maybe it is because I have not been to bed with a woman for a long time … I’ll take advantage of the party to invite Countess Ilona … she’s always ready to give it to me!”
Ulla’s party does not go entirely to plan. After a brief altercation with a sleazy young man who gropes her backside and gets a slap on the face as a reward (“I find the boys unbearable”, she thinks to herself), she comes across her uncle having sex with the nubile young Countess Ilona.
Then we get the next twist. In a thought bubble, Ulla reveals that she, too, has incestuous fantasies: “Uncle is the most beautiful of the boys that I masturbated to in high school!”
Up until now Ulla—who feels remorse for the murders carried out by her werewolf-self—has been a sympathetic character. With the revelation that she has erotic designs on her own uncle, however, we learn that she is far from the innocent victim that we may have expected.
Distracted by her incestuous voyeurism, Ulla fails to notice the full moon in the sky as the midnight hour draws close…
The issue takes the opportunity to end on a cliffhanger. In its treatment of the werewolf theme, the story sticks to convention. The portrayal of a lycanthrope as a tragic protagonist, who is forced against their will to become a murderous monster, is entirely consistent with the formula established in the Universal films. The pseudo-scientific origin for Ulula’s affliction, while unusual, is not unique. In the post-war years, monster movies drifted away from the old Gothic ghouls in favour of aliens, radioactive mutants, and the like. While werewolves and vampires would still turn up, their traits were often explained away using the kind of pseudo-scientific business previously associated with the Frankenstein and Invisible Man films; examples of this include the hypnotically-created lycanthrope in I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957) and the portrayal of vampirism as a blood infection in 1945’s House of Dracula (which, like Ulula, uses a blood transfusion as a plot device).
The trend did not last long. With the honourable exception of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, these mid-century technofantasy vampires now seem terribly dated, while the fantasy figures portrayed by Max Schreck and Bela Lugosi live on in our imaginations. That Ulula revived this approach decades after it had run its course suggests that the comic was rather careless in its cribbings, interested less in the folkloric resonance of the werewolf concept and more in the visceral potential of the genre.
So, what does the first issue of Ulula add to the werewolf formula? Well, the simple answer is sex. Hammer’s Carmilla trilogy, Jean Rollin’s arthouse horror, and countless Italian and Spanish exploitation romps had combined Gothic fantasy with sexual titillation, but Ulula and its fumetti kindred took things a step further. This is material that would not be seen onscreen outside of hardcore porn.
The combination of sex and violence in the comic is uncomfortable, but surely that is the point of horror?
Horror fiction has long drawn upon sexual themes. The slasher films of the 1980s and 90s established the vaguely puritanical cliché in which people who have sex are doomed to be murdered. Almost a century beforehand, Bram Stoker invoked rape imagery when describing Dracula’s attack on Mina Harker. Going back still further, we find legends of such supernatural sex-fiends as the succubus and incubus.
Of course, not all horror writers have been keen on eroticism. M. R. James explicitly avoided sex in his works, not out of moral concerns, but simply because he found sex too boring a subject to be used in a ghost story. But yet, generations of storytellers and audiences have found sex and horror an irresistible combination.
What should we make of that? Is Ulula a contemptible piece of exploitation, a harmless bit of derivative nonsense, or an enjoyably brash pulp adventure? Could we even make a case for it as being—at least in some respects—a progressive work, thanks to its gay portrayal and subversion of the male gaze?
These are questions that linger as Ulula enters her second issue…
Once again, the cover art does not beat around the bush. As with issue #1, the figure of the werewolf anti-heroine is front and centre, clearly eroticised but rather more hairy on the limbs than your typical female sex symbol. The main difference from last time is that she has lost the strange wolf-headed look, her appearance now consistent with the comic’s interior art. Unlike the first, this cover shows a second female character: a naked blonde woman who fits the stereotypical role of sexualised victim, seen on many a horror poster or paperback cover. In the background, an elderly man (familiar to those who read the first issue as Ulula’s uncle) reclines on the bed, twirling his moustache as he looks on with voyeuristic approval.
The story of the second issue, entitled “Incesto,” picks up right where the first instalment left off, with Wilfred bedding the beautiful young Countess Ilona. Wilfred himself is a rather curious piece of character design: in his first appearance he resembled a stereotyped elderly scientist—and yet, when he gets his lab-coat off, he turns out to be a veritable Chippendale from the neck down.
Wilfred and Ilona do not realise that they are being watched by Ulla who, for the first time in her life, is transforming into her werewolf alter-ego Ulula.
Ulula gives Ilona a nasty, but non-fatal bite on the shoulder, sending her into a faint. Wilfred responds by whacking his transformed niece over the head with his cane, and succeeds in knocking her unconscious.
After hastily shooing away the partygoers downstairs and sending his manservant on holiday, Wilfred tends to Ilona’s wound. As for Ulla, he has something slightly different in store; something that makes “Incesto” live up to its title:
When Ilona comes round, Wilfred initially tries to convince her that the werewolf attack was just a nightmare, but she has none of it. Reluctantly, the scientist spills the beans and admits that he had turned Ulla into a lycanthrope by giving her an infusion of wolf blood. “I’m leaving,” remarks Ilona, “But before I go, I’m reporting her to the police!”
Exactly what she plans to report to the police is unclear; her only tangible evidence is the wound on her shoulder, which would logically look more like an animal bite than anything inflicted by the pearly whites of a supermodel. Nevertheless, Wilfred and Ulla find Ilona’s threat credible enough to warrant desperate measures.
Ulla watches with grim determination as her uncle blocks Ilona’s departing car by dropping the castle portcullis, causing the countess to bash her head against the windscreen. Wilfred then takes the unconscious woman into his laboratory and announces his plan to “give Ilona an injection of strychnine and then bury her in the crypt.”
Ilona comes round in time to hear this, and tries to escape. Ulla apprehends her and throws her into a wolf’s cage. “Here’s a nice bit of food, brother!” quips our anti-heroine.
“Ulla is hard-hearted, even when she’s not a werewolf,” thinks Wilfred to himself, and the reader will find it difficult to disagree. We have seen Ulla wracked with self-pity about the curse that haunts her (Sigh! Sigh!), but she shows not a shred of sympathy for Ilona.
Some may object to the depiction of the still-sexualised Ilona being torn apart, of course; but before we label Ulula a specifically misogynistic comic, Let us not forget that the first issue showed the werewolf tearing off and eating a hunky naked man’s penis in an identical mixture of sex and violence.
After committing this murder, Ulla retires to bed. While she sleeps, Wilfred sneaks out for another grope, only to accidentally wake her.
Undeterred, he proceeds to rape her. She struggles against him, but when he holds her by the neck and threatens her with death, she gives up hope. The moment of penetration is accompanied by a truly chilling narrative caption that reads simply “…and Ulla loses her virginity.”
Depiction of rape in comics has been something of a hot-button issue for a while now, with Mark Millar and Alan Moore two of the creators whose names tend to come up in the debate. Both writers have defended the portrayals of sexual violence in their comics: Millar has said that rape is simply a way of showing how evil a character is, while Moore argues that—since murder is widely depicted in popular fiction—it makes sense to also depict rape, a more common crime.
A key factor when judging the rape in “Incesto” is the question of how the audience is expected to react. Was the scene included for the arousal of a presumed male reader, so that he can imagine himself as the rapist Wilfred?
This is not necessarily the case.
Horror, by its nature, relies on a conflict of emotions from its audience. Yes, it titillates us with transgression. But at the same time, it pushes us to look away. It strives to make us uncomfortable through atmosphere or—at a more basic level—physical disgust, while simultaneously keeping us so captivated that we cannot look away.
At its most sophisticated, horror is a delicate balancing act that must both attract and repulse its audience. Even the cruder works in the field operate on the same basic principle, albeit in a less refined form. The common argument that Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) glorify torture is weakened by the fact that the audience is meant to find the scenes of violence a trial to sit through, even as they are caught up in the narratives of the films. The argument is better applied to the likes of 24 which are less graphic, but deliberately place the viewer on the side of the torturers.
Ulula is scarcely an example of sophisticated horror, but we can see—if only in crude terms—the same basic combination of the pleasurable and the repugnant. We may find aesthetic appeal in the finely-rendered male and female figures on display, but at the same time, we are appalled by Wilfred’s actions. Uncomfortable, certainly, but this is to be expected from horror.
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Enthusiastic consent…? Agnes Ayres and Rudolph Valentino in the 1921 film of The Sheik.[/caption]
Another factor that should be taken into account is the question of audience demographics if we set aside the assumption that the reader is a straight male, it is quite possible to read Ulula #2 as part of the “bodice-ripping” tradition. For generations, women reading novels like E. M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919) and E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) have imagined themselves in the garters of female protagonists with abusive but irresistible male partners. For generations, too, feminist critics have held these narratives up to the light and been thoroughly unimpressed with what they see, but this has done little to dampen the popularity of such fiction. Whatever objections we may have to the rape scene in “Incesto,” we will have to acknowledge that—to a large extent—it is repackaging the kinds of illicit fantasies that have long been created by and for women.
That said, there is still one scene in which it would be fair to say that "Incesto" has crossed a line.
Towards the end of the rape scene, Ulla is given a thought balloon that reads “My body is beginning to feel pleasure, but I cannot let him have the satisfaction of knowing it.” Right afterwards, a narrative caption tells us that “the girl’s intentions are not in accordance with the exuberance of her sex” (presumably this refers to the act of sex, although the word used—“sesso”—can also denote biological sex). As Ulla reaches orgasm, she yells “Yessss … I’m coming! Again! Again!”
What are we supposed to infer from this? One interpretation is that Ulla’s exclamations are meant to be read as coming from biological impulse and not as representing her intellectual or long-term emotional response to the rape.
“Quite simply, our bodies respond to sex,” says science writer Jenny Morber. “Orgasm during rape isn’t an example of an expression of pleasure. It’s an example of a physical response whether the mind’s on board or not, like breathing, sweating, or an adrenaline rush.” A far less extreme form of this physical reaction, Morber points out, is the natural response to tickling: “During that unpleasant experience, amid calls to stop, the one being tickled will continue laughing. They just can’t help it.” Morber also discusses the confusion and shame felt by rape survivors who have had this experience. “Incesto,” however, shows no interest in exploring the impact of the rape upon Ulla’s psyche.
Because of this, it is quite easy to go away with the impression that Ulla has come to genuinely enjoy the rape. The utterly monstrous implication of this is that, if a woman resists a man’s sexual advances, he merely needs to knock her around until she sits back and finds herself going along with the ride. It is doubtful that Ulula intended to convey this message. Nevertheless, it is a message that can be readily inferred. While not everyone agrees with the view that rape should be verboten in popular fiction, “Incesto” is a pretty clear demonstration of how things can go seriously wrong when such a touchy subject is depicted in the broad strokes of pulp.
After this questionable diversion, the story returns to its core of gore when Ulla transforms into Ulula and slaughters her uncle.
In exploitation films, one tried-and-true sub-genre is the rape-revenge story. Classic examples of this cycle include Last House on the Left (in which rapists are brutally murdered by the parents of one of their victims) and I Spit on Your Grave (in which the victim herself hunts down and murders her rapists), which were released in 1972 and 1978 respectively and would have been part of the general trash-horror scene when Ulula was published. “Incesto” follows the lead of I Spit on your Grave, with the poetic justice of a rapist being killed by his own victim.
Not, however, that the comic is entirely clear on whether Wilfred’s fate is meant to be read as just.
Narrating the story, Ulla tells states that “I realised that I had committed a horrendous crime.” It seems strange that Ulla, who just hours beforehand had knowingly and cold-bloodedly murdered an innocent person purely to save her own skin, feels any remorse for unintentionally killing a man who raped her. Once again, we have the subtext that raping a woman is no big deal.
After Ulla feeds her uncle’s body to those ever-convenient wolves, the flashback ends and Ulla is exchanging flirtatious banter with her gay manager Jo. “Thanks, Jo,” she says. “You’re a true friend! You deserve a prize … if you want!” Jo replies that “for me, that would be a punishment! You know my tastes!”
“Incesto” ends with Ulla collecting the inheritance money left by her dead uncle. It would appear that she is not too torn up about his death, after all: having wiped away her crocodile tears, she decides to go on holiday with Jo.
The second issue of Ulula is a disquieting read, not for its uncomfortable subject matter (surely horror is the ideal genre for uncomfortable subject matter?) but from the implications of the narrative. While sexual violence towards both men and women is part and parcel of the Ulula series, this particular issue takes things a step too far by--if, perhaps, unintentionally--offering a story in which rape is normalised.—if, perhaps, unintentionally on the parts of the creators. Despite this, the comic’s gender politics are more complex than might first be assumed.
While the first issue cast Ulla as a hapless (if sexually liberated) victim of circumstances, “Incesto” gives her a little more agency—albeit only when she has to clean up the mistakes made by her alter ego. Her coldly pragmatic murder of Ilona marks her as something of a picaresque heroine, one who will use whatever tricks she must to get by—no matter who is harmed along the way.
In English-language discussions of horror fumetti, the Gothic movies of Hammer Film Productions are often brought up. But to me, a more interesting comparison point would be another British studio that made its name with popular melodramas: Gainsborough. In her 2006 Rough Guide to Chick Flicks, Samantha Cook sums up the appeal of Gainsborough’s films:
While critics tut-tutted at their visual excess and cheeky flamboyance, [Gainsborough movies] offered thrilling adventures that appealed hugely to deprived female audiences going through the major cultural, social and economic disruptions of World War II.
Cook goes on to analyse Gainsborough’s best-remembered film—The Wicked Lady (1945), in which scheming aristocrat Barbara Skelton escapes from the boredom of her married life by committing highway robberies:
You can’t help but root for the dynamic, beautiful Barbara—“I’ve got brains and looks and personality! I want to use them!”—above goody-goodies like Ralph, Caroline and Kit. And while she may get the comeuppance that the plot demands, she at least gets to have some wicked fun—and wear some truly wicked outfits—along the way.
Films like The Wicked Lady did for female audiences what the gangster movies of the same period did for male filmgoers: they offered wish-fulfilment fantasies of breaking the rules and living for the moment, while still showing the social order patched up and the miscreant punished before the end credits rolled. A similar ethos can be found in many exploitation and horror films. The blood-drinking lesbian in The Vampire Lovers (1970) and patriarchy-hating nun in Flavia the Heretic (Flavia, la monaca musulmana, 1974) may be framed as dangerous transgressors by their narratives, but they are in many respects more sympathetic than the authority figures tasked with slaying them.
From a feminist point of view, Ulula raises an intriguing question: how much is Ulla the hypersexualised fuck-doll of male fantasy, and how much is she the liberated rule-breaker of female fantasy?
