The black widow, her sinister image has been in the pages of many works for more than one hundred years. For the first time, its appearance was noted in medieval European legends. With slight variations, the plot in them is the same - the insidious and predatory beauty can make a lasting impression on men. They come across entirely influential and wealthy. Their fate is sad: after marrying a treacherous seducer, they do not live long. They suddenly die from obscure diseases, a hint of which they had not had until recently. And the black widow, having inherited the fortune, moves on through life in search of new prey and new adventures.
Is there smoke without fire?
Perhaps the black widow is nothing more than an impressive poetic image and an abstract symbol of evil? Or did such ladies meet in some places? Of course, there were a great many real historical prototypes of the insidious poisoner in history. Their biographies are constantly featured on the pages of the "yellow press" and other tabloid fiction. Most often, the main characters of these novels are able to handle natural substances at the level of graduates of the Hogwarts school. And the motives for their actions are banal and uncomplicated: to send her husband to the grave and get his condition.
Many thus recoup for all the evil that they had to endure on the threshold of youth. But in the classical works of this genre, everything is far from so primitive. In them, as a rule, the black widow is a woman with a special gift. More precisely, it would be called a curse, which is most often unknown to her herself and opens gradually, as the plot develops. The main property of this curse is that it dooms all those who love it to death. And the main character, the black widow, is faced with a very difficult
moral choice: how to continue living and what to do with her supernatural gift. Of course, in
the Middle Ages, the entire sacred Inquisition bravely fought against these ladies with all the arsenal of tools and instruments at its disposal. Needless to say, what is this magnificent material for screenwriters of all formats? In cinema, this image is exploited throughout the history of its existence. This commercially successful character brings good income to everyone, from creators to the leading woman, inclusive.
From legend to reality
As long as the black widow is a book or a television series, then, as they say, and to hell with her ... But we see this name more and more often in television news reports about terrorist acts committed by self-blasting. Those who do this, call themselves this phrase. Most often, these are real widows of extremists who died in the war. The terrorist underground gives them such a name, and the "black widows" wrapped in belts of shahids set off for the Moscow metro.
It will be interesting to note that, in addition to terrorists, this name - "black widow" - refers to a particularly poisonous species of spiders, widely distributed in many countries of the world. There are more than thirty varieties of them. And they are very dangerous.