Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Bc. Hana Šafrancová
The Femme Fatale and Her Portrayal in Angela Carter's Works Master‟s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.
2015
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
………………………………………… Author’s signature
I would like to thank my supervisor, prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A., for her valuable advice and kind guidance. I would also like to thank my family, friends and Ing. Adam Hurta for his endless support throughout my studies.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction...... 5
1.1 The Concept of the Femme Fatale…...... 8
1.2 Early Femme Fatales...... 13
1.3 History of the Femme Fatale-like Character in Literature...... 18
2. Characteristics of the Femme Fatale………………...... 23
2.1 Posing a Challenge……...... 23
2.2 Appearance and Sexuality...... 25
2.3 Castrating and Devastating...... 27
2.4 Theme of Death...... 29
3. The Work of Angela Carter...... 32
3.1 Heroes and Villains...... 33
3.2 The Passion of New Eve...... 34
3.3 The Bloody Chamber...... 35
4. Angela Carter’s Femme Fatales...... 37
4.1 Identifying a Femme Fatale...... 37
4.2 From a Puppet to a Fatal Woman...... 43
4.3 Variations on the Concept...... 48
4.4 Women under Transformation Process...... 52
5. The Threatening Female...... 55
5.1 Fear of Castration...... 55
5.2 The One Being Destroyed...... 59
6. Conclusion...... 63
7. Works Cited...... 66
8. Resumés...... 71
1. Introduction
The term femme fatale has been appearing in all sorts of literary genres since their very beginning. Some, like Hirsch, even go as far as to claim that the term dates back to “the very origins of storytelling” (187). It has often been used both by the general public in everyday speech to denote an exceptionally beautiful or dangerous woman, and by academics to describe an archetype of a fatal woman in literary works.
Although the phenomenon is apparently not a newly invented one, there still seems to be a certain degree of confusion about the nature of a femme fatale. The uncertainty over what a femme fatale is and what she is not is also caused by the fact that there is no single characteristic and definition that would precisely define what is the basis of the phenomenon.
There are countless variations of the concept of the femme fatale, which leads to the fact that it is seen as an elusive concept. Rather than falling into a neat category, the phenomenon has many different shapes and appearances. Yet the femme fatale is more than just a diabolical female character that brings destruction to those around her. The thesis aims to provide a comprehensive concept of the femme fatale phenomenon, while still highlighting that it is a term with no single correct definition or clear structure. As a result, the femme fatale is ever-changing, bringing up the possibility of a discussion whether it is at all possible to find an answer to what a femme fatale is and in what way she is portrayed.
The author of this thesis has chosen this topic because in spite of the fact that the femme fatale concept is commonly known and quite popular, there are not many academic articles dealing with the femme fatale as a whole. What is available is mostly a range of one-sided approaches to the concept in question. These focus on a limited number of elements in a femme fatale. Furthermore, there has been an on-going
5 discussion about the femme fatale‟s nature and while several definitions have been come up with, they may considerably differ. Also, it has not been made clear what conditions a female character must fulfil in order to be perceived as a femme fatale and there are different perspectives on the issue.
The aim of this thesis is to analyse the figure of a femme fatale and demonstrate that there is more to her than simply being a female character destroying all male characters that fall in love with her. Its focus is not to defend the femme fatale for she definitely is a disastrous woman, often cold and violent. Rather, it strives to show how fascinating and complicated a true femme fatale might be and that she might be seen from various angles.
The introductory part is devoted to the theoretical background of the femme fatale. It deals with a short evaluation of definitions of the term and assesses fatal women throughout the history of literature in order to provide context for the following chapters. On the whole, the thesis is divided into two main parts. The first part is concerned with the femme fatale‟s typical characteristics – it explores what kind of challenge she poses and to whom exactly. Subsequently, it concentrates on the question of her sexuality and castrating qualities, which leads to her having a pernicious influence on male characters. Later on, the attention is paid to the femme fatale‟s connection with the theme of death and her overall devastating effect. The plot and characters of selected Angela Carter‟s works will be briefly touched upon to create space for the analysis.
The second part of the thesis deals with a femme fatale‟s portrayal in three of
Angela Carter‟s works. For the analysis itself, two novels and one collection of stories have been chosen. These include The Passion of New Eve (1977), Heroes and Villains
(1969) and The Bloody Chamber (1979) with its stories The Lady of the House of Love
6 and The Company of Wolves. The reason for choosing these works is not only the fact they rank among Carter‟s most popular works, but also because in all of these stories, there is some variation on the concept of the femme fatale. It is expected that each of them will provide a slightly different point of view on the matter.
While The Passion of New Eve is useful for discussion of fatality and both metaphorical and literal castration, Heroes and Villains is suitable for pointing out the issue of distribution of power between male and female characters in a relationship, which is important because out of the two the woman cannot be the helpless and defenseless one and be considered a femme fatale as well. What is more, Heroes and
Villains demonstrates a female character who is half-typical and half on her way to a femme fatale, even though she does not fulfil the conditions yet. The Lady of the House of Love is used to illustrate an example of an animal-like femme fatale and last but not least, The Company of Wolves is included as it depicts the perfect inconspicuous femme fatale in the form of an innocent girl, who is far more powerful than she seems to be and becomes the unexpected fatal woman. Other Carter‟s works in which the phenomenon can be traced might be mentioned marginally to provide more examples and comparisons.
The main question raised here and at the same the basic motif pervading the entire thesis concerns what or who is a femme fatale and what characteristics are attributed to her. Apart from the question of what renders women femme fatales, there are also several points for discussion which help shed light on the fatal female character and employ a different perspective. These additional questions will cover topics such as whether the femme fatale must necessarily be a human being or whether she can also have non-human qualities. It is also of interest to pinpoint whether such a threatening female must always pay for her destructive nature and thus inevitably come to an
7 inglorious end and pay the price a fatal woman usually ends up paying for her destruction of men.
1.1 The Concept of the Femme Fatale
When it comes to pinpointing the definition of the term femme fatale, different dictionaries provide varying levels of information. The reason might be that, as Praz argues, there is “no established type of fatal woman in the way there is an established type of Byronic hero” (201). Dictionary definitions nevertheless constitute a credible starting point for understanding the concept. Merriam-Webster describes the femme fatale as a seductive woman “who lures men into dangerous or compromising situations”, adding one more interpretation of her in which she is seen as “a woman who attracts men by aura of charm and mystery” (Merriam-Webster Online). The first definition emphasizes that the woman is the one who leads men to their doom instead of considering whether it is not their fault that they blindly follow her. The second one clarifies the mysterious qualities of the fatal woman which make her even more attractive. Like the definition, the femme fatale prefers to remain mysterious as long as possible to render herself more interesting for men, being “at once everywhere yet difficult to pin down” (Braun 1).
Another view of the fatal woman repeats, too, the idea of a great attractiveness and seductiveness. A strong and provocative woman “will ultimately cause distress to a man who becomes involved with her” (Oxford Dictionaries). The important word here is ultimately. A fatal woman will eventually try to destroy a man, but she will do so only in the end, since in the meantime she tries to manipulate him for her own purpose. She cannot destroy the male right at the beginning because she first provokes and tempts and then shocks and humiliates the man who has idealized her. Initially, the fatal
8 woman seems innocent and fragile however she is ready to suddenly strike when no man expects it.
One more definition of the independent fatal character depicts her as a woman who is “sexually attractive but cruel and dangerous to men who have a relationship with her” (Macmillan Dictionary). Sexual attractiveness is one of the essential qualities of her because she needs to be charming in order to ensnare men. Her beauty is so dazzling that it renders men not only speechless but powerless, too. After meeting the woman, men become so fascinated with her that they cannot resist their urge to chase her. There is no one specific form of beauty she would have to possess. Rather, the femme fatale concept can include a broad range of empowered and charming female characters instead of being restricted to a certain type.
As far as the above-mentioned cruelty is concerned, opinions on the matter of its presence or absence diverge. On one hand, some academics tend to view the fatal woman as a manipulative and shameless figure who causes trouble in order to subvert patriarchal society. She is terrible and cruel because she is a predator capable of controlling men. Therefore she herself cannot be controlled because she is unpredictable and deceptive and therefore a huge threat to men. On the other hand, some take a more sympathetic view, claiming that she is more likely a helpless victim of her beauty. From this point of view, she does not plan to use her power to destroy men consciously:
Her power is of a peculiar sort insofar as it is usually not subject to her
conscious will, hence appearing to blur the opposition between passivity
and activity. She is an ambivalent figure because she is not the subject of
power but its carrier (the connotations of disease are appropriate here).
Indeed, if the femme fatale over-represents the body it is because she is
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attributed with a body which is itself given agency independently of
consciousness. In a sense, she has power despite herself. (Doane 2)
Here she is clearly humanized and presented in a more positive light, as someone who is powerless just like the men she enchants. She is powerless in the sense that she has no choice but to accept her loveliness and the power that comes with it.
This sympathetic view of the femme is however somewhat shattered by the fact that the fatal woman typically insists on staying unknowable and undeterminable, which further strengthens the male desire. As Tookey puts it in Sphinxes and Scheherezades, elusiveness might be perceived as a “feminine tactic, the deliberate creation of mystery in order to maintain a hold over the man” (91). From this perspective, she might not deliberately create the desire but she is guilty because she prolongs and sustains it on purpose. She is not passive in just accepting her gift – and her curse. Instead, she remains elusive and inaccessible, thus delaying the moment of a potential sexual act.
Such deferring of the erotic fulfillment keeps her victims engaged in pursuing her and could be seen as an act of cruelty.
It might be tempting to think of a female character as inherently innocent, yet
Craciun warns against such reading, observing that in order to set up new readings of female characters and their attitude to violence and power “we need to abandon several apriori assumptions: that women are inherently nonviolent, that cruelty and mastery are in general unnatural or at the very least culturally masculine” (9). The problem with the femme fatale is that she is often a two-sided and two-faced character. The two- sidedness can be also applied to the debate of whether she is a cruel being concealing her evil nature as best as she can or whether she is a poor victim of something she herself cannot help and fight. None of the two attitudes can be unequivocally pronounced the correct one or more persuasive one, bearing in mind that there are many
10 variations of the femme fatale concept. As a result, an innocent and a predatory type of the femme fatale can very well co-exist.
Due to her complicated nature, she is difficult to characterize. Pikula reminds her readers that the indefinable characteristics of a femme fatale are “largely a matter of consensus among the many critics who have discussed this figure and identified its mythic and religious roots in such characters as Salome, Cleopatra and Eve … the femme fatale is a site of semantic complexity and uncertainty” (277). It is therefore possible that a female character might not have to fulfill all the individual traits of a typical femme fatale to be identified as one or that some characters may be seen as femme fatales even if they do not fully deserve that status.
The dictionary definitions stress the fact that the femme fatale brings down men who become involved with her. This applies to virtually any man who encounters her, no matter whether he is willing to fall in love or not. I would like to close this introductory part by demonstrating how the femme fatale makes her victim feel on an excerpt from Charles Swinburne‟s poem which is aptly titled Satisfy thyself with Blood.
Swinburne offers a unique portrayal of the feelings of one disappointed man with impressive accuracy. This shows the femme fatale‟s disastrous nature in practice:
If you loved me ever so little,
I could bear the bonds that gall,
I could dream the bonds were brittle;
You do not love me at all.
O beautiful lips, O bosom
More white than the moon‟s and warm,
A sterile, a ruinous blossom
Is blown your way in a storm.
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My heart swims blind in a sea
That stuns me; swims to and fro,
And gathers to windward and lee
Lamentation, and mourning, and woe. (1-16)
The poem reveals a great deal of information about the relationship between the femme and her victim. The title is a reference to a vampire, making her seem like a bloodthirsty monster. The speaker accuses her of having no feeling towards him. She is indifferent, which ruins his life. He emphasizes her incredible beauty and puts it into contrast with her destructiveness. She appears and disappears, leaving just sorrow, grief and misery behind her. It can also be seen how desperately the hero wishes to get rid of his addiction to the femme but to no avail:
I wish you were dead, my dear;
I would give you, had I to give,
Some death too bitter to fear;
It is better to die than live.
I wish you were stricken of thunder
And burnt with a bright flame through,
Consumed and cloven in sunder,
I dead at your feet like you. (32-40)
Swinburne was able to perfectly catch the nuances of the torture the femme represents.
If he could, the hero would obviously prefer death to having his soul tormented by unrequited love. The last line is very interesting because the speaker does not only wish his torturer was dead but he himself as well. The femme‟s mastery over the male speaker can be felt from his humiliation:
If I could but know after all,
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I might cease to hunger and ache,
Though your heart were ever so small,
If it were not a stone or a snake.
You are crueller, you that we love,
Than hatred, hunger, or death;
You have eyes and breasts like a dove,
And you kill men‟s hearts with a breath (41-48)
When describing his love for her, he instead refers to 'we', suggesting that all men fall for the femme fatale and all of them suffer. The last line is equally telling, containing a metaphor of killing with breath. The femme fatale is surrounded by aura of mystery, yet she is no witch and cannot literally kill with breath. But she can very well destroy men just as easily and naturally.
1.2 Early Femme Fatales
The figure of the beautiful temptress who is impossible to control has a long history. The roots of the first mythological femme fatale are usually traced back to the
Bible. Eve is frequently considered both the earliest femme fatale and the first woman to live. It is quite paradoxical because after tempting Adam to taste the forbidden fruit she can definitely be seen as a seductress, however if studied in detail she cannot be labelled a femme fatale per se. For this reason, it is necessary to distinguish between a femme fatale and a mere seductress. Huvenne and van Twist see the two as fundamentally different figures because for the seductress “sexuality and voluptuousness are ends in themselves” while the fatal woman “uses her feminine attractions to lure men to their destruction” (7) and her motives are ambiguous.
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The fact that Eve brings destruction to her husband is not quite enough to earn the title of a femme fatale. If Eve was the first femme fatale, then she would have to fulfil at least several of the conditions to be identified as such. First of all, we do not know anything about Eve‟s great attractiveness or dazzling beauty or of having an aura of mystery around her. She does not hide her body from the male gaze, which is an essential quality of the femme. Hedgecock emphasizes that a typical femme fatale
“attempts to resist her objectification as a seductress. Until she manipulatively exposes vulnerabilities of her male victims, she carefully hides the seductive nature of her sexuality” (14). Yet Eve does not hide anything and it might not even be possible as the victim is her husband who must know her and not some random stranger.
The fatal woman catches her victim because he does not know what he is dealing with and she can thus use the moment of surprise to reveal what she carefully concealed – her rapacious nature. In contrast, Eve tempts her closest companion who should know her, leaving her no room for camouflage. There are no signs of cruelty or obvious manipulation on her side. As a human, Eve is a sexual being, which Simkin comments on as follows: “there is also a clear connotation of sexual transgression in
Eve‟s sin. Not only is the serpent an over-obvious phallic symbol, but the fact that after they ate of the tree of knowledge 'the eyes of them were both opened, and they knew that they were naked' (Genesis 3:7) strongly implies a sense of sexual shame” (25-26).
What he implies is that there has been some sexual encounter but her sexuality, as opposed to the femme fatale‟s, cannot be called predatory. No man chases Eve or considers her unattainable.
What she has in common with the femme fatale is that she, too, is the bearer of the blame. The femme fatale is blamed for being the ruin of men and Eve is blamed for eating the fruit and tempting Adam. Even though they both ate from the tree, Adam
14 refused the guilt and Eve was seen as the culprit. She was convinced by the male serpent, which might make her seem weak. This weakness only further reinforces the argument of her not conforming to the standards of the femme fatale. If something can be claimed for sure, it is that the femme fatale is never a weak figure but quite the opposite. Out of the two, it must be the man who is weak and succumbs to the power of the femme.
Last but not least, Barstow points out how Eve story was twisted to fit the archetype of the femme fatale: “Not only has Eve been seen as subordinate to Adam, but subordinate has come to mean more evil. By associating Eve with Pandora and
Lilith, rabbis and Christian theologians have made her into a symbol of weakness, treachery, and insatiable sexuality” (567). She further claims that out of fear, the Church fathers turned heterosexuality into “a violent confrontation between women and men rather than a unifying bond. Thus the concept of woman as a witch and castrator was born” (567). In other words, all Eve‟s negative qualities were exaggerated and then highlighted to stress her guilt.
The idea of connecting Eve to Pandora is interesting, too. Similarly to Eve, nothing is known about Pandora‟s beauty, cunningness, cruelty or malicious plotting against men. What the two figures have in common is that their stories both tell about
“man‟s initiation into a world of suffering” (Christensen 319). The emphasis is first on the temptation, be it in the form of the fruit or the box, and then on the consequent suffering. The suffering is caused by falling prey to the desire, which is perceived as a form of weakness and this weakness is then seen as diabolicalness. In both legends, someone suffers and there is a certain connection to women, yet this alone does not earn them the femme fatale name.
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The third of the earliest fatal woman mentioned by Christian theologians is
Lilith. She might not be as well-known as the other two figures but she is indeed the one to deserve the femme fatale status. She was a mythological figure, “a sinister deity of the night who attacked, seduced and devoured solitary men” (D‟Arcy 373). During the
Middle Ages, the legend of her destructive female sexuality became a part of the
Judaeo-Christian heritage and Lilith began to be seen as the first woman who ran from
Adam in order to engage in her sexual fantasies with evil spirits (Bornay 25). She was banished from the Paradise but this did not stop the predatory femme. In fact, the legend has it that when Eve replaced her, Lilith continued to live outside Eden as “a diabolic and extremely erotic night spirit” (Phillips 71-72) and attacked men.
Taking her behaviour into consideration, it is Lilith who looks like the stereotypic femme fatale. Lilith was portrayed as an independent, unstoppable evil. She later had a sexual intercourse with an evil serpent and turned into a succuba, raping men at night and giving birth to evil spirits (Simkin 5). As a succuba, she had special powers over men who could not resist the temptation. Lilith would not fit the academic debate concerning the innocence of femme fatales who are regarded only as carriers of their power and do not actually act of their own will but because they are fated. In contrast,
Lilith‟s influence on men is pernicious because she wants it to be exactly that way.
It is noteworthy that Lilith‟s story, like Eve‟s, was twisted and modified so that she eventually appeared more threatening. Hurwitz argues that Lilith was originally a rather harmless ancient goddess who, “on her very first appearance in the historico- religious tradition, presented just one single aspect: that of a terrible mother-goddess.
However, this character changed in the course of the development of the myth” (31).
The change puts Lilith into a more negative light from the point of view of men:
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By the time of the Talmudic-Rabbinic and Graeco-Byzantine traditions at
the latest, Lilith had acquired a strange dual aspect. Depending on
whether she is faced with a man or a woman, one or other side of her
becomes more apparent. Faced with a man, the aspect of the divine
whore or, psychologically speaking, that of the seductive anima comes
more to the fore. To a woman, however, she will present above all the
aspect of the terrible mother (Hurwitz 31).
This implies that she does not harm women but to men she appears as an immediate threat. Moreover, this two-sidedness is another reference to a typical femme fatale quality. Lilith lures by combining two different emotions or behaviours, such as sweetness and pain, innocence and power, pleasure and danger, and sex and death, showing the traits of the femme fatale.
The passage also sheds light on how the femme affects men and how she affects women. Considering her lure, it is not surprising that man fall victims to the femme fatale easily. It is in fact one of the basic conditions she must fulfil. A true femme fatale necessarily affects men and unless this happens, she cannot be considered fatal
(Hedgecock 17). On the example of Lilith it can be seen that women are in danger only if they themselves become the characters of the fatal women, which would mean not only the male‟s death but her own as well.
After re-considering the stories of Eve, Pandora and Lilith, the discussion leads to the question of why exactly this need to portray women as more mysterious and diabolical than they were arises and how it subsequently alters the way female characters are considered. In an interview, Beard mentioned that the need to mystify women and create evil figures lies in the patriarchal society. She is persuaded that the patriarchal culture has been imagining women as “fantastically dangerous and in need
17 of all the kind of male control that men can actually offer them”, which leads to a great number of females in literature going “wild and oversexed” (qtd. in Simkin 24). When considering Eve, the impact of this goes beyond the world of legends and literature. Due to the fact that Eve is said to be the primeval mother of the humankind, a part of her is included in every woman. The specific implications of the myth of evil seductress are that because a piece of Eve “resides in each and every woman, women‟s bodies are evil, seductive, damning and dirty” (D‟Arcy 373).
In addition, if Eve has for centuries been presented as a femme fatale (even if it can be disproved from today‟s point of view and it has been shown in the thesis that it is not really so) then the natural consequence is that every woman might potentially be a femme fatale and start harming men. This appears as a great danger for any female would pose a threat to men, inciting general anxiety and fear. And it might be exactly this fear that has kept the femme fatale figure so long in the spotlight.
1.3 History of the Femme Fatale-like Character in Literature
Since the times of Eve, Pandora and Lilith and the stories of their unrestricted sexuality and independence, the fatale femme has managed to be seen in a large number of incarnations. As the qualities of the femme have been altered over time, not all of the following examples might fit the idea of the fatal woman as we perceive her these days, as was the case with Eve. However, they are apparently accepted as such by the academic world simply because they were beautiful and caused trouble for men. This shows how the criteria for femme fatales may not have been the same hundreds or thousands of years ago. The stereotype of the femme fatale was created and then naturally kept changing, mostly maintaining the basic criteria of combining beauty and deadliness but the other criteria were subject to the individual era. This means different
18 personality traits of the femme came to the foreground depending on the period. Doane further emphasizes that the femme fatale‟s representation, like any representation is not
“totally under control of its producers and, once disseminated, comes to take a life of its own” (3). In other words, alterations in the way we perceive her continue to this day.
The earliest femmes are thus followed by tales about goddesses like Moneta,
Venus, and Astarte, among other females, as Blake aptly puts it “positioned at the heart of darkness” (n.p.). The ancient world itself presents numerous examples, with Greek mythology representing a fertile area. Bade cites Helen of Troy, Circe, the Sirens,
Medea and Medusa as examples of historical figures (8). The Middle Ages is a no less fruitful source of femme fatales. Daichman argues that the reason is that in the misogynistic era of the Middle Ages “the mere fact of their sex made them prey to the worst possible faults” (32). There are Arthurian legends of Nimue, Guinevere and
Morgan le Faye, the especially cruel and wicked sorceress. When it comes to the medieval femme, it is of interest to notice that different literary forms have varying effects on the way the femme is presented and constructed. Braun for instance mentions that the unstable form of the ballad intensifies the femme fatale‟s character. It highlights her abilities of prolonging the male desire and retaining her mysterious aura (18).
During the Renaissance, one of the most striking pieces of writing that depicts the femme fatale seems to be Hélisenne de Crenne‟s Personal and Invective Letter.
Throughout this work, a woman is universally seen as purely evil, “monstrous being and temptress who enchants, diverts, and entices men to abandon their goals and duties for sensual pleasure … inspiring at first intense joy only to instil horror” (Nash n.p). Not only is the Renaissance femme fatale blamed for virtually anything, but her predecessors come under fire too: “was not Socrates simply an unfortunate victim, drawn into a disastrous situation by Xanthippe over which he had no control? And was
19 not Hannibal similary ensnared by Tamira, and Mark Anthony by Cleopatra, and Philip of Macedonia by Olympia, and Samson by Delilah, and Nero by Agrippina … ?” (Nash n.p.).
The Romantic femme fatale underwent some alterations, too. What is foregrounded is her dual aspect and remoteness. This can be seen in Keats‟s La Belle
Dame sans Merci and in Baudelaire‟s poems. The dual aspect lies in combining opposite qualities which make the femme even more attractive. She is cruel and distant, yet sensuous and alluring at the same time. Baudelaire‟s poetry voices ambivalent attitudes towards the femme fatale, consisting of “desire, disgust, fear and contempt … it was necessary for Baudelaire to view the object of his desire as evil and monstrous … at the same time he needed to place his loved one on a pedestal, to treat her as an idol …
[yet] to approach too closely the object of desire was to risk destroying the desire”
(Bade 11). He shows in what sense it would be a mistake to try to catch the femme for it is not only the femme, but the desire to desire her that the male character enjoys.
The Victorian era is literally haunted by images of the femme, being a period of her biggest popularity. One of the primary femme fatale‟s materials in this period was
Charles Swinburne‟s work, including his poem which was cited above. The poem reveals that in contrast to the view of the fatal woman as rather innocent and unable to not use her powers, the femme of this era is seen as a malicious plotter. The nineteenth- century femme emerges as a figure that incites two basic emotions – fear and desire.
She often takes the shape of “the allumeuse (a woman who ignites), who excites men‟s desire without satisfying it” (Finney 52). The fact that the desire is never realized means that it can also be anticipated to be fulfilled anytime, leaving the male in permanent state of desire.
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As the femme fatale has existed for ages, it brings up the question of why she became so prominent particularly in the Victorian period. On the whole, it is no coincidence. Hedgecock asserts that “images of the femme fatale are more pervasive during socially and economically troubled times” (4) and what is more, certain features of the femme turn more prominent than other, depending on the socio-political situation of the individual era (6).
The answer thus seems to consist in dramatic changes in the then society.
Anxieties about women‟s roles, position and purpose mark a response to a crisis.
Dijkstra sees the period as characterized by fascination with woman “as the embodiment of evil” (235). Pikula perceives the “unruly female figures” as manifestations of fears concerning “the insatiability of female sexual desire” (278).
Similarly, Doane argues the massive appearance is an evident indication of “the extent of fears and anxieties prompted by shifts in the understanding of sexual difference” (1-
2). It is also the late phase of the Industrial Revolution which allowed women to take jobs as factory workers, which led to some degree of financial independence. Likewise, increasing calls for equality and activities of women‟s movements resulted in the debate of the roles of men and women.
The legislative changes included the Matrimonial Causes act of 1857 and the
Married Women‟s Property Act of 1883. The former made divorce possible for women and the latter one “affirmed separate rights for men and women within and beyond matrimony” (Braun 5). These changes mean newly-granted rights for women, but made their freedom appear threatening. The fear was then transformed into the creation of fatal literary characters like Wilde‟s Salomé.
At the turn of the century, after the boom, came the inevitable moment of decline and degradation. Braun explains it as follows:
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[The] fatal woman, at the height of her nineteenth-century fame, begins
to descend into cultural cliché and tedium. Weighed down in omen and
ornament and bereft of veils and masks, [she] is forced to confront what
she has become: a grotesque hybrid of desire not her own, a foreign
reflection of a self she neither recognizes nor controls. (11)
Yet she did not remain in the form of cliché and a one-dimensional figure for long because the femme fatale soon re-emerged at her best in film noirs. The rise of film noir‟s dangerous heroine is no coincidence either. It is the impact of the World‟s Wars and the ensuing chaos about male and female roles (i.e. women having to take previously male jobs because of the war): “Changing views of sexuality and marriage were generated by the millions of men overseas and by the millions of women pressed into the work force. The postwar return to normalcy never really materialized … [the] triumphant homecoming only seemed to complicate matters” (Schatz 113-114).
In the film noir, the femme fatale is often presented as the castrator or a criminal. Place even called the film noir era the only period in film in which women are
“deadly but sexy, exciting and strong” (qtd. in Boozer 22). The deadliness and malevolency is especially highlighted – an image of the femme fatale as a murderess was no exception. Last but not least, the noir femme fatale transformed into the modern, or neo-femme fatale, whose qualities will be discussed on the examples of Carter‟s heroines.
The femme fatale archetype has always had its place in the literary tradition. She appears in almost every culture and every period of history, but it has been shown that the femme appears significantly more in the period of social unrest and questioning of male and female roles. She functions to some extent as an indicator of the moods, fears and anxieties in the respective eras.
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2. Characteristics of the Femme Fatale
Most academics agree that the term femme fatale refers first and foremost to a powerful and threatening female that inevitably brings destruction to the male. A typical femme fatale is a strong and gorgeous woman whose irresistibility kills men. They simply fall in love with her but she stays indifferent to their demands – no man can ever reach the femme. Her triumph, however, proves to be short-lived because the femme fatale almost always comes to a bad end herself, paying the price for her cruel and uncontrollable behaviour towards men. Her death represents the ultimate punishment for challenging the male identity and threatening the patriarchal order. The men fail at subduing the femme fatale and their male dominance is shattered for she refuses to change. For this reason, the threat of the cruel female can only be removed by death.
2.1 Posing a Challenge
The femme fatale is often seen in a negative light because she is first and foremost a great challenge for men. When considering the question of what her challenge lies in, it turns out that it is primarily her potential to seduce and to create desire. The desire remains strong because on one hand, after creating it she is able to sustain it and keep her allure, but on the other hand, she also excites fear. This double- sidedness becomes hopelessly attractive. Simkin argues that “very often her erotic charge is magnified considerably precisely because of the threatening potentiality she carries within her: in Freudian terms, she combines two distinct drives – Eros and the death instinct Thanatos” (7). This unique combination of drives keeps the male in constant pursuit of her. She offers great sexual pleasure and dangerous situations at the same time; she attracts, she scares, but never wearies her admirer.
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The femme fatale is sometimes seen as the powerful woman who destroys feeble men. If they did not meet the femme, these weak men would continue “to live their uneventful lives of quiet desperation unless they were knocked out of their complacency by the temptress” (Christensen n.p.). Yet when a male falls for the femme, the desire subsequently blindfolds him and makes him her victim. Out of the two, the victim is naturally in a subordinate position, which is not acceptable for the male. The desire for her then makes him appear weak and as if without control over his life.
The outcome of this is that the male clearly loses power by succumbing to the desire the fatal woman offers. In this sense she is a challenge because the male wants to conquer her and have power over her, instead of letting her have all the power over him.
He does not want to be perceived as the weak one during the process of catching her, but in the presence of the femme he loses his mind and she has the upper hand. What is more, he realizes that the chances of conquering the femme approach zero: “From the moment the hero catches the sight of the femme fatale, both find themselves caught in a sequence of events which can go only one way. Both are tragically framed within a narrative of fate and can only come to accept the law of causation” (Bronfen 105-106).
It is this mission impossible that makes her an even greater challenge – the challenge of her not yet being subdued by anyone else. In the patriarchal society, she is the unruly element, the disruptor of the traditional thinking about women‟s roles, being neither a devoted lover, nor an attainable one.
Another challenge is to map the femme, or rather to untangle her mysterious identity and to come to know her. It is clear she offers a balanced mix of both pleasure and pain; otherwise she remains an enigma. This inscrutable status evokes certain paranoia in the male. Doane explains it in the following way: “The femme fatale is the figure of a certain discursive unease, a potential epistemological trauma. For her most
24 striking characteristic, perhaps, is the fact that she never really is what she seems to be.
She harbors a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable, or manageable” (1). The male is challenged to reveal her secret, discover who she is and what her intentions are, to unmask her. There are endless tales about her, but she never consciously lets anyone close to her.
2.2 Appearance and Sexuality
The femme‟s power lies above all in her immense, overpowering physical beauty. Her beauty serves as a tool for hiding her not so beautiful intentions. At first, she needs to hide her beauty because she wants to meet the male without raising suspicion. Rather, she strives to look innocent and to achieve this, camouflage is essential. She aims to appear too harmless to be taken for the femme fatale, using her charms only sparingly when the male is in a vulnerable position and ready to yield to temptation. At that moment, she unveils what is under her disguise.
In order to take attention away from her magnificence, she needs to cover it.
Bade argues that “the curves of breasts, waist and hips are hidden or suppressed” (13).
Her beauty might reveal her real identity and it is in her interest not to be detected as dangerous. For this reason, she hides her feminine features. Often the femme fatale uses a veil to wrap her body and face. The veil serves as a protection against the gaze of the outside world. It conceals the femme‟s face and allows her to keep her secret. The veil has several functions as it both fuels her confidence and creates excitement in the male character. He becomes curious about the veiled figure and precisely at the moment she takes it off and her destructive forces emerge.
According to Bartky, women‟s faces and bodies are “trained to the expression of deference. Under male scrutiny, women will avert their eyes or cast them downward;
25 the female gaze is trained to abandon its claim to the sovereign status of seer” (68). She also adds that “The nice girl learns to avoid the bold and unfettered starting of the loose woman who looks at whatever and whomever she pleases” (68). The femme is not ashamed to stare back at her admirers. She does not avert her eyes or avoid eye contact
– after all, she is not the nice girl. She knows she is an object of the gaze and the subsequent sexual desire, which is the source of her power.
When it comes to the topic of sexuality, it proves to be another convenient tool for the femme. She represents the ultimate sexual fantasy for men and does not think twice about using it to her advantage. The prospect of a potential sexual act with her drives men crazy. It is no wonder, considering that Haggard wrote that sexual passion is
“the most powerful lever with which to stir the mind of man, for it lies at the root of all things human” (qtd. in Kestner 143). This sexuality however is in most cases the reason for the man‟s downfall. Stott stresses that the femme fatale bears a sexuality that is eventually “rapacious or fatal to her male partners” (8).
This definition emphasizes that sexuality is perceived as one of her defining features. The femme seems to be sexually uninhibited, promising great pleasures and experiences to her lovers. Yet when looking for instance at Anthony Powell‟s femme fatale, Pamela, it can be seen that it might not always be the case. Pamela, even though she tempts men with sexual act, is herself sexually unresponsive. She attempts to put on a show to live up to the expectations of her suitors, but one of her lovers in Books Do
Furnish a Room disproves the notion of the femme‟s appetite, emphasizing that it seems insatiable only to outsiders: “„It‟s when you have her. She wants it all the time, yet doesn‟t want it. She goes rigid like a corpse. Every grind‟s a nightmare. It‟s all the time and always the same‟” (Powell 225). Pam‟s sexuality is everything but rapacious, which shows the irony surrounding this fatal woman; she was considered the greatest
26 seducer who, however, turned out to be frigid. This example shows another trait of the femme – her deceptiveness. If needed, she is willing to pretend anything in order to convince and ensnare her victims.
2.3 Castrating and Devastating
Creed compares the fatal woman to a species of spiders whose females are especially large and dangerous to the males, claiming that “Like Darwin‟s deadly female spider, the femme fatale is an unmistakably castrating figure. Yet as Darwin explains, this does not stop the male spider from sacrificing himself to her deadly mandibles” (120). This demonstrates very well on one hand the extent of the male‟s fears of castration and on the other hand their inability to resist the desire. With the femme, the male takes chances notwithstanding the potential fulfilment of his castration fears.
The danger of the femme and her castrating power lies in the power relationship during the sexual act, at the moment of “abandonment in the sex act – a loss of self- awareness following a conscious seduction of the male” (Allen 2). The male fears the sexual act because for a while the female has power over him and he is thus vulnerable.
This anxiety then represents the fear of not mastering the femme. According to Freud, the male dreads becoming “infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling. The effect of coitus in discharging tensions and inducing flaccidity may be a prototype of what these fears represent; and realization of the influence gained by the woman over a man” (76). She holds the key to disarming the male because from his point of view, the power distribution during the sex act works to his disadvantage.
Psychologists have come up with various theories explaining the male‟s fear of castration. Bade emphasizes that there have always been males who took a “masochistic
27 delight in fantasies of fatal women. The superstitions that women are bringers of ill-luck and that they sap men of their virility, that they are tainted with evil and devious and mischief-making by nature are, in more or less primitive forms, universal” (10). Every culture has in one form or another expressed its fears about sexually aggressive women.
Some see the source of castration anxieties in the fear of the vagina as the mouth that
“devours and swallows” (Lurie 168), while others attribute it to the fear of the maternal figure – potentially any female lover could hide the castrating power men fear from their mothers (Lurie 171) or lastly, some consider primitive concerns about menstruation to be the source of the castration fears.
It does not matter whether the fear refers to literal or symbolical castration; the femme is always perceived as the devastating element for the male character. The blame is put on her because, seen exclusively through the men‟s eyes, she seduces the hero and causes his downfall. Yet, as Cowie suggests, the male often succumbs to the femme knowingly and voluntarily because it is precisely “her dangerous sexuality that he desires, so that it is ultimately his own perverse desire that is his downfall” (125). To a certain degree, the hero masochistically searches for a narcissistic female who is sexually challenging. What he does not bear in mind is that she is a force against which he is necessarily powerless. There is no such thing as flirting with the femme fatale and then letting her go as she is endowed with both brains and beauty.
In what sense does the femme fatale devastate the male? First, the desire for her blindfolds him and he becomes addicted, which leads to the loss of his identity and frenetic pursuit of the femme. In his book, aptly titled Never Flirt with a Femme Fatale,
McNair argues the male desire can “distort reality. The femme fatale changes a man‟s worldview; he may become oblivious to consequences. He makes mistakes.” (2). An example of this approach could be the traditional perception of the story of Eve and
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Adam where it is believed that Eve made Adam sin because she prompted him to be indifferent to consequences.
Second, the devastation also lies in the amorality of the femme as she dares to be the opposite of the maternal. For this reason, she is no longer the woman “nature meant her to be. She incarnates destruction rather than creativity. She has lost the capacity for love, and with it her function as wife and mother” (Ridge 353). If she is neither looking for, nor accepting the role of a nurturing mother or devoted wife, she threatens the basic unit of the society – the family. Her threat lies in offering potential adultery to husbands and fathers, which means families might start falling apart and eventually fall apart. She is thus seen as the wrecker of marriages, relationships and subsequently as the threat to the whole society which cannot very well function if the family, which is understood as pivotal, is damaged.
Moreover, the fatal woman is the “diametric opposite of the good woman who passively accepts impregnation, motherhood, domesticity, the control and domination of her sexuality by men” (Allen 4). If she refuses the role of a mother, then the femme does not bring anything to the society. The society justifies singling her out because she does not take part in producing. She becomes a “failed contributor who must be rescued by a male hero for proper maternal and career service functions” (Boozer 26). However, the rescue attempt inevitably fails because the femme has no reason to change and the male character falls for her in the process of transforming her into the proper maternal figure.
2.4 Theme of Death
The previous subchapter revolved around the devastating effect on the male. Yet the femme comes to an inglorious end, too, and in comparison to her male counterpart,
29 who is not typically killed, she ultimately ends up punished for good: killed by accident or removed. Misfortune, disasters, suffering and death are topics that are often connected to the femme. In The Military Philosophers, Powell‟s femme fatale is described as follows: “„I well discern in your heart that need for bitter things that knows no assuagement, those yearnings for secrecy and tears that pursue without end, wherever you seek to fly them ... Death, it is true, surrounds your nativity‟” (67). This greatly summarizes the figure in general. She is a carrier of death and suffering, bringing men near the abyss, therefore surrounded by the aura of death. And she is close to death herself.
What is significant about her death is that she, as opposed to the male who was caught, could have chosen a different path instead of continuing in the seduction of males. She anticipates that her behaviour will be the cause of her death at the end but does not avoid it at all. Given that she is “radically and continuously free to make a choice against sacrificing other and, ultimately, herself, her embrace of death calls upon us to ask why, if one could avoid death, should one choose it” (Bronfen 105). She herself is responsible for her fate and she seems to accept it by carrying on with her actions.
Cavell draws attention to the fact that the reason consequences “hunt us down is not merely that we are half-blind, and unfortunate, but that we go on doing the thing which produced the consequences in the first place” (309). Following this logic, the femme stays independent and sexually threatening, which leads to her doom. The male keeps on chasing the femme, which makes him devastated. Yet the male character often does not accept that his fate is the result of his behaviour and choices. He wishes to destroy the femme, hoping to “purify himself of the desire she inspired and the guilt this entailed” but it goes along with acknowledging that we cannot “purify ourselves from
30 the consequences of our actions by shifting guilt onto the other” (Bronfen 107). Shifting guilt is exactly what the male attempts to do. He blames the femme for everything that happened to him, not keeping in mind he is guilty too.
It has been mentioned that the femme almost always comes to a bad end, which is perceived by her victims as the deserved outcome of her deeds. Taking an alternative approach like Bronfen does, it can also be argued that the femme has actually won because her desire for freedom is “attainable only in death” (106). She accepts responsibility for her fate because she has no other choice, realizing that being hidden is one of many options. She gives up this “illusory safety, even if this means accepting the death one has been courting all along” (Bronfen 116). From this point of view, it is then possible to understand the end of the femme as her redemption, which would not otherwise be possible during her life.
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3. The Work of Angela Carter
Angela Carter was a British novelist and a feminist writer whose writing challenged traditional ideas on the patriarchal society, female sexuality and female roles. This is especially visible in her collection of stories titled The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), where she rewrites traditional fairy-tales and thus brings up new perspectives and insights. Bacchilega comments on Carter‟s work, emphasizing, too, that
Carter‟s postmodern rewritings are acts of fairy-tale archaeology that
release [the] story‟s many other voices. As an enthusiastic listener/reader
of both folk and literary tales, and as a writer who draws from many
versions, oral and literary, Carter tells tales that reactivate lost traditions,
trace violently contradictory genealogies, and flesh out the complex and
vital workings of desire and narrative. (59)
She skilfully manages to play with what has always been taken for granted, such as the question of who is the real carnivore incarnate in The Little Red Riding Hood story, suggesting the girl knew what was coming and planned her actions accordingly. And it is not only the short stories but also Carter‟s novels that can allow various readings, offering an array of voices. In the book titled Angela Carter Linden Peach reminds her readers that “this is especially difficult in Carter‟s case. While her non-fiction, short fiction, children‟s fiction and novels all interconnect, Carter was always interested in blurring the boundaries between them, challenging our perceptions …” (3).
This thesis‟s analytical part is based on the novels The Passion of New Eve
(1977), Heroes and Villains (1969) and the stories from The Bloody Chamber (1979), namely The Lady of the House of Love and The Company of Wolves. These
“undecorous, overripe and mocking tales in which nothing is sacred and nothing
32 natural” (Gerrard qtd. in Peach 7) provide a very different, yet greatly fascinating ideas on what it means to be a femme fatale. Carter demythologises the archetypes of female figures, including the femme fatale, arguing in The Sadeian Woman that “all the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and a consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway” (5). The following section briefly introduces the three works.
3.1 Heroes and Villains
Heroes and Villains narrates a story of Marianne, a professor‟s daughter, and a
Barbarian called Jewel. They find themselves struggling in a post-catastrophe world,
Marianne attempting to escape from the suffocating prison of obedience and Jewel taking her hostage or at least thinking about it in such a way. Their relationship clearly differs from that of the hunter and the hunted for when Jewel attacks her, whispering:
“„Get me out of here and I‟ll do you no harm but if you shout, I‟ll strangle you,‟” she, to his shock, replies: “„It‟s quite unnecessary to strangle me‟” (Heroes and Villains 18).
Marianne leaves for the wilderness with him voluntarily, leaving behind her white tower and her father. She courageously penetrates the perilous land in order to reach Jewel‟s village and at the end of the journey to become his wife.
The story is a constant fight for power between the two young people. While she is thinking of strangling him, he is thinking of raping her. Both desperately want to have power over the other and it is even more complicated when romantic feelings start to be involved. Peach calls it a “problematic relationship based on a combination of attraction and repulsion” (72). Not only are the feelings mixed, but the characters also have ambiguous personalities. Jewel is on one hand an educated chief and on the other he
33 resorts to primitive savage behaviour and superstitions. Marianne is very bright, agile and proud, but on occasions turns into an oppressed, defeated individual. For this reason, she is described in the chapter Women under Transformation Process.
3.2 The Passion of New Eve
The Passion of New Eve is also set in a dystopian world, but the story opens with the narrator‟s description of women going extremely wild and aggressive:
As the summer grew yet more intolerable, the Women also furthered
their depredations. Female sharp-shooters took to sniping from concealed
windows at men who lingered too long in front of posters outside blue
movie theatres. They were supposed to have infiltrated the hookers who
paraded round Times Square in their uniforms of white boots and mini-
skirts; there were rumours of a kamikaze squad of syphilitic whores who
donated spirochetal enlightenment for free to their customers out of
dedication to the cause. They blew up wedding shops and scoured the
newspapers for marriage announcements so that they could send brides
gifts of well-honed razors. (17)
This overly exaggerated report of how women take revenge on men is a fictionalized account that allows Carter to open a debate about topics such as sex, gender, violence and what it means to be male or female. In this terrifying situation, at the edge of war, a young man named Evelyn is seduced by a stripper, Leilah. He completely falls for her and remains fascinated until finding out she is pregnant. Evelyn then rejects her, insists on an abortion that leaves her sterile and flees. He is however taken captive in a desert by the female residents of Beulah, whose leader castrates Evelyn and changes him into a woman. He manages to escape but is captured by a cruel misogynist tyrant. Eve, now an
34 insignificant woman in a harem of neglected wives, has a taste of his own medicine.
Upon meeting Leilah again, he is told the events were all planned by the great Mother.
Finally, he is taken away to a safety of a cave because (s)he is pregnant.
The Passion of New Eve is in many ways an ambiguous and metaphorical novel for Carter dexterously plays, among others, with the myth of the fatal woman. Even after labelling Leilah the femme fatale, it is difficult to conclude who is whose victim.
Due to Eve‟s behaviour, Leilah becomes sterile, while Eve is robbed of his masculinity and forced to adapt to living in a female body. In a sense, they happen to be fatal for each other.
3.3 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
The last stories that are the subject of analysis include The Lady of the House of
Love and The Company of Wolves. In The Lady of the House of Love, a female vampire who wishes to be human lives her monotonous life until a young soldier comes to her house by chance. She, too, is a character who combines opposite qualities: “Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house … a girl who is both death and the maiden.” (112). She is bloodthirsty but also innocent in her desire to be normal. On the figure of the Countess, Carter shows the animal side of femininity and the inner beasts and temptations one has to fight.
The Company of Wolves shatters the reader‟s expectations right from the start.
The land is merciless, the enemy fierce: “One beast and only one howls in the woods by night. The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious” (134). But surprisingly, the Little Red Riding Hood is much more cunning than she seems to be. In this reworked tale, she is the wolf‟s equal. The wolf here is a male and very attractive; they bet who will reach the grandmother‟s house first and Little Red Riding Hood wants
35 to lose to get a kiss. When she realizes who he is and he threatens to eat her, she bursts out laughing. She, like him, is determined to follow a plan and she is not afraid to stick to it. Her plan is quite simple – to kiss him, undress and sleep with the wolf. She does not seem to care that the werewolf has eaten her grandma; she ignores that in order to consummate the relationship with the wolf. Carter‟s empowered female character provides a very different and fresh attitude to the classic fairy-tale and also challenges the deep-rooted idea of the young girl being the wolf‟s victim.
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4. Angela Carter’s Femme Fatales
According to Adler and Lécosse, women who are in love are dangerous because
“the power of their desire can disturb the so-called natural imbalance that has always existed between the sexes since the dawn of humanity.” (22). Many of Carter‟s female heroines, on the contrary, do not need to fall in love at all to be dangerous. To be fatal.
To be the end of the men they set eyes on.
4.1 Identifying a Femme Fatale
One thing that can be said for sure is that if the task of identifying a femme fatale was simple, it would be much more difficult for her to ensnare her victims. Her true nature is therefore concealed as best as possible. In The Passion of New Eve,
Evelyn comments on his first seeing the exotic Leilah: “Her sex palpitated under my fingers like a wet, terrified cat yet she was voracious, insatiable, though coldly so, as if driven by a drier, more cerebral need than a sexual one, as if forced to the act again and again by, perhaps, an exacerbated, never-to-be-satisfied curiosity” (18). Obviously
Evelyn has no idea who he faces, even though he names the notorious traces of the femme fatale – coldness, insatiability and impassive following of a plan. What is more, he mentions she seems to be driven by something he himself cannot recognize, which is
Leilah‟s plan of seducing him, bringing him to the desert and having him changed into a woman.
He gets lost the moment he catches sight of her attractive body:
Her tense and resilient legs attracted my attention first for they seemed to
quiver with the energy repressed in their repose, like the legs of
racehorses in the stable, but the black mesh stockings she wore
designated their length and slenderness as specifically erotic, she would
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not use them to run away with. As soon as I saw her legs, I imagined
them coiled or clasped around my neck. (The Passion of New Eve 19)
The femme‟s body captures her victim‟s imagination. Now she needs to slightly reveal herself: “She had on a pair of black, patent-leather shoes with straps around the ankles, fetishistic heels six inches high and, in all the heat and paranoia of summer, an immense coat of red fox … I will always associate her, with some reason, with foxes. This coat revealed only the hem of a dark blue, white coin-dotted dress that hardly covered her.”
(The Passion of New Eve 19). What is interesting about this passage is not only the fact the femme is compared to an especially cunning animal (to be sly as a fox as they say) but also the form of the veil she uses. Leilah uses no ordinary fabric but a long fox coat.
The coat serves only the purpose of concealing as Evelyn mentions that the weather was too hot for such piece of clothing. And because this veil is opaque, she needs to unfold it, which has a great effect on Evelyn:
My cock was already throbbing before, at the door, she turned towards
me and let her coat fall back. … her white, rolling eyes caught mine and
stared at me for an endless second with all manner of mocking invitations
in their opaque regard. Then she extended one hand, with the shards of
five purple beetles glittering on the tips of the fingers, drew the bosom of
the dress together and, with a magnificent, barbaric, swirling gesture,
wrapped the coat again entirely around her, so she seemed a fully furred
creature. (The Passion of New Eve 20)
The fatal woman knows very well how to make her gestures as erotic as possible. She reveals only a little and immediately covers herself and then again her leg or cleavage peeps out to tease her dazzled victim.
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First the narrator compared her legs to those of horses in the stables, then he thought of her as of a fox and now, again, he calls her a furred creature, suggesting she resembles an animal. He seems to do so unconsciously, highlighting her animal-like, predatory qualities. He also mentions Leilah boldly staring him in the eyes like a beast of prey would, which especially emphasizes that Leilah will hardly be a passive and docile female. This gaze is replaced by casting side looks:
She must have known I was staring at her, a woman always knows,
though she never once glanced in my direction, but a certain quivering,
as of the antennae of her extravagant hair, suggested she was aware of
every nuance in the atmosphere around her that she charged with the
electric glamour of her presence. (The Passion of New Eve 19)
In order to be even more provoking, she alternates between looking and not looking and keeping presence and distance.
When it comes to distance, Leilah is said to wander the streets “picking her way among the refuse with the rapt delight of a shepherdess in a pastoral straying among flowers in a meadow” (The Passion of New Eve 21). She is graceful and elegant and although very young, she knows how to play the game:
there was a strange, magic space between us; when I was so close to her
the smell of musk almost overpowered me, she would gather her coat
about her and hurry a little and, though, she did not seem to move fast,
she must have moved far more quickly than I for I could never catch up
with her … (The Passion of New Eve 22)
Leilah even spices the hunt with throwing down her knickers and dress. This game of
„catch me if you can‟ is what hooks the victim and keeps the femme fatale‟s plan moving.
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The most crucial thing is that the victim is fooled and his behaviour lets her know that the male is securely hooked and wondering about how she both “appalled and enchanted [him]; it was infectious, [he] caught it. Under the dying moon, she lead [him] on an invisible string” (The Passion of New Eve 21). Strangely enough, Evelyn admits that “all these were the palpable manifestations of seduction” (The Passion of New Eve
21) but fails to see the danger of the femme fatale. He seems to be the hunter who decides to pursue the femme, the one who has it in his hands, but the exact opposite is true:
… if the contingent turn from free choice to inevitability is aligned with a
masculine gaze appropriating a seductive feminine body, one must
not overlook the fact that as bearer of the hero‟s look, it is the femme
fatale who manipulates the outcome of their fatal meeting. It may be a
coincidence that this particular man has caught her in his field of vision,
but she has been expecting someone like him to do precisely that. She
knows all along that she is fated and can, therefore, turn what is
inevitable into a source of power. (Bronfen 106)
So what exactly is it that prevents the male from identifying the femme fatale and subsequently from saving himself? Is it her “high, very childlike voice” (20) or her innocent “sucking at her candy and singing” (The Passion of New Eve 20)? Or is it the tactics she uses – the veil, the luring behaviour, the sexual fantasy? It appears that the male is not fully aware of the hazardousness of the situation and thus he ignores the hints he himself mentions. He perhaps unconsciously feels that something will go wrong but cannot or, more probably, does not want to do anything about it. The femme fatale‟s magic is so powerful that it is not easy to see through her when one is involved.
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In contrast to Leilah, the Countess of The Lady of the House of Love does not use her sexuality to seduce the male. She is rather composed, the opposite of sensuous
Leilah, but equally gorgeous. In fact, she is so beautiful that she does not look natural:
“her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition.
Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.” (The Lady of the House of Love 113). Even though it is typical of a femme fatale to pretend she is interested in sexual encounter (like Leilah does), she seems to long for love which she has never experienced in her immortal existence. The title of the story is then quite ironic for there is no love in this house of love.
The Countess does not make use of any veil but finds refuge in semi-darkness.
The half-light in her room is her ally in helping her stay undiscovered. Her victim only sees her indistinct shape in a faint light “since it caught and reflected in its yellowed surfaces what little light there was in the ill-lit room; this shape resolved itself into that of, of all things, a hoop-skirted dress of white satin draped here and there with lace, a dress fifty or sixty years out of fashion but once, obviously, intended for a wedding”
(The Lady of the House of Love 120). This way, he cannot notice her razor-sharp, vampiric teeth.
As for catching her victims, the vampire has a completely different strategy from the heroine of The Passion of New Eve. While Leila actively chooses her victim and then lets him chase her down the streets and enjoy the hunt, she passively waits in her desolate house for any stray visitors who might come and become her food. She has almost no energy left, making her look like a doll or like “a great, ingenious piece of clockwork. For she seemed inadequately powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control; as if she had been wound up years ago, when she was born, and now
41 the mechanism was inexorably running down and would leave her lifeless” (The Lady of the House of Love 123). Being buried alive in her mansion, she, to an extent, resembles the Sleeping Beauty but is far from being as innocent as the fairy-tale character is.
This is not to say that there is no good in her. She tries to defy the reality of being a vampire: “She loathes the food she eats; she would have liked to take the rabbits home with her, feed them on lettuce, pet them and make them a nest in her red-and- black chinoiserie escritoire, but hunger always overcomes her.” (The Lady of the House of Love 115). She appears to be powerless in controlling her urges. She is delicate, too,
“sobbing in a derelict bedroom where a cracked mirror suspended from a wall does not reflect a presence” (The Lady of the House of Love 112), a poor girl with the “fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail that her dress seemed to him to hang suspended, as if untenanted in the dank air” (The Lady of the House of Love 120).
If this description brings compassion to the reader, Carter is quick to disrupt it by showing her as ravenous: “When the back door opens, the Countess will sniff the air and howl. She drops, now, on all fours. Crouching, quivering, she catches the scent of her prey” (The Lady of the House of Love 114). Her teeth are “as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the arcana; her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler” (The Lady of the House of Love 113). She is fearsome but nevertheless a victim. And does this not, after all, fit the description of a femme fatale perfectly? The anonymous narrator even adds: “So delicate and damned, poor thing. Quite damned. Yet I do believe she scarcely knows what she is doing” (The Lady of the House of Love 127). Again, there is the idea of the femme fatale behaving in a certain way because she is forced to; she cannot help it but be fatal despite her inner desire to be a human.
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What works in the femme‟s advantage is that she shows only her positive side and conceals the negative. Then, if an unwise stranger stops in “the square of the deserted village to refresh himself at the fountain, a crone in a black dress and white apron presently emerges from a house. She will invite you with smiles and gestures; you will follow her” (The Lady of the House of Love 115). By using an old mute lady as her personal servant, the vampire looks even more innocent than she already does. The prey is thus almost unable to identify the danger that lies ahead of them, seeing only two harmless women. An example where the make-believe is brought to perfection, however, is quite surprising and even more unexpected than in the case of The Lady of the House of Love story. The mysterious femme fatale is dealt with in detail in the following subsection.
4.2 From a Puppet to a Fatal Woman
There is a femme fatale who seems to be so naïve and persuasive in her manner that it is almost impossible to think about her as a calculating person. The reason she is so inconspicuous is that we are told at the very beginning of the story who is undoubtedly the evil one:
If the benighted traveller spies those luminous, terrible sequins stitched
suddenly on the black thickets, then he knows he must run, if fear has not
struck him stock-still. But those eyes are all you will be able to glimpse
of the forest assassins as they cluster invisibly round your smell of meat
as you go through the wood unwisely late. They will be like shadows,
they will be like wraiths, grey members of a congregation of nightmare;
hark! (The Company of Wolves 134)
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Those luminous eyes of a killer belong to a character that is not named but the description is scary enough to take attention away from the Little Red Riding Hood. If anyone doubted that the wolf should be dreaded, the narrator escalates his original statement: “But the wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. We try and try but sometimes we cannot keep them out … Fear and flee the wolf; for, worst of all, the wolf may be more than he seems.” (The Company of Wolves 135). This seems to be a curious observation because exactly like the wolf, the Little Red Riding Hood could be more than she seems, too.
She is first presented as a child “so pretty and the youngest of her family, a little late-comer, had been indulged by her mother and the grandmother who‟d knitted her the red shawl that, today, has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow” (The
Company of Wolves 138). However, it is immediately mentioned that she is no longer a child because children in general do not stay young for long in the harsh environment:
“There are no toys for them to play with so they work hard and grow wise” (The
Company of Wolves 138). As opposed to Perrault and Grimms, Carter‟s Little Red
Riding Hood is rather a grown-up girl, almost a young woman: “Her breasts have just begun to swell; her hair is like lint, so fair it hardly makes a shadow on her pale forehead; her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her woman‟s bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month.”
(The Company of Wolves 138). The swollen breasts and period highlight that she is a sexual being inside; the red shawl she wear tells it to the outside world as well.
It has been mentioned that the red shawl is a gift from her grandmother, which could be interpreted as a symbol of sexual maturity. The grandmother, as the more experienced one, has decided that the girl is now mature enough to wear it. Moreover,
Carter emphasizes her heroine‟s virginity: “She stands and moves within the invisible
44 pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver” (The Company of Wolves
138). The femme fatale, however, can very well be a virgin because even though she usually gains power over the male by “nourishing his sexual fantasies, her own interest is only superficially erotic” (Bronfen 106).
The original Little Red Riding Hood is a pretty village girl, passive and obedient. However, she is also foolish because she clearly does not know it is dangerous to talk to a wolf. What is more, she tells him where the grandmother‟s house is and finally, she does not recognize the male voice of the wolf in female clothing because she believes that grandma simply has a rough voice because of cold. In Carter‟s story, there is a very strong and active female powerful character who survives the wolf‟s attack because she is courageous and intelligent, and she stays on guard. She does not need any help from male characters (the huntsman or woodcutters). Carter gives her character much more space and even let her determine the story‟s development as The
Red Riding Hood decides to sleep with the wolf. She makes her intelligent and witty, which challenges the fixed representation of sexuality in fairy tales. The female character then disproves the traditional gender stereotypes.
Yet these features alone do not make her a femme fatale yet, but the fact that it is her who feels in power and seduces the wolf, does. In the original version, the wolf is the instrument of punishment because the girl is either too helpless to save herself or too unintelligent to do so. Carter, however, rewrites the fairy tale narrative in such a way that the wolf is no longer the stronger one, the one who is a threat and therefore she is not his poor victim. The fact that she knows what lies ahead can be seen in this passage:
“When he offered to carry her basket, she gave it to him although her knife was in it
45 because he told her his rifle would protect them” (The Company of Wolves 139). She does not do it out of naivety because the reader was already told “She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing” (The Company of Wolves 138). She does it because she has a plan that lies in overpowering the wolf.
Like a true femme fatale, she is flirting with him when he tries to persuade her to leave the path: “Is it a bet? He asked her. Shall we make a game of it? What will you give me if I get to your grandmother's house before you? What would you like? She asked disingenuously A kiss. Commonplaces of a rustic seduction; she lowered her eyes and blushed” (The Company of Wolves 140). She uses her charms to distract him, fluttering her eyelashes while subtly suggesting she is not against a sexual encounter.
Lau comments on this conversation as follows:
She is, of course, both innocent and knowing, and that is exactly what
makes her so highly desirable in the typical male fantasy But Carter is
just toying with that fantasy, writing her own moral pornography as a
way of further dismantling a world of sexual absolutes. As Carter writes
her, Little Red Riding Hood is, ultimately, a sexual agent … (86)
It is, after all, the Little Red Riding Hood who is the seducer, starting the striptease when she is alone with the wolf: “What shall I do with my shawl? Throw it on the fire, dear one. You won‟t need it again. She bundled up her shawl and threw it on the blaze, which instantly consumed it. Then she drew her blouse over her head; her small breasts gleamed as if the snow had invaded the room.” (The Company of Wolves 143-144). In
Lau‟s view, Carter wrote this scene as if showing Little Red Riding Hood in a pornographic film, “the desirable young nymphet caught in the male gaze” (87). During this slow and provocative striptease, the girl is indeed in the centre of the male gaze but she, as a femme fatale, manipulates the outcome of this.
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If the Little Red Riding Hood character still seems to be an improbable one to become a cold, calculating femme fatale, this is exactly what works in her advantage.
Of course she would not seduce as many males as she does if she did not look so inconspicuous and did not have innocent eyes. The femme fatale is not what she seems to be and that is precisely her trick. It is indeed difficult to think about her as a dangerous and cruel girl. In Never Flirt with a Femme Fatale, McNair reminds us that women are typically seen as life-givers and nurturers while men are often the life- takers: “It‟s shocking for a woman to be in the other role. And it‟s exciting.” (2). It is indeed tempting to see the wolf as the carnivore incarnate.
Even the cunning wolf is fooled by her mask for when he is about to eat her, she starts laughing: “she knew she was nobody‟s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing” (The Company of Wolves 144). The statement that she is nobody‟s meat is interpreted by Bacchilega who claims that “by acting out her desires - sexual, not just for life - the girl offers herself as flesh, not meat … Both carnivores incarnate, these two young heterosexual beings satiate their hunger not for dead meat, but flesh, while at the same time embodying it” (64).
It makes more sense when considering that the Little Red Riding Hood is not a victim. If she is not the wolf‟s victim, then he is no longer the demon who leads well behaved girls to their death. Both of them are in fact carnivores who satisfy their hunger but she is the femme fatale. As such, she secretly manipulated him for her own purpose.
The roles are reversed; the wolf does not have power over her. As a femme fatale, she even has a certain degree of power over her life: “Her father might forbid her, if he were home, but he is away in the forest, gathering wood, and her mother cannot deny her …”
(The Company of Wolves 138). She is cruel, too, undressing the wolf while “the old
47 bones under the bed set up a terrible clattering but she did not pay them any heed”
(144). Carter aptly closes the story by saying: “Carnivore incarnate, only immaculate flesh appeases him.” (The Company of Wolves 145), which, after perceiving the girl as a femme fatale, is given a double meaning.
4.3 Variations on the Concept
Naturally, not all of Carter‟s female characters are fatal women. Some of them might actually be called quite the opposite, like the heroine of Black Venus who resorts to prostitution in order to have at least hot water, she does not know her own value and is totally dependent on male help. Similarly, the heroine of Our Lady of the Massacre is powerless in a fight against a male character who wants to take her child from her and give him a new name and a new mother.
Some female characters, like Fevvers of Nights at the Circus, at first seem they might have some features in common with the femme fatale figure, like the awe they generate in their admirers:
On that European tour of hers, Parisians shot themselves in droves for
her sake; not just Lautrec but all the post-impressionists vied to paint her;
Willy gave her supper and she gave Colette some good advice. Alfred
Jarry proposed marriage. When she arrived at the railway station in
Cologne, a cheering bevy of students unhitched her horses and pulled her
carriage to the hotel themselves. In Berlin, her photograph was displayed
everywhere in the newsagents‟ windows next to that of the Kaiser. In
Vienna, she deformed the dreams of that entire generation who would
immediately commit themselves wholeheartedly to psychoanalysis.
(Nights at the Circus 4)
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She seems to be immensely popular and literally chased by crowds of males:
Everywhere she went, rivers parted for her, wars were threatened, suns
eclipsed, showers of frogs and footwear were reported in the press and
the King of Portugal gave her a skipping rope of egg-shaped pearls,
which she banked. Now all London lies beneath her flying feet. (Nights
at the Circus 4)
She also makes Walser fall in love, making him feel like he has never felt before. Plus, she manages to humiliate him, which provides her with a more femme fatale-like personality: “he has fallen in love, a condition that causes him anxiety because he has not experienced it before. Hitherto, conquests came easily and were disregarded. But no woman ever tried to humiliate him before, to his knowledge, and
Fevvers has both tried and succeeded” (Nights at the Circus 109). Walser implies that while the previous women were easy to catch, he must put a lot of effort into befriending Fevvers. Her inaccessibility, combined with the feelings she is able to elicit in the male, might suggest a promising femme fatale.
Yet there is a second side to this and this image of a temptress is soon broken.
Fevvers is called Venus but only in the sense that there is something “fishy about the
Cockney Venus” (Nights at the Circus 2), as the narrator suggests. While beauty is one of the femme fatale‟s most important weapons, Fevver‟s face is “broad and oval as a meat dish, had been thrown on a common wheel out of coarse clay; nothing subtle about her appeal” (Nights at the Circus 5). The feminine movement and gestures must, according to Bartky, “exhibit not only constriction, but grace as well, and a certain eroticism restrained by modesty: all three” (69). In the case of Fevver, however, it is
“impossible to imagine any gesture of hers that did not have that kind of grand, vulgar, careless generosity” (Nights at the Circus 5).
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On one hand, Fevvers does mention that her body is “the abode of limitless freedom” (Nights at the Circus 29), which is especially true for the femme fatale figure.
On the other hand, Walser often mentions he is frightened by her size and looks: “At close quarters, it must be said that she looked more like a dray mare than an angel”
(Nights at the Circus 5). This should not happen to a femme fatale who is exquisite all the time. Besides, he calls her a giantess and stresses how much she eats and drinks.
Rather than being a seductive femme, Fevvers is terrifying, at times even disgusting:
“the aerialiste, who now shifted from one buttock to the other and – „better out than in, sir‟ -- let a ripping fart ring round the room.” (Nights at the Circus 4). She is even more unappealing when it comes out how messy she is, not hiding: “a writhing snakes‟ nest of silk stockings, green, yellow, pink, scarlet, black, that introduced a powerful note of stale feet, final ingredient in the highly personal aroma, 'essence of Fevvers', that clogged the room.” (Nights at the Circus 2).
The reason Fevvers is not generally considered a femme fatale lies exactly in these anti-femme fatale-like qualities she possesses. The femme fatale has many faces and forms and recognising them is not always a straightforward process. However, if there are too many features that obviously clash with the idea of the femme fatale as we know her, it suggests the female character might me more suitable for another label, such as the coquette. Hedgecock comments on this issue as follows:
… to me the femme fatale is vibrant and courageous, becoming
somewhat intoxicating, and very different from her female counterparts
such as the idealized domestic woman … and unconventional though she
may be at times, the femme fatale uses her mischief to show the less
serious side of life. (15)
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There is no need for the femme fatales to be conventional or like copies of each other, but if there is just one or two things a character has in common with the phenomenon, it might not be the right one to deserve the name.
A completely different variation on the femme fatale concept can be seen on the example of Tristessa in The Passion of New Eve. She is the perfect embodiment of the fatal women, being beautiful, cold and unattainable. Though being the dream of many men, she is castrating, too, “the infamous Tristessa, Witch, bitch and Typhoid Mary of sterility” (The Passion of New Eve 104). What a surprise it is when it turns out the ultimate seducer is a male, and out of her female clothes pops out “the rude, red-purple insignia of maleness, the secret core of Tristessa‟s sorrow, the source of her enigma, of her shame” (The Passion of New Eve 128). Carter herself wrote an essay titled Femme
Fatales in which she argues that there is nothing wrong with casting a beautiful boy in the role of the fatal woman because in her view “the significance of the femme fatale lies not in her gender but in her freedom” (251).
The fact that the whole time the crowds of male admirers looked up to a male they thought to be a female (or wanted to think so) highlights to what a great extent the femme fatale is not really herself, but rather a projection of one‟s desires. The male imagines the femme the way he wants her to be. In Carter‟s own words:
Desire does not so much transcend its object as ignore it completely in
favour of a fantastic re-creation of it. Which is the process by which the
femme gets credited with fatality. Because she is perceived not as herself
but as the projection of those libidinous cravings which, since they are
forbidden, must always prove fatal. (Femme Fatales 249)
In this sense, the femme fatale exists as the creation of others, as the product of their desires and imagination and not as an individual being.
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4.4 Women under Transformation Process
Marianne, the main protagonist of Heroes and Villains, provides an interesting type of the femme fatale. She is a female character who is undergoing a transition from an obedient woman to a powerful female character. She already has the traits of a femme fatale but she is not fatal yet. Marianne is exceptionally strong but from time to time, she lapses back to her previous obedient self. For this reason she is considered a character on her way to a full femme fatale, being close enough but not quite there.
Although Marianne was not born a femme fatale, she aims to become one.
Marianne meets the attractive Barbarian Jewel under specific conditions – he tries to kidnap her, coldly saying: “„Get me out of here and I‟ll do you no harm but if you shout, I‟ll strangle you. It‟s quite unnecessary to strangle me,‟ she whispered angrily.” (Heroes and Villains 18). Her reaction in this very first conversation reveals what an unusually strong female character we are dealing with. In a femme fatale-like style, she implies that she is coming with him of her own will. She is even toying with the idea of using Jewel to help her escape and then strangling him.
In the relationship that develops between them, they constantly fight for power.
Marianne, as the future fatal woman, needs to feel in power. When she is hurt she does not cry and if he slaps her she slaps him back. When he rapes her, she suffers in silence.
It might seem that a true femme fatale would not allow herself to be in such terrible and humiliating situations at all but Marianne is aware of the fact that she has no choice so she has to learn “to reconcile herself to everything from rape to mortality” (Heroes and
Villains 59). In Zirange‟s view, Marianne is a “mentally tough character, who would like to dominate, rather than be dominated … Carter‟s protagonist has an independent
„thinking‟ mind, ambitions and also pragmatic view of life which leads to her gaining a possession of authority” (90). This idea of a pragmatic view is very important because it
52 shows that Marianne is not just passively tolerating what Jewel does to her; she only knows what is possible to achieve and what is not in the present circumstances when she is pregnant and trapped among Barbarians in an unknown, dangerous land.
On multiple occasions, Jewel mentions that he is afraid of her: “he was afraid to let her out of sight while he was also afraid to look at her” (Heroes and Villains 27).
Marianne tries her best to remain mysterious and threatening. She avoids a group rape only because she incites fear in the male characters. Professor Donally aptly summarizes not only her, but every femme fatale‟s secret: “„Familiarity breeds contempt. You‟ll have to remain terrifying, you know; otherwise, what hope is there for you?‟” (Heroes and Villains 56). Marianne thus keeps everything to herself, though some other characters can mistake this for obedience, such as when Mrs Green tells her that she must be careful when pregnant and follow Jewel: “„I shall go wherever he goes,‟ said Marianne composedly. „Is it as bad as that, dear?‟ said Mrs Green with melancholy satisfaction and kissed her again. Marianne realized the woman had quite misinterpreted her and thought she meant she wanted to be Jewel‟s shadow forever.”
(Heroes and Villains 128).
Marianne finally marries Jewel though not because of love but because she has no other choice if she does not want to go back to her old community. There is no place for love in her troubled mind. Carter points out that the conviction that women should
“live for love remains implicit in the idea of the femme fatale, despite the continual evidence of the behaviour of the femme fatale herself that this is not so” (Femme
Fatales 249). She is forced to get married but there is nevertheless a freedom in her choice. Another choice of her is to let another Barbarian rape her. This sounds very strange but she literally makes him rape her in order to reassert her freedom via having intercourse with someone other than her husband. She is trying to show him that she can
53 do whatever she pleases. She has no other option of showing it to him, apart from the rape and occasional running away from him. She fell for Jewel only temporarily, quickly gathering herself and going back to her usual tenaciousness.
All in all, Marianne is a sort of sad portrayal of what happens to an aspiring femme fatale if she is in difficult conditions. Her hunger for power and self-governing is given space only when Jewel and many others die. At that moment, Marianne becomes a ruler of the Barbarian tribe and calls herself the Tiger Lady. Perhaps it marks the end of her journey toward the femme fatale. She can finally do what her wants and all the power is in her hands. Her plan succeeded – she broke out of the prison of boredom in her old place and has kept her rebellious spirit. She suffered along the way but she, like a femme fatale, actually took advantage of the male to achieve her own purpose.
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5. The Threatening Female
The two following sections deal with the topic of castration, both literal and metaphorical and with the question of who gets destroyed after the involvement with the fatal woman, whether it is the male, the female or both of them.
5.1 Fear of Castration
The idea of destructive female sexuality is not a 20th century phenomenon. On the contrary, it has been mentioned that the legend of castrating female can be dated back to the times of Lilith, the uninhibited sexual monster who raped men at night. The view of the femme fatale as such a castrating monster seems to be based on her mysteriousness and power. Most male characters fear the sexual intercourse, during which the femme is said to have power over the male who is thus left vulnerable. Given how free, cunning and destructive the femme is generally perceived to be, the male succumbs to her but at the same time fears the worst.
The castrating qualities ascribed to her make the femme appear especially cruel.
Yet the castration proves to be more of a myth than an actual tool the femme would use to destroy the men; she makes do with other feminine weapons, such as seductiveness, to drive the males crazy. Carter wrote in the Sadeian Woman that a free woman in “an unfree society will be a monster” (27), which actually shows that the femme‟s nature is to be unrestrained but not to be a mutilator. From the male point of view, the monstrosity of the femme seems to lie in damaging the male body, yet Carter almost never shows her femme fatales heartless to such an extent that they would literally castrate the male. It is the fatal woman‟s freedom that earned her the title of femme castratrice – she is a monster because she cannot be tamed and dominated.
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The fear of the female who can castrate during sexual intercourse represents the extent of male‟s fears that surround her. Taking into consideration her capacity to elicit immense fear, the femme fatale is in this sense very powerful. The myth of castrating and the subsequent fear is nicely depicted in Heroes and Villains where Marianne is saved from group rape only by the warning that comes from one of the males. He claims that “it‟s a well-known fact that Professor women sprout sharp teeth in their private parts, to bite off the genitalia of young men” (49). Hearing this, only the chief of the tribe laughs; others remain serious. Marianne is a stranger in the community and as such she remains a secret. The male Barbarians are subject to superstitions, which ultimately saves her from a horrible experience. Once again, it proves right that “„Familiarity breeds contempt.‟” (Heroes and Villains 56) and if the femme remains threatening for the males, she can remain intact.
Judging from the fears of the male characters, the removal of the male private parts might be perceived as the death of masculinity. Bade reminds us that in the 19th century there was not yet any cure for syphilis so “women were quite often literally the carriers of hideous disease and death … this certainly has some bearing on the frequent association of love and death, of beauty and disease” (10). During the intercourse, the female is briefly given a masculine role because she is in control of his manhood. If the femme castrated the male, be it with her vagina dentata1 or otherwise, the male would not die immediately but his masculinity would be diminished. For this reason, Jewel makes sure Marianne has no sharp teeth in her vagina before the sexual act. For
Marianne his superstitions mean an additional source of power and a better position in their struggle for power.
1 Vagina dentata refers to a myth about the vagina with teeth that can cut off the male private parts during sexual intercourse. 56
Technically speaking, castration can be regarded, in a very simplified way, as a physical change in the body. The change is basically irreversible. At the same time, castration changes both the appearance and the functioning of the body. From this point of view the Little Red Riding Hood is the biggest castrator of all Carter‟s femme fatales that are mentioned in this thesis. The reason the Little Red Riding Hood earns the name of the femme castratrice lies at the beginning in the narrator‟s inconspicuous statement that “Seven years is a werewolf's natural span but if you burn his human clothing you condemn him to wolfishness for the rest of his life” (The Company of Wolves 137).
The girl, after stripping of her clothing “ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing. The flames danced like dead souls on Walpurgisnacht…” (The Company of Wolves 144). The verb rip off that is used here evokes aggressiveness on the side of the female and suggests it might have happened against the wolf‟s will. The act of condemning the male/the wolf to stay in his animal form forever metaphorically represents castrating the male in the story. After all, in a vulnerable moment, the wolf did not expect her to change his body for good.
The Passion of New Eve is far less metaphorical and much more detailed when it comes to the topic of castration. Caught in the middle of the desert, Evelyn is tied and lead like “a sacrificial animal, to the altar, to the operating table, where Mother waited with a knife. Down, down, down into the dark, down into a soft, still, warm, inter- uterine, symmetrical place hung with curtains of crimson plush, into a curtained cabinet where there was a white bed” (The Passion of New Eve 69). Evelyn‟s journey towards castration strikingly resembles descent into the female womb with its darkness, softness and warmness. Thus, castration is associated with the maternal in a similar way as Lurie describes that men might fear the castrating power of their mothers (171).
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Here, it is therefore the great Mother and not the femme fatale who is the castrator. Leilah is responsible for the events that lead Evelyn to the desert, however she is by no means the executor of castration, which again brings up the question of the femme‟s alleged cruelty. As for the life after the operation, there is a contrast between the male and female view of castration. Eve sees it as “the end of Evelyn, who‟d been sacrificed to a dark goddess of whose existence he‟d never been aware” (The Passion of
New Eve 71) while his companion tells him the following: “„Don‟t you think,‟ asked
Sophia, „that the domination of man has caused us all too much pain? Were you ever happy, when you were a man, since you left the womb, unless you were trying to get back into it?‟” (The Passion of New Eve 76). This shows how for the male, castration is one of the most dreadful things to happen. In consequence, the femme who has the reputation of a merciless castrator is seen in an even more negative light than before.
The story offers one more example of castration which might be called mental castration as no operation physically takes place. Zero nevertheless feels castrated – the supposed castrator is Tristessa, the male femme fatale who is discussed in the subchapter titled Variations on the concept. Zero describes his mental castration as follows:
She‟d blasted his seed because he was Masculinity incarnate, you see.
Utilising various cabbalistic devices, Tristessa had magicked away his
reproductive capacity via the medium of the cinema screen. …
Tristessa‟s eyes, eyes of a stag about to be gralloched, had fixed directly
upon his and held them … He‟d felt a sudden, sharp, searing pain in his
balls. With visionary certainty, he‟d known the cause of his sterility. (The
Passion of New Eve 104)
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This particular castration is described to have happened through screen, giving the fatal woman magical abilities. This further perpetuates the negative attitudes towards the femme, making her appear as a wicked witch.
Eventually, Tristessa turns out to be a male and Zero realises he could not have been castrated by him. What is important about this moment is that it proves the extent to which the femme exists as the projection of male lusts and fantasies. If the gorgeous
Tristessa never really existed she could not be blamed for something she, as a male, is not capable of doing. The femme was seen as the destroyer of masculinity because the male imagined her the way he wished; she served as a projection of his fears and desires, a product of his imagination and his sole creation.
Last but not least, the heroine of The Lady of the House of Love, being portrayed as rising at night and playing “the game of patience until she grows hungry, until she becomes ravenous” (113) might be expected to be the most fierce castrator of all the females. Yet Carter is everything but predictable, considering that as far as the topic of castration is concerned, she seems to be the most innocent one, not harming her lover in any way. Perhaps as the only one of all the males, he does not feel any impact after meeting the femme. He is neither threatened, nor castrated, notwithstanding the fact that the Countess is at other times a bloodthirsty creature. Moreover, it proves once more that the femme fatale is never what one expects her to be.
5.2 The One Being Destroyed
It has been suggested that the reason consequences “hunt us down is not merely that we are half-blind, and unfortunate, but that we go on doing the thing which produced the consequences in the first place” (Cavell 309). From this point of view, the femme keeps threatening the male, his masculinity and the patriarchy in general which
59 often leads to her death. The fatal woman is out of control of the male, she cannot be subdued or dominated and that is why she has to be punished. She is always perceived as the devastating element for the male character, but the male also continues in his destructive behaviour, masochistically chasing the femme till he is devastated.
While the male is left disappointed and ruined, he does not die. The femme, in contrast to him, comes to an inglorious end, too, but as opposed to the male who is not killed, she ends up being punished for good. Carter in her pursuit of demythologising and twisting the traditional view of the femme fatale does not let her heroines die, except for the Countess. In her case, however, her death might not necessarily be perceived as the deserved outcome of her actions. Unhappy in her vampire role, she actually implies that she would like to be human but “she does not know if that is possible” (The Lady of the House of Love 114). Thus, it can also be claimed that the femme has actually triumphed because her desire for being human was not attainable during her life. She is like the bird she keeps in a cage: “sometimes the lark sings, but more often remains a sullen mound of drab feathers. Sometimes the Countess will wake it for a brief cadenza by strumming the bars of its cage; she likes to hear it announce how it cannot escape” (The Lady of the House of Love 113). They are both trapped in an imaginary cage, both mournful and unable to escape. Her death is then a release, not a punishment, making it possible to understand the end of the Countess as her redemption. All in all, the heroine is saved from her suffering by being allowed to die.
Leilah does not die but her fertility is permanently damaged by amateurish abortion that she underwent because Eve did want her to do so. In this sense, he seems to be fatal for her more than she is to him. Although Eve is changed into a woman, his reproductive system functions normally but Leilah is left sterile after their love affair.
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They both changed each other‟s lives for good, which is an interesting and unique approach to the femme fatale phenomenon; both of them are in some way destroyed.
As for pinning the blame on the femme, he does not even blame her for his new sex, as if admitting that he succumbed to the femme knowingly and voluntarily, accepting that his fate is the result of his previous behaviour. A typical femme‟s victim usually attempts to shift the blame on her, arguing the femme is the reason for everything that happened to him instead of keeping in mind he is guilty too. As a result,
Carter manages to show the femme fatale as much less of a monster and more of sexually challenging female the hero in fact looks for. As such, he is responsible for his downfall or possible suffering.
The Company of Wolves does not show the femme fatale coming to a bad end either. It is the girl‟s choice to stay with the wolf in her grandma‟s house; she is not harmed. The wolf is to some extent doomed, forced to stay in his animal body due to her decision to burn his clothes. The Little Red Riding Hood, as opposed to the traditional fairy-tale is thus fatal for the wolf and not the other way round. Marianne‟s counterpart ended up worse than the wolf or Eve whose bodies were changed. Jewell does not die by Marianne‟s hand; she has nothing to do with his death. She, as a character on her way to being a femme fatale, remained trapped in the Barbarian community when Jewell was still alive. She was “cruelly wounded in her pride … and, besides, she felt herself quite trapped and entirely without hope” (Heroes and Villains
59) saying she has no choice and power over her life at all: “It‟s marry or burn.”
(Heroes and Villains 63).
When Jewell is killed Marianne appears to be set free. On one hand, it seems that he is removed in order for her to make one more step towards being a strong, independent femme fatale who starts ruling the tribe. On the other hand, she will
61 probably still be lost in the hostile land and unfriendly community. When Jewell is gone, no one will protect her against rape or treachery of the Barbarians and her pregnancy will not allow her to escape. It seems that all the femme fatales end up quite satisfactorily and no males were killed. While Marianne, who is not a genuine femme fatale but somewhere in between, has her future already decided due to her situation. In her example, Carter shows that nothing is black and white – neither do all femme fatales end up badly, nor do all non-femme fatale characters end up well.
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6. Conclusion
The aim of the thesis is to provide a comprehensive overview of the femme fatale figure, which still seems to create some confusion in the academic world, even though the concept is not a newly invented one. There have been debates about what exactly the femme fatale is and what she is not since the times of Eve and Lilith, which is partly caused by the fact that the term does not fall into a neat category but rather remains subject to changes and alterations.
The femme fatale concept never had any clear structure or single characteristics.
Furthermore, the characteristics that have been attributed to the femme fatale kept changing during eras. Various authors employed different perspectives on what it precisely means to be the femme fatale, dividing the femme‟s admirers between those who perceive her as an innocent, damned woman who cannot help but behave the way she does because she knows that she is fated, and those who view her as a diabolical character with castrating qualities who only derives pleasure from leading men to their doom.
The femme fatale is first and foremost a woman who challenges, attracts and then destroys because the male desire of catching the femme is never fulfilled. In order to ensnare her victims, the fatal woman uses her charms, her sexuality and mysterious aura to secretly lure men into traps. The fatal woman is so addictive because she offers a mix of both pleasure and pain in the right proportion. Succumbing to the professional temptress is inevitable; she, as a result, is labelled the evil element in patriarchal society.
The femme threatens the male order, disrupting the traditional ideas about women as nurturers.
The source of power for the femme is the male gaze and desire. When it comes to manipulating her admirers, she is indeed very powerful and her power increases as
63 the victim finds himself tangled in a series of events he cannot influence. Yet she is often punished for her power and her victory is short-lived as she pays the price for her dominance over men. The femme harbours a threat so challenging that she must be removed in order for the male to survive; the fatal woman neither changes, nor lets anyone tame her.
However, in the novels The Passion of New Eve, Heroes and Villains and in The
Bloody Chamber and its stories The Lady of the House of Love and The Company of
Wolves, Angela Carter does not adhere to the femme fatale concept as it has been presented by others. Her neo-femme fatales are not punished at the end of the stories and their possible death is not seen as the deserved outcome of their behaviour. She shows the heroines as free to make choices, even if it is sleeping with the wolf or leaving the safety of home for a dangerous wilderness.
It appears that by not letting her heroines die, Angela Carter seems to take away the guilt of the femme fatale, implying that the male himself is responsible for his suffering. It is the male who stubbornly projects his desires and cravings on the femme fatale. She comes to exist as the creation of the male gaze and wishes. This can be seen in the example of Zero in The Passion of New Eve, who though the male femme fatale bewitched his masculinity, showing the extent to which the femme exists as the projection of male lusts and fantasies. Tristessa was ironically seen as the ruin of masculinity because the male imagined her the way he wanted. Thus in general, men themselves give her the power she needs, the power which she cunningly uses for destroying.
Carter plays with the femme fatale concept, highlighting how difficult it is to identify the femme due to her concealing nature. She surprisingly makes the Little Red
Riding Hood the most fatal character of them all, or creates a fake femme fatale who is
64 actually a man hiding his penis in female underwear. Carter also comes up with a femme fatale who is human but has strong animal qualities and with a young woman who is not yet a femme fatale but rather on her way to become one, showing once again that the femme fatale phenomenon has many different shapes and appearances, hindering men from the task of unravelling the mysterious figure.
In her pursuit of demythologising and twisting the traditional view of the femme fatale, she also portrays femme fatales who suffer along with men, challenging the view of the femme fatale as content with her position of the cold-blooded destroyer of the males. In Heroes and Villains, Marianne is injured, raped and threatened by the
Barbarians, while in The Passion of New Eve Leilah is abandoned by Evelyn for getting pregnant with him and eventually left sterile as a result of abortion. The Countess in The
Lady of the House of Love is, like Marianne, trapped in a situation she is unable to escape.
In her works, Carter strives to show that nothing is really straightforward and unequivocal – it cannot be simply said that the femme fatale is the one who should bear all the blame, the one who brings destruction to unfortunate, innocent men. Instead, she demonstrates that there have always been, and most likely always be, various, sometimes even opposing views on the femme fatale concept.
In conclusion, the femme fatale concept is in itself greatly interesting, mysterious and ever-changing concept which Angela Carter managed to elevate to a new level.
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8. Resumé
The diploma thesis titled The Femme Fatale and Her Portrayal in Angela
Carter's Works focuses on the femme fatale concept in three of her works. The analysis shows threating females in her novels Heroes and Villains and The Passion of New Eve and in two stories from The Bloody Chamber, namely The Lady of the House of Love and The Company of Wolves. The thesis concentrates on the various characteristics that have been attributed to the femme, including her beautiful appearance, insatiable sexuality and mysteriousness, along with the theme of castrating or devastating the male.
Besides the femme‟s characteristics, it studies different attitudes towards the fatal women during several eras. On one hand, they might be seen as innocent, damned women who cannot escape their situation so they behave in a certain way which finally destroys them. On the other hand, they can be also perceived as cold and calculating characters with castrating qualities that greatly enjoy humiliation and destruction of anything they come across. Angela Carter, though, does not handle the femme concept in the same way as other authors. She does not condemn her heroines to death and what is more, she does not show them as responsible for the male‟s heroes suffering.
In her pursuit of demythologising and twisting the typical attitudes towards the femme fatales, Carter shows femme fatales who are for instance half-human, half- animals, as men in women‟s clothing pretending to be temptresses or innocent-looking girl as the true femme fatales. Last but not least, she shows fatal women who suffer just as much as their victims do. By employing a different perspective, she implies that the traditional idea that the femme is the one who should bear all the blame because she brings destruction to poor, innocent men might not be the only way of explaining the femme fatale concept.
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Tato diplomová práce s názvem Femme fatale a její zobrazení v dílech Angely
Carter se zabývá konceptem femme fatale ve třech jejích dílech. Analytická část ukazuje tuto hrozivou ženu v románech Hrdinové a padouši, Vášeň nové Evy a ve dvou povídkách z Krvavé komnaty, konkrétně Paní z domu lásky a Společenství vlků. Tato práce se soustřeďuje na rozličné typické rysy, které se se femme fatale připisují, jako její nádherný vzhled, nenasytná sexuality a tajemnost, spolu s tématem kastrace a ničení muže.
Práce kromě typických znaků femme fatale studuje různé přístupy k této osudové ženě během historických etap. Femme fatale může být na jednu stranu považovaná za nevinnou, zatracenou ženu, která nemá východisko ze situace, ve které se nachází, a tak se stále chová takovým způsobem, který vede nakonec k jejímu zničení. Na druhou stranu může femme fatale být vnímána jako chladná a kalkující postava s kastrující povahou, postava, která si velmi užívá ponížení a ničení čehokoliv, co jí přijde do cesty. Nicméně Angela Carter se s konceptem femme fatale nevypořádává stejně jako ostatní autoři. Neodsuzuje své hrdinky ke smrti a navíc je nezobrazuje jako zodpovědné za utrpění mužských postav.
Ve snaze o odhalení mystifikace a pozměnění typických postojů vůči femme fatale Carter ukazuje například femme fatale jako napůl člověka a napůl zvíře, jako muže v ženském oblečení předstírajícího být svůdkyní, jako nevinně vypadající dívku, která je ale učiněnou femme fatale, nebo v neposlední řadě jako trpící právě tolik co jejich oběti. Tím, že Carter uplatňuje jiný pohled na fenomén femme fatale naznačuje,
že tradiční pojetí, v němž osudová žena nese veškerou vinu, protože přivedla nebohého, neviného muže do zkázy nemusí být tím jediným způsobem jak vysvětlovat koncept osudové ženy.
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