The femme fatale has existed in the collective imagination as a woman who embodies lust and ambition. Her sin or fatal flaw: that she represents power and defies all social norms. Her rebelliousness has been punished throughout ages and her form turned into that of a witch, demon, or whore.
The fascination with the femme fatale began in the nineteenth century, when the Irish writer, George Bernard Shaw, coined the concept “femme fatale” to describe women armed with iron shields in his novels.
This fatal woman emerged stronger than ever from the fumes of the Industrial Revolution. As the urban stain began to grow, so did the oldest profession in the world: prostitution. In this period of time, prostitutes were vilified as malicious beings luring honest men to perdition and into the clutches of syphilis; as a consequence, the femme fatale, associated to this profession, became an emblem of sickness. In literature, the figure has not come out unscathed; we only have to turn to Théophile Gautier’s One of Cleopatra’s Nights and John Keat’s poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
The Poison of Antiquity
According to Jewish legends, after God created Adam, he fashioned Lilith, but she soon rebelled against this patriarchal power and fled to the shores of the Red Sea to fornicate with demons. The legend of Lilith is found in Babylonian texts, which describe her as an evil entity that devours newborn babies, torments pregnant women, and lures men into erotic dreams to extract their semen and procreate more demons. Another unmissable biblical figure is the seductive Eve, who led Adam to take a bite out of the forbidden fruit.
Salome is another fateful character from the Bible: she wraps herself in seven veils of lust to conquer Herod of Antipas with her seductive dance. Under her spell, Herod promises to give her whatever she wants, and she asks for the head of John the Baptist. She has been a muse and inspiration for countless artists from Titian and Henri Regnault to Federico Beltrán Masses and Gustave Moreau. She also inspired Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1891), which became a classic of universal literature.
In 1866, Jean León Gérome painted Cleopatra with Julius Caesar, an allegorical piece that established the code of seduction of one of History’s most successful temptresses. Medea, Elektra, Delilah, and Lucretia are expertly paintbrushed and stenciled to adapt to masculine desire. Writers like Tolstoy with Anna Karenina and Baudelaire’s poetry expose the dimensions of women within a context of debauchery and lewdness.
Within the effervescent world of art surged Sarah Brenhardt, a Parisian actress who captivated not only the spectators, but also the intellectuals of her era. In the twentieth century, the femme fatale took on the shape of an exotic dancer, Mata Hari, who consolidated herself not only as a myth because of her performance, but served as a spy in favor of the German army during the First World War.
The Seductress of Cinema
The inception of cinema brought about the “star system,” which aimed at creating idols for the masses. Hollywood led the way with stars like Theda Bara, who portrayed Carmen and Cleopatra and was dubbed the “most perverse woman on earth.” The list of the femme fatales became extensive, with Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, Vivian Leigh in Gone With The Wind, Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Ava Gardner in The Killers, and we cannot forget Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall who lit up the flames that revived the femme fatale persona.
The femme fatale is much more than a symbolic element in artistic and cultural representations; it has changed throughout the years until it finally became an emblem of female liberation. Women of flesh with poisonous blood were immortalized in History; they became the muses of artists, and ultimately, deities that grant wishes of sex, freedom, eroticism, and heartbreak.
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