Guest Blogger Elizabeth Eckhart on Where’s the Female Walter White?
The theme behind Scandalous Women is that well-behaved women don’t make history. Unfortunately, the entertainment business is another story. Though history is rife with women who have performed unheroic actions in order to further a cause they believed was right, it seems novels, television, and film have been slow to understand these qualities in women. The entertainment world is buzzing with the onslaught of anti-hero men; consider Breaking Bad’s Walter White, and Dexter’s Dexter, who are two of the most recent additions to the “dangerous men” club that began with Tony Soprano. Like Tony, these are men who make purposefully evil choices for what they believe is a pure-hearted cause. Walter White, after all, becomes a drug lord for the sake of his family. Not to say we haven’t had our fair share of “evil” or “naughty” women, but in most cases, that’s all they are. Women in popular literature, on TV, and in movies are more likely to be found portraying “good girls,” who, even if t...