What Ever Happened to the Vengeful Ex-Wife, and How Do We Get Her Back?
Words: Maddy Gorrell
Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but I like mine with a musical number. More specifically, Velma Kelly’s Cell Block Tango in the musical Chicago. Here she shimmies and gyrates the audience into agreement that murdering her husband was necessitated. And since her husband did draw first blood with an extramarital affair, can you tell her that she was wrong? Velma’s rallying cry “He had it coming!” is a deliciously wicked sentiment for anyone who has ever been burned by a lover. But her message cuts deep for another reason. She taps into an overindulged yet pervasive question about women’s worth: what happens to a wife when her husband no longer wants her?
Enter Ruthless People, She-Devil, Death Becomes Her, and First Wives Club: four films that centre on women who have dedicated themselves to helping their husbands achieve success, only to be dropped in the final hour for someone else. What results are dark portrayals of these ex-wives trying not only to get even, but to actively destroy their husbands’ lives. The lead characters of this 80s and 90s subgenre are unapologetically righteous and revengeful: antiheroes who lash out against patriarchal expectations that they should internalise their failing marriages as character flaws. But while these movies maintain cult followings, the storytelling behind them has largely been shelved.
Did Hollywood break up with the ex-wife for her divisive opinions? Or did she serve as the prototype for contemporary expressions of female rage on screen? Hit play on Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” and let’s get into the (brief) rise and fall of the vengeful ex-wife. From The Women to War of the Roses, movies have showcased the complexity and antagonism of crumbling marriages for almost a century. However, what makes Ruthless People, She-Devil, Death Becomes Her, and First Wives Club stand apart from other break-up films is the ex-wives’ positionality to the central plot. Rather than depicting both the husband and wife as they navigate their tumultuous relationship, the narrative only follows the female lead, sympathising with her frustrations and fears.
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Take Ruth in She-Devil. At the beginning of the film, the audience gets an intimate look into her daily life as she labours under notions of the perfect housewife, constantly criticising herself - and being criticised by her husband - for her appearance, parenting style, and ability to run their home. By contrast, the other three films offer zero perspective on the mens’ internal states. Each movie begins with the husband already having betrayed his wife in some way: Ruthless People opens with Danny DeVito’s character eating lunch with his mistress, while in Death Becomes Her, Bruce Willis’s character shirks his fiance for her best friend. The audience doesn’t gain insight into why these men are seeking out lovers; we’re only meant to understand that they’re unredeemable characters for their actions.
Interestingly, Despite the husbands’ bad behaviour, the ex wives remain largely unaffected by the impacts of their dissolving marriages. They have reliable jobs, corporate connections, and a different partner to dote on them. There’s a safety net in place that enables them to offload their wives with little consequence. The story of the vengeful ex-wife is not about the fallout between her and her husband. It’s about the realisation that her role as a wife has been stacked against her from the onset of the movie and her marriage - she’s just the last one to find out about it.
The vengeful ex-wife isn’t the only female trope of the 1980s that copes with a reality that’s out of her control; the “working woman” classics like 9 to 5 and Working Girl also navigate sexism, classicism, and ageism on a daily basis. Comparing the ex-wife against the working woman trope, we can see that the film industry of the 1980s extended its investigation of patriarchal barriers in the workplace to the institution of marriage. B ut while the working woman eventually succeeds in gaining the support necessary to oust her toxic boss, the ex-wife is left to carry the emotional brunt of her failing marriage on her own.
“While her actions are still depicted through the lens of marriage, she retaliates against the misogynistic context that she’s stuck in using the very thing she’s been criticised for all along: emotion.”
What becomes so revolutionary about the vengeful ex-wife then is her refusal to internalise the problems of her relationship, imposed by a system that empowers her husband and punishes her. Unlike the working woman who takes action within her work system to enact change, the vengeful ex-wife operates outside norms, leveraging the same tools that have been used to hold her down — plus a healthy dose of rage. In First Wives Club, this manifests as the three women seizing hold of their husbands’ financial assets, while Ruth in She-Devil reports her husband to the IRS. In Ruthless People and Death Becomes Her, the female leads take even more outlandish action with Barbara Stone turning her husband’s murder plans against him and Madeline and Helen attempting to make Ernest immortal so that he can keep them looking young and beautiful forever.
The trope of the vengeful ex-wife offers an important opportunity to depict righteous anger against the gendered expectations of marriage. But this character doesn’t come without criticism: Even at the time of release, Ruthless People, She-Devil, Death Becomes Her, and First Wives Club were met with mixed reviews, largely because they undercut their own feminist agendas with pandering jokes about the main characters’ looks and behaviour. Perhaps the biggest critique of the vengeful ex-wife is that her identity — even after marriage — is still defined by her relationship to her husband. Plus, she’s typically a white, wealthy woman who has unconvincing access to all of the resources needed for revenge.
Even so, the vengeful ex-wife’s lasting mark on cinema stems from her prototypical expressions of female rage. While her actions are still depicted through the lens of marriage, she retaliates against the misogynistic context that she’s stuck in using the very thing she’s been criticised for all along: emotion. She gets angry, she gets mean, and she shows her husband that she doesn’t need his validation to be worthy of a fulfilling life.
