Vashti: Defiant Brat or Badass Bitch?

When I was a kid, and we dressed up for Purim at Hebrew School, everyone wanted to be Esther.

Why?

Because (as every third-grader knew back then) Esther was beautiful and Vashti was ugly. Vashti looked something like a witch. She had black straight hair and Esther had golden curls. Esther wore pink and purple and Vashti wore black. So if you were popular (which I was not) you got to be Esther. I don’t know how this trend began (Villains always wear black? Heros are always attractive?) but it was a pretty firmly entrenched myth…

Now, as I’m discovering now, there are a lot of people who think (to varying degrees) that Vashti was a badass. There’s a lot of feminist writing about her, and her role in the story. It seems that “Vashti has been reconceived by feminist Jews not so much as a victim of a despotic husband-king, but as a heroine for her refusal to bow to his demand that she dance naked at his party.”

Which is reasonable enough to me (though I’ve been known to take my shirt off on occasion, I wouldn’t do it because anyone but Jack Daniels told me to)

What’s your understanding of this particular wench?