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Every text is the product of conflicting forces. The result of a compromise, it “speaks” simultaneously desire, transgression, and possible punishment; in particular, it speaks the desire for incest and its prohibition, which are the very foundation of culture. (Kofman, 1988, p. 55, emphasis added)
Freud's essay on “The Taboo of Virginity” (1918) concludes with a reference to the story of Judith's beheading of Holofernes as first told in the Apocrypha of the Old Testament and then by Hebbel in a 19th-century German play which Freud paradoxically considered the more “original” of the two works because of its more overtly sexual themes.1 However, in between these two versions of the story there are also numerous visual renderings of the beautiful, sword-wielding Judith by Botticelli, Donatello, Caravaggio, Gentileschi, and others which Freud does not discuss. To this illustrious list of sword-wielding women I would add Beatrix Kiddo, the female (if not feminist2) hero of Quentin Tarantino's two-volume masterpiece Kill Bill . In the first section of this essay I will explore Freud's theory of “The Taboo of Virginity” and how it relates, specifically, to Judith and Beatrix. Then I will examine specific ways that Tarantino's two films demonstrate, not only Freud's analysis of the incestuous “killer bride” in the “Taboo” essay, but also examples of “Oedipal echo-effects” as illustrated through the lethal romantic relationship between Bill and his much younger lover and protégé Beatrix Kiddo.
Beatrix Kiddo, one is quick to note, was no virgin when she unleashed her “rip-roaring rampage of revenge” against