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Cardinal Richelieu is smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, flawed, vicious. He manipulates dumber men to do his dirty deeds for him. And yet he's a magnificent bastard worthy of respect, while Milady is put down like a viper. She's not exactly portrayed as a role model by Dumas.
Men hate when women characters like this are empowered. We've had a discussion of Heartbreakers on the Motte recently and I think we have discussed Gone Girl as well. So of course the old manipulative Milady was replaced with the new one, the one that can escape in the final reel.
Glad you brought up Richelieu. In the book, he and Milady are aptly juxtaposed because of these very qualities: smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, and seeking power. The difference is that Richelieu (for the most part) uses that accumulated power to make the state of France strong, while Milady (when not kept on a tight leash) uses it to pursue her own passions, including murder and revenge. That is Milady's one ultimately-fatal flaw: whatever her intelligence and talents, she ultimately serves her baser instinct. It's what makes her such great villain, while Cardinal Richelieu is merely an antagonist who aptly pursues goals contrary to whose of the protagonists.
Exactly: Dumas develops her as a villain, not an anti-hero. And as a villain, she is absolutely the tops. She has her own clearly developed story arc. She has a great back story. She grows as a character. Her resourcefulness gets developed and revealed and stages. By the time of the "boss fight" scene, the reader really believes that it indeed takes four musketeers and a professional executioner to finally kill her. All that, and the only time she lifts a weapon is to pretend to wound herself.
You know, I have never met a man who likes the Dumas books but was incensed that too much time gets devoted to this Milady character, or how it's bullshit that she's so powerful. Dumas chose to devote many more chapters to Milady. The chapters about her mission to kill the Duke of Buckingham are from her point of view. Dumas published the chapters serially, a lot of his readers were men, and I take it as evidence that he responded as much to popular demand as he did to his own creative urges.
I mean, how much more empowered can a character get? The Duke, forewarned by a lucky fluke, captures Milady, imprisons her, puts an incorruptible guard over her. In a few short days, she not only gets that guard to help her escape, but to carry out her ultimate mission: kill the Duke. I mean, damn! that's Power!
I think I wasn't able to communicate my idea clear enough. You are correct that Dumas wrote her as a competent villain of the selfish, ignoble, scheming kind. And she meets her end in a way that is appropriate for this kind of villain: desperate, groveling, clutching at every straw until her head is struck down into the mud. However, this puts the modern writers in a bind: they need a "strong female character" and Milady as she has been written doesn't work as one:
The writers chose the easiest way out: Milady now competes with men in the male sphere: she's a dashing rogue now, someone who, even after sending Constance to her death, has the possibility of a redemption arc. No longer are underhanded tactics implicitly coded as feminine. Could the writers have come up with a different Milady, one that could attract female viewership, not alienate male viewership and at the same time not be an ahistorical girlboss? In theory, yes, but no one has time for this kind of tightrope walking in practice.
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