“You Avenge the Others”: The Portrait of a Femme Fatale in Gladys Huntington’s Madame Solario

The article deals with the concept of femme fatale as presented in Gladys Huntington’s 1956 novel Madame Solario. The eponymous protagonist, Natalia Solario, displays several characteristics of this female archetype, omnipresent in literature, culture and visual iconography. As a femme fatale, Natalia is beauty, danger and mystery incarnate. The cause of tragedies, but also a tragic figure herself, Madame Solario is both victim and victimizer. The article explores the interplay between innocence and experience, life and death, the erotic and the thanatic, as well as the motifs of transgression, ambiguity, love, passion, desire, perversion, dominance and control crucial to Huntington’s novel. Madame Solario reminds us that, paradoxically, the femme fatale usurps certain stereotypically masculine traits. This, in turn, brings us to the novel’s feminist dimension: the femme fatale is victimized by men, but she is also the agent of female revenge and, ultimately, liberation, symbolically marking the transition from patriarchy to women’s emancipation

Fatal Woman, Revisited: Understanding Female Stereotypes in Film Noir

Film noir stereotypes female characters through the archetype of the femme fatale: the fatal woman or the fatal wife. However, critics are currently re-examining the femme fatale. For example, in the second paragraph of Film Noir’s Progressive Portrayal of Women, Stephanie Blaser and John Blaser write “even when [film noir] depicts women as dangerous and worthy of destruction, [it] also shows that women are confined by the roles traditionally open to them.” With Blaser and Blaser’s understanding of the double nature of the femme fatale in mind, can one say that the femme fatale generates fear of feminism? Can one read her as a martyr and a heroine? I will examine facets of the femme fatale in modern and classic iterations, while contextualizing women’s historical roles in society. Historically, the femme fatale originated as a response to World War II. As Gary Morris notes in the last paragraph of “High Gallows: Revisiting Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past,” “[she] embodies post-war fears that women, having contributed mightily to the war effort and moved into ‘men’s work,’ might abandon the domestic sphere entirely... and even the most powerful men around her can’t comprehend or control the violent forces she represents.” Additionally, the essay will focus on Phyllis in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Kathie in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, and Evelyn in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. To include a literary dimension, I will also provide a close reading of Velma in Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler. To comprehend the femme fatale and her relationship to women’s roles in Western society, these women must be placed in a broader, historical spectrum. Transhistorical examination of the femme fatale will be achieved by examining one of the most prominent characters in Judeo-Christian society, Eve. The close reading of this proto-femme fatale will specifically examine her role in Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Closely reading the femme fatale is important because it contextualizes modern women’s roles, both locally and globally, and aids in the drive towards gender equality

The Femme Fatale, a Mirror of Post-War Male Anxiety in Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

This TFM explores the trope of the femme fatale in Raymond Chandler's hardboiled novel, Farewell, My Lovely (1940). This discussion explores the correlation between the femme fatale and the author's trauma as a war veteran of the Great War and to the disorientation of post-war American society. I have chosen to examine how the novel's femme fatale, Velma Valento / Helen Grayle emerges as a mirror of Chandler's war fears, but also as the representation of women striving for independence through rebelliousness and, in this case, criminality. Velma Valento / Helen Grayle is a sexually liberated woman, who profits from her seductive tactics to secure her independence.Aquest TFM explora el tros de la femme fatale en la novel·la de Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (1940). Aquesta discussió explora la correlació entre la femme fatale i el trauma de l'autor com a veterà de guerra de la Gran Guerra i amb la desorientació de la societat americana de postguerra. He optat per examinar com la femme fatale de la novel·la, Velma Valento / Helen Grayle emergeix com un mirall de les pors de la guerra de Chandler, però també com la representació de les dones que lforcen per la independència a través de la rebel·lia i, en aquest cas, la criminalitat. Velma Valento / Helen Grayle és una dona alliberada sexualment, que es beneficia de les seves seductores tàctiques per assegurar la seva independència

Film Noir, Hard-boiled Fiction, and Working Women : Depression and Post-War America

The writer examines the connections between the femme fatale in film noir and 1930s hard-boiled fiction, claiming that noir critics are misguided in their claim that the femme fatale has historical specificity to postwar America. The writer summarizes criticism on the femme fatale in film noir and proceeds to underscore the significant contributions to made by the hard-boiled tradition to noir. He believes that these contributions point to a pre-war male anxiety about female independence that he traces to the economic instability of the Depression. From this anxiety during the Depression, the author claims, came the femme fatale of hard-boiled fiction. He focuses on James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity to exemplify that the femmes fatales in these novels are identical to their film noir counterparts. Furthermore, he discusses the difference between popular fiction and hard-boiled fiction, contrasting Cain\u27s novels with Sinclair Lewis’ Ann Vickers. He concludes that critics who emphasize the historical specificity of the femme fatale in film noir have not adequately familiarized themselves with the history of American working women and have privileged the historical weight of film over literature

Book review: the contemporary femme fatale: gender, genre and American cinema by Katherine Farrimond

In The Contemporary Femme Fatale: Gender, Genre and American Cinema, Katherine Farrimond shows how the femme fatale - primarily associated with the classic film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s – remains a remarkably resilient and malleable figure in the present, tracing her appearance across a variety of genres in contemporary US cinema. This is a well-argued, convincing study, writes Fiona Handyside, with a reading of the femme fatale that demonstrates her capacity to pose vital and complex questions about the representation of women’s agency, sexuality and desire in the current cultural landscape

Gerda Von Rinnlingen – Seductive and “Femme Fatal”?! (According to "Little Herr Friedemann" by Thomas Mann)

The present work aims at finding out whether Gerda Von Rinnlingen – the main protagonist woman of “Little Herr Friedemann” written by Thomas Mann, is or not a seductive and “femme fatale.” By describing the Amazon Gerda’s internal and external features or expressing her cold attitude towards her husband and by discussing this mysterious woman’s role in miserable Friedemann’s life we can conclude that, Gerda Von Rinnlingen,in fact, is not only a seductive woman for Friedemann but she is still a “femme fatale.” Keywords: amazon, dangerous temptress, “femme fatale,” failure, relationship of passions, tyrant

Art, Androgyny, and the Femme Fatale in Decadent Fictions of the Nineteenth Century

This thesis offers a reappraisal of the recurring figure of the femme fatale within Decadent art and literature of the nineteenth century. Despite the ubiquity of studies concerning the femme fatale, most notably within genres such as Film Noir and Romanticism, the Decadent femme fatale has often been relegated to a single chapter or footnote within these studies. It is here the purpose of this thesis to rectify this critical disregard. Combining multiple disciplines (literature, aesthetics, history, mythology and psychology) each of the four chapters of this thesis will locate the femme fatale within nineteenth-century European Decadent texts as represented as a specific objet d’art: the haunted portrait, the corpse-doll, the fragmented sculpture, and the mutilated and/or sculpted body of the androgyne. Invoking Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, the influence and trajectory of each chapter’s respective femme fatale will be traced from the midnineteenth century through to the fin de siècle. By tracing the lineage of the aesthetic impression made by French Decadent writers of the mid-nineteenth century (such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire) upon subsequent French and British writers and artists of the latenineteenth century (such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, Rachilde, and Vernon Lee), this thesis interrogates how the re/construction and usage of the Decadent femme fatale was utilized as a means of exploring ulterior philosophies of classical beauty and a fluid range of forbidden sexualities, including androgyny and homoeroticism. Offering interdisciplinary readings of the nineteenth-century Decadent femme fatale, this thesis shows the different ways in which nineteenth-century Decadent writers and artists move beyond the femme fatale’s malevolence, though without losing sight of it, to explore the mysterious relationships between life and death, art and artifice, pleasure and pain, and the seen and unseen

Femmes Fatales as Mythological Creatures in Romantic and Victorian Poetry

openThe thesis starts by giving a general definition of femme fatale and by talking about women’s role during the Nineteenth century, myth and mythological creatures. It then moves towards the femme fatale in romantic poetry, analysing selected poems of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Finally, it discusses the fatal woman in victorian poetry with selected poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

REPRESENTASI FEMME FATALE DALAM NOVEL CANTIK ITU LUKA KARYA EKA KURNIAWAN

ABSTRAK Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk memaparkan karakteristik-karakteristik femme Fatale yang terdapat dalam novel Cantik Itu Luka. Melalui tokoh-tokoh perempuan yang berbeda, ciri-ciri tersebut dapat ditemukan. Dengan menggunakan konsep femme fatale dari Yvonne Tasker dan Edwards, lima tokoh perempuan, yaitu Dewi Ayu, Alamanda, Adinda, Maya Dewi, dan Si Cantik dapat dikategorikan sebagai femme fatale. Citra ini diperkuat juga dengan membandingkan ciri-ciri tersebut pada citra tokoh perempuan yang berbudi luhur. Simpulan akhir mengungkapkan bahwa pada diri tokoh-tokoh perempuan tersebut terdapat ambiguitas antara protagonis dan antagonis,  femme fatale dan perempuan berbudi luhur. Dengan demikian dapat dikatakan bahwa ada citra baru perempuan yang dibangun oleh dekonstruksi seksualitas pada novel ini. Kata kunci : femme fatale, perempuan, seksualitas ABSTRACT This study aims to describe the characteristics of femme Fatale contained in the novel Cantik Itu Luka. Through different female characters, these characteristics can be found. Using the femme fatale concept of Yvonne Tasker and Edwards, five female characters, Dewi Ayu, Alamanda, Adinda, Maya Dewi, and Si Cantik, can be categorized as femme fatale. This image is also strengthened by comparing such characteristics in the image of a virtuous woman. The final conclusion reveals that in the female characters there is and ambiguity between the protagonist and the antagonist, the femme fatale and the virtuous woman. Thus it can be said that there is a new image of women built by the deconstruction of sexuality in this novel Keywods: femme fatale, woman, seksualit

Femme noir : a subcategory of neo noir film

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.This study identifies a new subcategory of film noir, the femme noir. Traditional film noir films use gendered binaries, male gaze and scopophilic treatment of the female characters to limit and fragment women characters. This dynamic is most obvious in the binary between the ‘looking’ male protagonist and the ‘looked at’ femme fatale. This binary traps female characters in positions that have limited agency and scope within film narrative. Gendered binaries are a phallic pleasurable expectation and a way in which film noir recreates patriarchy. The film noir film narrative is traditionally the enactment and expulsion of male sexual anxiety on screen. The femme fatale character typically personifies this male sexual anxiety. The film noir film story tends to follow the male protagonist and his journey to uncover a mystery surrounding the femme fatale. By the end of the film, the femme fatale is revealed, punished or rehabilitated according the will of the male protagonist. By the end of the film noir film, patriarchal status quo has returned. However, I propose that when the protagonist in a film noir film is a woman, the traditional gendered binary of film noir films is undermined. In the subsection of film noir films I identify as femme noir, a ‘looking’ female protagonist meets the gaze of the femme fatale. She recognises not a binary opposite, but a dark sister, an abject version of herself. This study proposes that the dynamic between a woman protagonist and a femme fatale is that of a reflection. By the end of a femme noir narrative, the femme fatale is not uncovered and expelled, instead her essence is absorbed by the female protagonist. I propose that the femme noir narrative is about the female protagonist’s journey to accept and absorb the essence of her abject reflection. The two woman characters together create a type of wholeness that resists the limitations and fragmentations of traditional film noir women. This study will suggest that in femme noir films, feminist meaning can still be created within a traditionally sexist genre using it’s familiar tropes and signs