Exciting femme fatale E-Book

Heinz Duthel

• Herausgeber: neobooks
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 409

Beschreibung

I feel like a man who goes to the trash can and looks for things that other peoples do not want and gave thrown away. WOMAN? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulas: she is a womb, an ovary; she is a female – this word is sufficient to define her. "At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols." In the Middle Ages, the idea of the dangers of female sexuality, typified by Eve, was commonly expressed in medieval romances as a wicked, seductive enchantress, the prime example being Morgan le Fay. The femme fatale flourished in the Romantic period in the works of John Keats, notably "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Lamia". Along with them, there rose the gothic novel, The Monk featuring Matilda, a very potent femme fatale. This led to her appearing in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and as the vampiress, notably in Carmilla and Brides of Dracula. The Monk was greatly admired by the Marquis de Sade, for whom the femme fatale symbolised not evil, but all the best qualities of Women, with his novel Juliette being perhaps the earliest wherein the femme fatale triumphs. Pre-Raphaelite painters frequently used the classic personifications of the femme fatale as a subject. No longer was she merely the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who breaks the will, masters the mind of a King by the spectacle of her quivering bosoms, heaving belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles, - a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning.

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Exciting femme fatale

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Heinz Duthel

Copyright © 2011 - 2018 Heinz Duthel

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DEDICATION

"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols."

Heinz Duthel

I feel like a man who goes to the trash can and looks for things that other peoples do not want and gave thrown away.

WOMAN? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulas: she is a womb, an ovary; she is a female – this word is sufficient to define her.

Exciting femme fatale

No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir

The Femme Fatale

"He keeps me on a leash so tight I can't breathe." Double Indemnity (1944)

Of the three types of noir women, the femme fatale represents the most direct attack on traditional womanhood and the nuclear family. She refuses to play the role of devoted wife and loving mother that mainstream society prescribes for women. She finds marriage to be confining, loveless, sexless, and dull, and she uses all of her cunning and sexual attractiveness to gain her independence. As Janey Place points out, "She is not often won over and pacified by love for the hero, as is the strong heroine of the forties who is significantly less sexual than the film noir woman." She remains fiercely independent even when faced with her own destruction. And in spite of her inevitable death, she leaves behind the image of a strong, exciting, and unrepentant woman who defies the control of men and rejects the institution of the family.

The classic femme fatale resorts to murder to free herself from an unbearable relationship with a man who would try to possess and control her, as if she were a piece of property or a pet. According to Sylvia Harvey, the women of film noir are "[p]resented as prizes, desirable objects" for the men of these films, and men's treatment of women as mere possessions is a recurring theme in film noir. In a telling scene from an early noir thriller, I Wake Up Screaming (1941), three men sit in a bar lamenting their unsuccessful attempts to seduce the femme fatale, clearly resenting her inexplicable refusal to be possessed. When one man complains that "Women are all alike," another responds simply, "Well, you've got to have them around — they're standard equipment."

In Out of the Past (1947), Kathie Moffett shoots her way out of a confining relationship with gambler Whit Sterling, but Whit hires detective Jeff Markham to retrieve her. When Jeff asks Whit for some assurance that he will not harm Kathie if he gets her back, Whit answers by comparing her to a racehorse that he once owned. Whit obviously thinks of Kathie as his prize possession. Similarly, Rip Murdoch (Humphrey Bogart) in Dead Reckoning (1947) wishes aloud that women could be reduced to pocket size, to be put away when not desired and returned to normal size when needed.

This attitude is not lost on the women themselves. They feel trapped by husbands or lovers who treat them as "standard equipment" and by an institution — marriage — that makes such treatment possible. Marriage for the femme fatale is associated with unhappiness, boredom, and the absence of romantic love and sexual desire. In Double Indemnity (1944), Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) feels like a caged animal in her husband's home and is driven to murder him largely because he shows no affection for her, only indifference: "I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares, not anymore. But he keeps me on a leash so tight I can't breathe." As Sylvia Harvey suggests, film noir attributes the femme fatale's violent behavior at least partially to women's lack of status and fulfillment in conventional marriage:

Other imagery in these films suggests that a routinised boredom and a sense of stifling entrapment are characteristic of marriage. . . . The family home in Double Indemnity is the place where three people who hate each other spend endlessly boring evenings together. The husband does not merely not notice his wife, he ignores her sexually . . . .

In some films, the husband's lack of interest in his wife seems almost sadistic. The elderly husband of young and beautiful Cora Smith (Lana Turner) in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) encourages his wife to spend time with Frank Chambers (John Garfield), as if he enjoys tempting Frank and frustrating Cora. Rita Hayworth receives similar treatment in both Gilda (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai (1948). In the latter film, Hayworth is married to a much older man who compensates for his physical paralysis and spiritual ugliness by arranging and then frustrating her relationship with Michael (Orson Welles). Even his insistence on calling her "Lover" has ironic and sadistic overtones, considering her obvious aversion to him.

The image of disabled, paralysed, or elderly men married to much younger women is a further indication that marriage and family life restrict sexual desire and romantic love. Sylvia Harvey sees this recurring image as a critique of traditional family relationships, which appear dull and lifeless, particularly from the point of view of the young, sexually exciting femme fatale:

It is perhaps most clear in this movie [Double Indemnity] that the expression of sexuality and the institution of marriage are at odds with one another, and that both pleasure and death lie outside the safe circle of family relations.

Moreover, there is clearly an impetus in film noir to transgress the boundaries of this circle; for the presence of husbands on crutches or in wheelchairs (Double Indemnity, Lady from Shanghai) suggests that impotence is somehow a normal component of the married state.

Another sign of the sterility of film noir marriages is the absence of children produced by these marriages. Childless couples are far more common in film noir than the traditional father-mother-children nuclear family. The husband of the femme fatale may have a full-grown child from a previous marriage (Double Indemnity, Murder, My Sweet), but the child's age implies that the father's sexual activity is long past and that his current marriage is empty of sexual desire.

The family home only intensifies this atmosphere of coldness and entrapment for the married femme fatale. In Double Indemnity, Phyllis paces the living room as she describes the routine of her life to Walter, crossing and recrossing bars of shadow cast by a window blind — like a prisoner in her own home. When Walter first enters the house, he notices a pair of framed photographs of the father and his daughter — no pictures of Phyllis are displayed, as if she has been frozen out of the family unit. The family home in Murder, My Sweet (1945) is a vast, marble-floored mansion, where echoes drown out people's voices and statues outnumber human beings. Detective Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) remarks sarcastically that the house is somewhat smaller than Buckingham Palace, and he later describes it as a "mausoleum" and a "fun house."

The lighting and mise-en-scène of the family home contribute further to its image as a trap or "mausoleum," particularly for the femme fatale. Nina Leibman writes that the living space inhabited by the married femme fatale and her husband creates an atmosphere of alienation between the characters:

In Double Indemnity and The Lady from Shanghai, the family home is a huge gloomy mansion. Stairways, room dividers, and davenports split the rooms and the characters. The lack of light gives a haunted feeling to these homes, which are invariably filled with too many knick-knacks, oversized portraits, and fishbowls.

These visual cues contradict the myth of the family home as the center of safety, fulfillment, and love. The benefits normally associated with marriage and the family - especially in conventional Hollywood films — are conspicuously absent from the film noir family.

In stark contrast to the visual and narrative representation of the family home is that of the femme fatale herself. She exudes a unique sexuality, which she uses to define herself and manipulate men in order to gain independence from an oppressive family life or relationship. Her body, her clothing, her words, her actions, and her ability to hold the camera's gaze create a highly charged sexual image that defies attempts by the men in her life and by the film itself to control her or return her to her "proper sphere" as a woman. Although she often is destroyed in the final reel, she lingers in the audience's imagination as a sexually exciting, living character who never accepted the role that society had chosen for her. Even in the few films in which she is actually converted to a more traditional role, the violence and power of her rebellion against that role earlier in the film overcomes the contrived ending, so that the dominant image of the femme fatale is one of defiance against the traditional family and woman's place in society.

The inevitable (and ineffectual) destruction of the femme fatale. Double Indemnity (1944)

Noir films create this image of the strong, unrepressed woman, then attempt to contain it by destroying the femme fatale or converting her to traditional womanhood. But the femme fatale cannot be made to serve the status quo so easily — even if that is the film's intention. Both Sylvia Harvey and Janey Place suggest that the femme fatale effectively undermines the supremacy of the traditional family and its values in spite of her final punishment or conversion. Harvey argues that the femme fatale's transgressions against the traditional family constitute a far more enduring image than her final punishment:

Despite the ritual punishment of acts of transgression, the vitality with which these acts are endowed produces an excess of meaning which cannot finally be contained. Narrative resolutions cannot recuperate their subversive significance.

Place agrees, asserting that the audience remembers the nontraditional female as free and powerful, not punished and neutralized:

It is not their inevitable demise we remember but rather their strong, dangerous, and above all exciting sexuality. . . . [T]he final "lesson" of the myth often fades into the background and we retain the image of the erotic, strong, unrepressed (if destructive) woman. The style of these films thus overwhelms their conventional narrative content, or interacts with it to produce a remarkably potent image of woman.

Place attributes the femme fatale's unique power to her willingness and ability to express herself in sexual terms. The femme fatale threatens the status quo and the hero precisely because she controls her own sexuality outside of marriage. She uses sex for pleasure and as a weapon or a tool to control men, not merely in the culturally acceptable capacity of procreation within marriage. Her sexual emancipation commands the gaze of the hero, the audience, and the camera in a way that cannot be erased by her final punishment. Place writes that "the visual style gives her such freedom of movement and dominance that it is her strength and sensual visual texture that is inevitably printed in our memory, not her ultimate destruction." 34

Noir films immediately convey the intense sexual presence of the femme fatale by introducing her as a fully established object of the hero's obsession. Since the camera often represents the hero's subjective memory — revealed via flashback — it projects his privileged knowledge about her dangerous sexuality even before he actually acquires that knowledge. Thus, according to Janey Place, the femme fatale's visual and sexual dominance — and the threat that she poses to the hero — are felt from her very first scene:

The femme fatale is characterised by her long lovely legs: our first view of the elusive Velma in Murder My Sweet (Farewell My Lovely) and of Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice is a significant, appreciative shot of their bare legs, a directed glance (so directed in the latter film that the shot begins on her calves, cuts to a shot of her whole body, cuts back to the man looking, then finally back to Lana Turner's turban-wrapped, angelic face) from the viewpoint of the male character who is to be seduced.

Visually dominant and unrepentent to the end. The Lady from Shanghai (1948)

Her ability to hold both the hero and the audience spellbound continues throughout the film to the point of her death and beyond. In The Lady from Shanghai, director Orson Welles uses the camera to roam over the tanned, swimsuit-clad body of his real-life wife, Rita Hayworth, engaging the audience in the hero's growing obsession. Later in the film, when Elsa (Hayworth) and Michael (Welles) confront each other in an amusement park hall of mirrors, the gun-wielding femme fatale fills the screen via multiple reflected images — at once supremely powerful, cold, and vulnerable.

The hero and camera are visually obsessed with the femme fatale. Laura (1944)

Even after her death, the strong female character has the power to intrude visually on the narrative, often continuing to "live" through her portrait. In Laura (1944), certainly the most famous illustration of this point, a striking portrait of the dead woman commands the center of every scene in her apartment. The detective assigned to solve her murder actually falls in love with her portrait without ever having seen her alive. Thus, Laura actually re-asserts her independence and power from beyond the grave.

I Wake Up Screaming (1941) features a less celebrated but more extreme example of the femme fatale whose portrait commands the gaze of the camera and the other characters even after her murder. In many key scenes, Vicki's photograph appears at the center of the camera's field of vision. She seems to be watching each character as the investigation of her murder places that character in danger. In the final scene of the film, the camera reveals the full visual power of the murdered femme fatale — the detective's entire apartment is filled with her photographs in a shrine to his obsession.

Attempts to neutralize the power of the femme fatale by destroying her at the end are usually unsuccessful, because her power extends beyond death. But film noir does not always deal with women's transgressions against the family in this way. A handful of noir films add conventional happy endings, in which a converted femme fatale or a "good" woman marries the hero and restores the status quo. In The Lady in the Lake (1947), the supposed femme fatale — an independent, gold-digging career woman during most of the film — suddenly abandons her dream of money and a high-ranking position to become the wife of seedy private eye Philip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery), who has spent the entire film demonstrating his misogyny at her expense. In Dark Passage (1947), Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) escapes from prison to clear his name of a murder charge, but decides in the end to flee the country for a romantic rendezvous with Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall). Yet, such resolutions seem tacked-on and contrived, and they cannot compensate for the disturbing images created earlier in these films. Rather than reinforcing the status quo, these last-minute reversals merely emphasize the more subversive elements of film noir's visual style, characterization, and narration.

In the majority of noir films, however, the femme fatale remains committed to her independence, seldom allowing herself to be converted by the hero or captured by the police. She refuses to be defined by the male hero or submit her sexuality to the male-dominated institution of the family; instead, she defines herself and resists all efforts by the hero to "put her in her place." As Kathie Moffett explains to Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past, "I never told you I was anything but what I am — you just wanted to imagine I was."

The lingering image of the exciting femme fatale. Out of the Past (1947)

It is not surprising that Kathie — alive, independent, and defiant — exerts a much more powerful hold on our imagination and our memory than her ultimate destruction. Even when we acknowledge that the femme fatale is killed at the end of the film, we are more moved by how she is killed. Kathie controls even her death. She chooses to die rather than be captured. Her death is essentially a murder/suicide, because she shoots Jeff while he is driving the car and while she is caught in a police crossfire. Thus, unlike the independent women of non-noir films, the femme fatale remains true to her nature, refusing to be converted or to accept capture, even when the alternative is death.

Femme fatale—is defined as “an irresistibly attractive woman, especially one who leads men into danger or disaster”. To me the most engaging semblance of a “femme fatale” is the stunning image of Lana Turner, as the camera pans from her ankles upward in that breathtaking shot from The Postman Always Rings Twice 1946.

Extremes

The most consistent aspect of film noir, apart from its visual style, is its protagonists. If a usable definition of the noir protagonist is to be formulated, it must encompass its most intrinsic character motif—alienation. The undercurrent that flows through most high noir films is the failure on the part of the male leads to recognize the dishonesty inherent in many of noir’s principal women. This tragic flaw destroys the central male characters in films as diverse as Scarlet Street 1945, The Locket 1947, and Angle Face 1953. It's embodied in the John Dall character in Gun Crazy 1949, whose youthful fascination with fire arms eventually leads him into a relationship with a woman who not only shares his gun craziness but who also introduces him to the parallel worlds of eroticism and violence. A more extreme example of this confusion is exemplified with Dana Andrews in Laura 1944, and Edward G. Robinson in Women in the Window 1944. Robinson and Andrews are fascinated initially not by the flesh and blood women, but merely by paintings—images of them.

The overtly Freudian aspects of such relationships function as a foundation on which to construct a sequence of narrative events that typify the noir vision. Many of these male “victims” are not trapped exclusively by sexual obsessions. Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity 1944, initially considers whether he is capable of committing murder for a woman. Then he thinks about effecting the perfect crime (his entanglement with Phyllis’ phony insurance claim), “It’s beating the house”, he thinks “sort of like the croupier that bets on the turn of the roulette wheel, when he knows the numbers to play”.

Detour

Edgar Ulmer’s Poverty Row cult-classic, Detour, 1945, is fraught with outrageous coincidences that in most accounts would be far too absurd to confront, but in Ulmer’s skilled hands are accepted as legitimate premises. Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, a disgruntled piano player in a New York night club. When his fiancée walks out on him for stardom in Hollywood, he decides to fellow her, and sets out to hitch hike west to join her. He gets picked up by a oddball character played by Edmond MacDonald who is carrying a large sum of money and happens to be driving all the way to California. MacDonald relates a story to Robert’s about a female hitch hiker he picked up earlier. In a blundering attempt to ravish her, she viciously attacked him, her finger nail marks clearly discernible on his face. As Roberts takes a turn driving, the MacDonald character mysteriously dies. Roberts thinking that the police will not believe his innocence in MacDonald’s bizarre death, hides the body and drives on alone. The next day Roberts picks up Vera, played with absolute aplomb by the very underrated Ann Savage.

Ultimate Femme Fatale

Out of the Past, 1947, while not a perfect example of the best of the noir cycle, contains many of the elements of the genre. It is best remembered as the film that introduced the erotic and lethal Jane Greer. The beautiful dark-haired Bettejane Greer came to Hollywood in 1945, a B player, she appeared in such obscure notables as Dick Tracy 1945, and The Falcon’s Alibi 1946. Out of the Past was one of only three noir films in which she appeared, the others being, They Won’t Believe Me 1947, and again opposite Robert Mitchum in the Big Steal 1949. Greer appeared in nine additional films through 1957. She took a brief hiatus until the mid-1960s, and has appeared off and on since.

Jane Greer was the “real deal”, unlike many of the frivolous noir semi-goddesses (Lauren Becall, Martha Vickers, Jane Russell, or Laraine Day), her sexiness was derived from sheer cunning. She did not rely on the parodistic flirtations so common to the counterfeits of the genre—while entertaining actresses, they lacked the appeal and darkness of the authentic femme fatale. A fine actress, I’ve always wondered why Greer did not become an icon of the genre in the mold of Gloria Grahame or Lizabeth Scott. She possessed the perfect on-screen persona of a post-war desolation angle. When Robert Mitchum firsts encounters her in the Mexican café, in an early scene from Out of the Past, she describes the complete night spot where he might feel more at home, and as she turns to walk away she tells him, “I sometimes go there”. At that moment we sense the hero’s ultimate calamity. Later we witness her brutally kill two men, and as Mitchum watches in terror, we cannot be confident that in the end he will not wind with her, such is the power of her sexuality.

Later Femme Fatales

Robert Siodmak’s, The Killer’s 1946 and Criss Cross 1949 are fine examples of Universal’s contribution to the noir cycle. In both films it’s the deadly female who topples the hero. Another Siodmak offering is the much downplayed, The File on Thelma Jordon 1950. Barbara Stanwyck portrays a different type of femme fatale than her Phyllis Dietrichson character in Double Indemnity, whom Thelma resembles in method and motivation. This time she ensnares Wendell Cory, playing assistant district attorney Cleve Marshall. Marshall is much more innocent that Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff, who admits trying to beat the house, well before he meets Phyllis. From the beginning Thelma loves her victim, whereas Phyllis was not smitten until the very end in Double Indemnity. Where Phyllis and Walter are chillingly logical in their scheme, Thelma and Cleve are guilt-ridden, and clumsily romantic. In the end Cleve is not completely ostracized, or dead as was his counterpart Walter Neff. He is however, scarred immeasurably—an emotional Sisyphus, he must now forever bear the weight of his misdeeds.

What Happened

The archetypal model of film noir had run its course by the mid-1950s. The requisite entry of that period, at least among most film critics of the day, was Robert Aldrich’s take on Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly 1955, by then though Spillane had moved from the hard boiled pulp hero of the post-war years to the new antagonists of cold-war America, the new great fear of the moment—the “Commies”. Kiss Me Deadly was a greater influence on the French “New Wave” movement, than a further definition of film noir.

By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, strong, tough, independent women were being replaced by coadjutors and consorts. “Leading Ladies” who, though portrayed as capable and self-reliant had, however, moved well into the background. A prime example is Doris Day in Pillow Talk 1959. And so to the male protagonists, who were now being portrayed as gallant Don Juan’s or attentive Casanova’s, a fashion that was to reach it zenith with the James Bond films.

To me, the “classic noir period”, spanned the interval just after World War II, until the early 1950s. The central figures portrayed in these films, were too often caught in their double binds, filled with existential bitterness. They were drowning outside of the social mainstream. They came to represent America’s stylized vision of itself, a cultural reflection of the mental dysfunction of a nation in uncertain transition. And often these characters were women, the femme fatales of a film style distinctly original, and wholly American.

A femme fatale (plural: femmes fatales) , with all [a]'s) is an alluring and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetypal character of literature and art. Her ability to entrance and hypnotize her male victim was in the earliest stories seen as being literally supernatural, hence the most prosaic femme fatale today is still described as having a power akin to an enchantress, vampire, female monster or demon. The ideas involved are closely tied to fears of the female witch and misogyny[1] while, according the History of Television.ca, a Canadian website which outlines television's history, the femme fatale "remains an example of female independence and a threat to traditional female gender roles".

The phrase is French for "deadly woman". A femme fatale tries to achieve her hidden purpose by using feminine wiles such as beauty, charm, and sexual allure. Typically, she is exceptionally well-endowed with these qualities. In some situations, she uses lying or coercion rather than charm. She may also be (or imply to be) a victim, caught in a situation from which she cannot escape; The Lady from Shanghai (a 1948 film noir) giving one such example. Her characteristic weapon, if needed, is frequently poison, which also serves as a metaphor for her charms.

Although typically villainous, femmes fatales have also appeared as antiheroines in some stories, and some even repent and become heroines by the end of the tale. In social life, the femme fatale tortures her lover in an asymmetrical relationship, denying confirmation of her affection. She usually drives him to the point of obsession and exhaustion so that he is incapable of making rational decisions.

The ideas involved are closely tied to fears of the female witch and misogyny while others say Femme fatale "remains an example of female independence and a threat to traditional female gender roles".

The femme fatale archetype exists, in the folklore and myth of nearly every culture in every century. The early examples are Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess, and Eve, Lilith, Delilah, and Salome from the Judaeo-Christian Bible. In ancient Greek literature, the femme fatale is incarnated by Aphrodite, the Siren, the Sphinx, the empusa, Scylla, Circe, Lamia (mythology), Helen of Troy, and Clytemnestra. Beside them is the historical figure Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, with her ability to seduce the powerful men of Rome. Roman propaganda attacked Cleopatra as a femme fatale; as a result, she became the legendary archetype of the attractions and the dangers inherent to the powerful, exotic woman.

The femme fatale as an archetypal character also existed in Chinese myths, stories and history, certain concubines (such as the historical Yang Guifei) have been accused of being responsible in part for the weakening and downfall of dynasties, by seducing her lover into neglecting his duties or twisting him to her will.

In the Middle Ages, the idea of the dangers of female sexuality, typified by Eve, was commonly expressed in medieval romances as a wicked, seductive enchantress, the prime example being Morgan le Fay.

The femme fatale flourished in the Romantic period in the works of John Keats, notably "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Lamia". Along with them, there rose the gothic novel, The Monk featuring Matilda, a very potent femme fatale. This led to her appearing in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and as the vampiress, notably in Carmilla and Brides of Dracula. The Monk was greatly admired by the Marquis de Sade, for whom the femme fatale symbolised not evil, but all the best qualities of Women, with his novel Juliette being perhaps the earliest wherein the femme fatale triumphs. Pre-Raphaelite painters frequently used the classic personifications of the femme fatale as a subject.

In the Western culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the femme fatale became a more fashionable trope, and she is found in the paintings of the artists Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Franz von Stuck and Gustave Moreau. The novel À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans includes these fevered imaginings about an image of Salome in a Moreau painting.

No longer was she merely the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who breaks the will, masters the mind of a King by the spectacle of her quivering bosoms, heaving belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles, - a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning.

She also is seen as a prominent figure in late nineteenth and twentieth century opera, appearing in Richard Wagner's Parsifal (Kundry), George Bizet's "Carmen", Camille Saint-Saens' "Samson et Delilah" and Alban Berg's "Lulu" (based on the plays "Erdgeist" and "Die Büchse der Pandora" by Frank WedekindThe femme fatale has been portrayed as a sexual vampiress; her charms leach the virility and independence of lovers, leaving them shells of themselves. Rudyard Kipling was inspired by a vampiress painted by Philip Burne-Jones, an image typical of the era in 1897, to write his poem "The Vampire". Like much of Kipling's verse it was incredibly popular, and its refrain: "A fool there was...", describing a seduced man, became the title of the popular 1915 film A Fool There Was that made Theda Bara a star. The poem was used in the publicity for the film. On this account, in early American slang the femme fatale was called a vamp, short for vampiress.

From the American film audience perspective, the femme fatale often was foreign, usually either of an indeterminate Eastern European or Asian ancestry. She was the sexual counterpart to wholesome actresses such as Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford. Notable silent cinema vamps were Theda Bara, Helen Gardner, Louise Glaum, Musidora, Nita Naldi, Pola Negri, and in her early appearances, Myrna Loy.

During the film noir era of the 1940s and 1950s, the femme fatale flourished in American cinema. Examples include the overly-possessive and narcissistic wife Ellen Brent Harland, portrayed by Gene Tierney, in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), who will stop at nothing to keep her husband's affections. Another is Brigid O'Shaughnessy, portrayed by Mary Astor, who uses her acting skills to murder Sam Spade's partner in The Maltese Falcon. Yet another is the cabaret singer portrayed by Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946),[9] who sexually manipulates her husband and his best friend. Another noir femme fatale is Phyllis Dietrichson, played by Barbara Stanwyck, who seduces a hapless insurance salesman and persuades him to kill her husband in Double Indemnity (1944).[9] In The Paradine Case, a Hitchcock movie from 1947, the character played by Alida Valli is a poisonous femme fatale who is responsible for the deaths of two men and the near destruction of another. One often referred to example is the character of Jane in 1949's Too Late for Tears, played by Lizabeth Scott. During her quest to keep some dirty money from its rightful recipient and her husband, she uses poison, lies, sexual teasing and a gun to keep men wrapped around her finger.

Other American cultural examples of deadly women occur in espionage thrillers, and juvenile adventure comic strips, such as The Spirit, by Will Eisner, and Terry and the Pirates, by Milton Caniff. Today, she remains a key character in films such as Body Heat, with Kathleen Turner, The Last Seduction, with Linda Fiorentino, To Die For, with Nicole Kidman, and Basic Instinct, with Sharon Stone..

In fin-de-siècle decadence, Oscar Wilde re-invented the femme fatale in the play Salome: she manipulates her lust-crazed uncle, King Herod, with her enticing Dance of the Seven Veils (Wilde's invention) to agree to her imperious demand: bring me the head of John the Baptist. Later, Salome was the subject of an opera by Strauss, was popularized on stage, screen, and peep-show booth in countless reincarnations.

Another enduring icon of womanly glamour, seduction, and moral turpitude was Mata Hari, 1876 - 1917, an alluring oriental dancer who was accused of German espionage and was put to death by a French firing squad. As such, she embodied the femme fatale archetype, and, after her death she became the subject of much fantastical imagining. She was the subject of many sensational films and books.

In popular culture

In contemporary culture, the femme fatale survives as heroine and anti-heroine, in Nikita and Moulin Rouge!, as well as in video games and comic books. Aeon Flux is one of the most striking femme fatales that was featured on MTV's liquid television animation series. Ada Wong from Resident Evil, Elektra from Marvel Comics, Fujiko Mine from Lupin the 3rd, Catwoman and Poison Ivy from the Batman stories, Rayne from Bloodrayne and EVA from Metal Gear Solid 3 are examples. The protagonists of the American television program Desperate Housewives use sexual allure to get what and whom they want. In the board game Clue, Miss Scarlet occupies the role as a femme fatale. A modern example of the archetypal femme fatale is Xenia Onatopp, the character from Goldeneye who seduced men and then murdered them by crushing them between her thighs mileena from mortal kombat.

The Velvet Underground song "Femme Fatale", on the The Velvet Underground & Nico album, tells of a woman who will "play" a man "for a fool". Two songs, both titled "Poison", by Alice Cooper and Bell Biv DeVoe respectively, tell of femme fatales.

Introduction

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. The religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination. In the legends of Eve and Pandora men have taken up arms against women. They have made use of philosophy and theology, as the quotations from Aristotle and St Thomas have shown. Since ancient times satirists and moralists have delighted in showing up the weaknesses of women. We are familiar with the savage indictments hurled against women throughout French literature. Montherlant, for example, follows the tradition of Jean de Meung, though with less gusto. This hostility may at times be well founded, often it is gratuitous; but in truth it more or less successfully conceals a desire for self-justification. As Montaigne says, ‘It is easier to accuse one sex than to excuse the other’. Sometimes what is going on is clear enough. For instance, the Roman law limiting the rights of woman cited ‘the imbecility, the instability of the sex’ just when the weakening of family ties seemed to threaten the interests of male heirs. And in the effort to keep the married woman under guardianship, appeal was made in the sixteenth century to the authority of St Augustine, who declared that ‘woman is a creature neither decisive nor constant’, at a time when the single woman was thought capable of managing her property. Montaigne understood clearly how arbitrary and unjust was woman’s appointed lot: ‘Women are not in the wrong when they decline to accept the rules laid down for them, since the men make these rules without consulting them. No wonder intrigue and strife abound.’ But he did not go so far as to champion their cause.

In most philosophies this fact has been taken for granted without pretence of explanation. According to the Platonic myth, there were at the beginning men, women, and hermaphrodites. Each individual had two faces, four arms, four legs, and two conjoined bodies. At a certain time they were split in two, and ever since each half seeks to rejoin its corresponding half. Later the gods decreed that new human beings should be created through the coupling of dissimilar halves. But it is only love that this story is intended to explain; division into sexes is assumed at the outset. Nor does Aristotle explain this division, for if matter and form must cooperate in all action, there is no necessity for the active and passive principles to he separated in two different categories of individuals. Thus St Thomas proclaims woman andincidental’ being, which is a way of suggesting – from the male point of view – the accidental or contingent nature of sexuality. Hegel, however, would have been untrue to his passion for rationalism had he failed to attempt a logical explanation. Sexuality in his view represents the medium through which the subject attains a concrete sense of belonging to a particular kind (genre). ‘The sense of kind is produced in the subject as an effect which offsets this disproportionate sense of his individual reality, as a desire to find the sense of himself in another individual of his species through union with this other, to complete himself and thus to incorporate the kind (genre) within his own nature and bring it into existence. This is copulation’ (Philosophy of Nature, Part 3, Section 369). And a little farther on. ‘The process consists in this, namely: that which they are in themselves, that is to say a single kind, one and the same subjective life, they also establish it as such.’ And Hegel states later that for the uniting process to be accomplished, there must first be sexual differentiation. But his exposition is not convincing: one feels in it all too distinctly the predetermination to find in every operation the three terms of the syllogism.

Freud never showed much concern with the destiny of woman; it is clear that he simply adapted his account from that of the destiny of man, with slight modifications. Earlier the sexologist Marañon had stated that ‘as specific energy, we may say that the libido is a force of virile character. We will say as much of the orgasm’. According to him, women who attain orgasm are ‘viriloid’ women; the sexual impulse is ‘in one direction’ and woman is only half way along the road. Freud never goes to such an extreme; he admits that woman’s sexuality is evolved as fully as man’s; but he hardly studies it in particular. He writes: ‘The libido is constantly and regularly male in essence, whether it appears in man or in woman.’ He declines to regard the feminine libido as having its own original nature, and therefore it will necessarily seem to him like a complex deviation from the human libido in general. This develops at first, he thinks, identically in the two sexes – each infant passes first through an oral phase that fixates it upon the maternal breast, and then through an anal phase; finally it reaches the genital phase, at which point the sexes become differentiated.

Freud further brought to light a fact the importance of which had not been fully appreciated: namely, that masculine erotism is definitely located in the penis, whereas in woman there are two distinct erotic systems: one the clitoral, which develops in childhood, the other vaginal, which develops only after puberty. When the boy reaches the genital phase, his evolution is completed, though he must pass from the autoerotic inclination, in which pleasure is subjective, to the hetero-erotic inclination, in which pleasure is bound up with an object, normally a woman. This transition is made at the time of puberty through a narcissistic phase. But the penis will remain, as in childhood, the specific organ of erotism. Woman’s libido, also passing through a narcissistic phase, will become objective, normally towards man; but the process will be much more complex, because woman must pass from clitoral pleasure to vaginal. There is only one genital stage for man, but there are two for woman; she runs a much greater risk of not reaching the end of her sexual evolution, of remaining at the infantile stage and thus of developing neuroses.

While still in the autoerotic stage, the child becomes more or less strongly attached to an object. The boy becomes fixed on his mother and desires to identify himself with his father; this presumption terrifies him and he dreads mutilation at the hands of his father in punishment for it. Thus the castration complex springs from the Oedipus complex. Then aggressiveness towards the father develops, but at the same time the child interiorize the father’s authority; thus the superego is built up in the child and censures his incestuous tendencies. These are repressed, the complex is liquidated, and the son is freed from his fear of his father, whom he has now installed in his own psyche under the guise of moral precepts. The super-ego is more powerful in proportion as the Oedipus complex has been more marked and more rigorously resisted.

The countless chores collectively known as “housework” – cooking, washing dishes, doing laundry, making beds, sweeping, shopping etc. – apparently consume some three to four thousand hours of the average housewife’s year

Woman as Other

FOR a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no more about it. It is still talked about, however, for the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: ‘Even in Russia women still are women’; and other erudite persons – sometimes the very same – say with a sigh: ‘Woman is losing her way, woman is lost.’ One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should, what place they occupy in this world, what their place should be. ‘What has become of women?’ was asked recently in an ephemeral magazine.

But first we must ask: what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero’, says one, ‘woman is a womb’. But in speaking of certain women, connoisseurs declare that they are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus like the rest. All agree in recognizing the fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, and become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is hardly patentable. It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that seem to have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the seers, and indeed in the times of St Thomas it was considered an essence as certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy

But conceptualism has lost ground. The biological and social sciences no longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine given characteristics, such as those ascribed to woman, the Jew, or the Negro. Science regards any characteristic as a reaction dependent in part upon a situation. If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. But does the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by those who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of nominalism; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word woman. Many American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to be psychoanalyzed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker has written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman ... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.’ But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine, and the antifeminists have had no trouble in showing that women simply are not men. Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is abstract. The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today – this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality. Some years ago a well-known woman writer refused to permit her portrait to appear in a series of photographs especially devoted to women writers; she wished to be counted among the men. But in order to gain this privilege she made use of her husband’s influence! Women who assert that they are men lay claim nonetheless to masculine consideration and respect. I recall also a young Trotskyite standing on a platform at a boisterous meeting and getting ready to use her fists, in spite of her evident fragility. She was denying her feminine weakness; but it was for love of a militant male whose equal she wished to be. The attitude of defiance of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their femininity. In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes; faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial; perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist.

If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question “what is a woman”?

To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once, a preliminary answer. The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear a man say: ‘you think thus and so because you are a woman’; but I know that my only defense is to reply: ‘I think thus and so because it is true,’ thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man’, for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity; circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be andimperfect man’, andincidental’ being. This is symbolized in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam.

Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes: ‘Woman, the relative being ...’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel: ‘The body of man makes sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself ... Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is simply what man decree; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the other.’