“God became man, granted. The devil became a woman.”[1]

 Stories of women poisoning their husband’s food or drink have captivated people throughout European history, in a large part because poisoning is presented as the ultimate act of cowardly cruelty, revenge, malice and sexual deviancy – and therefore perhaps liberation. It is women’s ambition and weakness that introduced all evil in the world (Pandora, Eve, etc). Narratives of women poisoners offer a glimpse into this particular misogynist construct. We are not strangers to evil, scheming women in literature, history, and art.

Modern European culture has its foundation in Judeo-Christian traditions, and the Bible’s account of the first humans answers the very question of how the Judeo-Chrisitan tradition constructs gender. Most are familiar with the story of Adam, the first man, and Eve, the first woman, who was created from Adam’s rib to be his second wife. Much less known is Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was created from the same earth as Adam and was his equal. Lilith and Eve are the two incarnations of the Feminine: the primordial Feminine and the Wife/Mother, respectively. As the ‘untamed’ primordial Feminine, Lilith refused to be submissive to Adam, and eventually ran away. Adam requested that God send angels to bring her back, but she refused and became a demon who seduces men and kills newborn babies.[2] God then made Eve from Adam’s rib, and she initially appeared to be a much more fitting wife. However, Eve also proved to be unmanageable, which culminated in her eating from the forbidden fruit and thus bringing sin on humanity. In this way, both incarnations of the Feminine are tainted with sin, one as a demon and one as an ignorant wife who failed to resist temptation. Adam, the honest and loyal husband wronged by his first wife and tricked by his second was made to suffer the consequences of their evil. The Feminine is thus constructed as prone to sin and inherently evil unless contained by the Masculine (often through violence), who is steadfast and honest, loyal to God above all else.

The primordial Feminine that Lilith represents and the tamed Wife and Mother that Eve represents have been the two ways in which we view women in European history. The version that Lilith represents has seen many women killed in brutal ways, mostly for embracing the ancient expression of femininity incompatible with the Masculine construct that a patriarchal society relies upon: enter the Witch, the new expression of the primordial Feminine. Through centuries of persecution she survived, but not before she became the most feared creature in Western imagination. The Witch has knowledge of all poisonous herbs and foods, and concocts potions with them. But the Witch is also the protector of women, and thus a threat to the Masculine; she is antithetical to the carefully built Masculine construct not because she isn’t the Mother or Wife, but rather because she is – and not just to him. The Witch is mother and wife to all women, and routinely puts her life on the line for them.

One of many examples of this is Giulia Tofana, a woman in Renaissance Italy who sold a very popular cosmetic called Aqua Tofana. Giulia Tofana is credited with killing over six hundred men over the course of fifty years in the seventeenth century. She produced and sold Aqua Tofana: powder cosmetics which were laced with arsenic, lead and belladonna. It is said that as little as four drops of the odorless, colorless, and tasteless potion was enough to kill a person (a man, to be precise) and it was virtually untraceable by the toxicology of the time.[3] Within the analysis of European gender constructs, Tofana would be the Witch who, with her knowledge of poison, sought to provide a service to women who felt their only hope was through killing their husband. The network of clients that Tofana built is impressive enough to conclude that many women wanted their husbands dead. After all, patriarchal control of women through gendered constructs, and specifically through the violence and ingratitude of the Masculine construct, leaves women very little options. The inherent scheming, petty nature that European Judeo-Christian culture has attributed to women has been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Defeating the Masculine by poisoning his food is imperative to the survival of the primordial Feminine, the Witch, the Wife and the Mother, and above all, Woman.

 “She’s a woman, Sir, and consequently a Monster.”[4]

 Masculinity is so inherently frail, it requires the complete subordination and repression of the Feminine in order to exist. In fact, part of the first task of the Masculine is to subdue the Feminine until she becomes the Wife, because the Wife is passive, nurturing and life-giving. The act of poisoning takes place when the primordial Feminine, symbolized by Lilith, kills the Wife, symbolized by Eve, and turns from a life-giving force to a deadly one, as food is when it’s poisoned, thus turning from the nurturing Wife into the deadly Witch. This reveals the nature of the struggle between these constructs, the raw, primordial Feminine waging war against the Masculine, who cannot exist without the Wife. The battleground becomes food and drink, which the Wife as the life-giver must provide for the Masculine. The Masculine can conquer the battlefield with his mighty weapons and bravery, and can defeat any enemy that challenges him, but an enemy that does not challenge, but rather attacks when least expected, cannot be stopped. Defeat through poisoned food is emasculating because it circumvents that need for violence, which is what the Masculine is built on.

We can observe this process take place much less abstractly in the story of Agrippina the Younger, who is suspected by some historians of poisoning her husband (and uncle), Roman Emperor Claudius, in order to ensure the succession of her son Nero. Per ancient sources, Agrippina is portrayed as a cunning and scheming woman bent on accumulating power and influence in the Roman court. Such a woman can only be remembered by the limiting simplicity of gender constructs prevalent in her time and ours. In the story, Agrippina metaphorically embraces the primordial Feminine construct (so hated and feared by the Masculine) to kill her husband, the Emperor and the most powerful man of that time (the ultimate embodiment of the ideal Masculine) by feeding him poisoned mushrooms.[5] The fear of the Feminine that men have stems from this very act of bringing down and humbling the most powerful of men, the strongest and bravest soldiers and statesmen with something as simple as food. Agrippina exposes the Masculine without the need for physical overpowerment. Pushed by her culture to embrace a Lilith-like construct, Agrippina then saw her fate sealed when her son Nero, the newly crowned Emperor began to feel threatened by her unwillingness to yield back to the much more tamed Wife/Mother construct. After many unsuccessful attempts to kill her, including the use of poison, his assassins finally succeeded in stabbing her to death. Agrippina had so thoroughly embraced the Witch construct that her own son could not defeat her using her own weapon. Women like Agrippina prove that the gender constructs of European traditions are in constant struggle for their own survival through the defeat or taming of the other. She also proves that the Masculine construct can only survive if the Feminine is repressed and subdued into the Wife or Mother, delegated only to life-giving instead of the more complex dominion over both life-giving and life-taking.

“Woman’s at best a contradiction still.”[6]

In conclusion, the battle of the sexes, as the phrase goes, is not really a battle of the biological sexes, but rather a battle between over-simplified gender constructs stemming from traditions that came before the emergence of a Christian modern Europe. Masculinity and Femininity are complex constructs, but Femininity has always interpellated, awed, frightened, and enraged the patriarchal order, and so it has been beaten into submission so that the seemingly stronger Masculine can thrive. The Masculine construct exists only through the burning of the Witch, the submission of the Wife, and the passiveness of the Mother. And while the Masculine needs violence in order to constrain and/or contain the Feminine, the primordial Feminine’s use of  poison completely bypasses that need for violence, and thus emasculates the patriarchy. Stories like the one of Giulia Tofana exemplify how the Witch (Tofana) and Wife (her clients) worked in tandem to bring down six hundred men without spilling a single drop of blood. Further, the story of Agrippina shows us that the Witch, the Mother, and the Wife need not necessarily be different people. She was the Mother and the Wife, but when she learned of her son’s betrayal, she is said to have asked the assassins to stab her in the womb, to kill the last remnant of the Mother in her and thus fully embracing the Witch.

It is natural and human to fear poison. The idea that a life-giving force such as food and drink can easily be turned into a life-taking force without any violence is a disturbing one. Before humans concocted our own poisons, nature was the provider of such substances, and we had evolved to fear them in order to survive. To have the power to poison is to almost have the power of nature itself, which is what the Witch is feared to have. The goal of each gender construct is its own survival in a binary, patriarchal society. For the feminine, there is not a wiser weapon than poison, or is not a man who is immune to it.

[1] Hugo, Victor. Ruy Blas. Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2009.

Act II, Scene V

[2] Lesses, Rebecca. “Lilith.” Jewish Women's Archive, March 20, 2009. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lilith.

[3] Carlton, Genevieve. “Meet the Woman Who Poisoned Makeup to Help over 600 Women Murder Their Husbands,” March 2, 2018.

[4] Wycherley, William. The Country Wife. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2018). 3

[5] Grimm-Samuel, Veronika. “On the Mushroom That Deified the Emperor Claudius.” The Classical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1991): 178–82. doi:10.1017/S0009838800003657.

[6]Alexander Pope, Moral Essays, Epistle 2