Female Vengeance in the Chronicles of Lupa

She-Wolves guard the balance between Justice and Mercy

Intimacy and Female Retribution

In film and literature vengeance is usually imagined as a masculine act. The lone gunman, the avenging king, the gangster who settles accounts are all familiar archetypes of wrath and retribution.

When vengeance passes into the hands of women though things take a different shape. Female vengeance is portrayed as intimate, more terrible, more unsettling, because it does not simply punish: it often carries with it the echo of nurturing love and even sexual love inverted into destruction.

In From the Chronicles of Lupa this tendency is brought to its logical conclusion, while also being balanced against the need for the healing of the wounds that have been inflicted by the person who has just suffered judgement.

Female Vengeance in Literature and Film

Across literature and film, women who avenge wrongs often do so on behalf of children, family, or their own violated bodies.

Their vengeance is freighted with the weight of life itself, of what should have been preserved but instead was desecrated. To witness such vengeance is to be reminded of the maternal or erotic bond turned towards ferocity, towards justice in its most personal, elemental form.

The figure of the vengeful woman has deep mythic roots. The most famous is of course Medea in Euripides’ tragedy, enacting vengeance at its darkest extreme, slaying her own children to wound her unfaithful spouse.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth famously calls upon the spirits to “unsex” her, that she may murder without remorse, a call to vengeance as an unholy empowerment.

In modern literature, we have Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo metes out horrific justice against her abusers.

Never to be outdone in tales of vengeance Tarantino gives us The Bride of Kill Bill, who makes her crusade of retributive violence something symphonic, to the point of being comic.

Most recently, Promising Young Woman reimagined the genre as both spectacle and moral provocation, centering on gendered violence in our own time.

Lupa and Ritual Vengeance

In The Chronicles of Lupa, vengeance is not merely personal: it is consecrated. The women of Lupa are inducted into a lineage that stretches beyond time, bound by the moon and anointed by ritual. As Ruby’s mother anoints her she also gives her a second birth into the lineage of Lupa:

… you are now reborn as Lupa. Given sight that others lack, to see the pathways of good and evil, given the power of judgment over those who walk upon them. The just you will pass over, the wicked you will condemn and lay utterly to waste…

Ruby’s transformation is both terrifying and beautiful. She is instantly elevated into an instrument of retribution, and with a single terrifying cry she disappears to hunt the man she is destined to erase from this world.

The full power of Ruby’s new inheritance is instantly revealed in the judgment of a man named Max Fairlight, who under cover of that pretty name has gorged himself with cruelty, dispensing it to his wife, his children and anyone who comes under his power.

Ruby appears to him a vulnerable waif whom Max delights in enticing back to his sordid rooms. All pleasure is choked out of him when he suddenly confronts Ruby in her moon-altered form, with the scene of judgment at once theatrical and insane:

… Max groaned in terror as his chest bulged outwards into the swift vacuum Ruby created before him. His engorged heart was exposed as his ribs collapsed outwards… Ruby wrenched Max’s heart clear of his chest and turned it back to show him, to accuse him by the blunt testimony of that gorged and swollen muscle.

This particular scene of vengeance is made unique by its obvious ritual content. Ruby does not lash out in fury; she hunts this man before delivering unrestrained judgment, holding up his depraved heart and letting his own corruption condemn him.

Ruby often takes her victims into metaphorical space so that they may be judged… so that the brutal manner of their demise takes place in an archetypal dimension and not literally in this world.

After the destruction had subsided Ruby Tuesday rested for a few moments. The room was released from the tensions of judgment, and the body of Max Fairlight sank back into the corporeal world, out of the other dimensions where he had been taken to have judgment executed upon him.

This power gives the Sisterhood of Lupa unrestrained authority to judge and condemn their victims once their wickedness and depravity has been established beyond doubt.

From Vengeance Towards Healing

Most stories of vengeance end with bloodshed. Either the avenger is killed or their enemies are laid waste, with the tale ending in justice being served or justice being thwarted. Rarely do we see what follows the morning after, or the morning after that.

This is where the Chronicles of Lupa depart from tradition. After Ruby has executed judgment on Max Fairlight she returns home and collapses into her mother’s arms, overwhelmed by the ghastly things she has witnessed, the terrible things she has done.

Her mother comforts her and shows her how to transform her welling tears, not into despair but towards consolation… showing her how to transform her tears into streams of mercy that can flow out into the world.

She turned back her tears as her mother showed her, and they flowed within her like rain to wet the fields of her own heart. And out into the world flowed their opposite, a kind of cool spindrift of mercy and forgiveness, running like a river to those places where its healing was required.

Here the cycle is completed. These women exact vengeance under the light of the full moon, only to flow out with mercy in the cool of the morning after. So that after the wicked are destroyed their victims can be made whole:

… The fractured souls of children were knit and made whole again, and as they brightened and shone those children ran about laughing, laughing for the sheer relief of their redemption… Poor kind men who had been bullied and broken felt lines of tension and shame leave their bodies, and they stood up straight again and felt their vigour and self-belief return…

This pattern is not completely unknown to literature. We glimpse analogues in Aeschylus when the Erinyes are transformed from Furies into Eumenides: agents of healing rather than terror. We see it in the shield-maiden Éowyn, who after slaying the Witch-King turns her hands towards healing and the care of things which grow. In The Hunger Games Katniss turns from fighting against tyranny to the quieter work of raising children.

The unique thing about the Chronicles of Lupa is that vengeance and mercy are not separate arcs involving separate action. They are two full halves of one soul: the same ritual, the same lineage. And this has been the role of these She-Wolves since there was very little else upon the earth, since they rejoiced in Gan Eden before their exile from the Garden.

These are not sentimental women though. Even in the final reconciliation scene between Jesse and Ruby we see just how deep her vengeance runs, when she demands that he atone for the sin of rejecting her even though she knows his actions were never done against her. As she says:

You ask the price of my forgiveness? Beloved you already know: I am a creature of reckoning and retribution. I do not forgive, and I very easily condemn. My name is the name of Judgment, transacted in the currency of blood.So here is my demand to you, Jesse James.Come to me, to be tested.I will not forgive you.But I will give you the chance to atone.

Lupa and the Balance Upheld

The Chronicles of Lupa make a distinctive contribution to the narrative tradition of female vengeance by fusing it with healing and conscious consolation.

In other narratives vengeance often consumes the woman who enacts it, leaving her dead or broken or alienated. Sometimes it simply ends with the spilt blood of the guilty and the woman walking away. Mercy — if it appears at all — seems ousted by vengeance and belonging to another realm.

The She-Wolves in Lupa hold vengeance and mercy in balance. The same hands that can rip out the heart of the abuser can also restore comfort to the innocent. The women who howl in outrage under the full moon can embrace in the morning to heal the broken and the abused.

This dual archetype is simultaneously terrifying and tender. It insists that judgment is necessary — that evil must be confronted and destroyed — but it also reminds us that vengeance without mercy is incomplete. Only when consolation and healing come can the world be restored.

Closing Thought

We live in an age that begs for both sides of this whole. On one hand we have desperate need for retribution against the cruel, the corrupt, the violent. On the other hand we feel the exhaustion of continual outrage, the despair of endless judgment spooling out into the world.

The Chronicles of Lupa render a vision that might bring things back into balance. A line of women consecrated to the destruction of evil but also the redemption of those whom evil has harmed.

Ruby and her sisters show us that love must be fierce enough to destroy evil, while being tender enough to gather in our broken parts and make them whole again. Because — as it is written — this world is held in the balance between justice and mercy.

P. Julian

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