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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2008 She Had to Be Bad: The Femme Fatale as Serial Killer in 1950s American Pulp Fiction Leslie Anne Jennings Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES SHE HAD TO BE BAD: THE FEMME FATALE AS SERIAL KILLER IN 1950S AMERICAN PULP FICTION BY LESLIE ANNE JENNINGS A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of English Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008 Copyright © 2008 Leslie Anne Jennings All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Leslie Anne Jennings on April 16th, 2008 ____________________________________ Christopher Shinn Professor Directing Thesis ____________________________________ Barry Faulk Committee Member ____________________________________ Linda Saladin-Adams Committee Member Approved: _____________________________________ Stan Gontarski, Chair, English Department The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………. iv INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………… 1 1. THE SCIENCE OF DETECTION ……………………………………………….. 14 2. THE FEMME FATALE ………………………………………………………….. 28 3. COMPLICATED MASCULINITY ………………………………………………. 51 EPILOGUE …………………………………………………………………………… 64 REFERENCES ……………………………………………………………………….. 73 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …………………………………………………………. 77 iii ABSTRACT My thesis, “She Had to Be Bad: The Femme Fatale as Serial Killer in 1950s American Pulp Fiction,” considers the femme fatale in light of popular fiction and the characterization of female criminals in popular culture. It does not address the role of the femme fatale in film, as that has been covered extensively in many critical texts. Instead, it reviews select pulp novels of the hard-boiled genre from the 1950s in order to understand the femme fatale’s role in U.S. popular fiction. Dashiell Hammett’s, The Maltese Falcon (1929), Cornel Woolrich’s, The Bride Wore Black (1940), Mickey Spillane’s, I, the Jury (1947), and Raymond Chandler’s, The Long Goodbye (1953), are examined specifically because pulp fiction and American literature in general changed drastically after World War II. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to investigate the femme fatale, who has now become a standard figure in popular culture, and to note how she begins to trouble the categories of gender and sexuality according to the new science of crime and the modern discourse of psychopathology. The femme fatale, who committed homicide, primarily for monetary gain, became the symbol of female criminality and evil. The representations of women in popular culture show criminals as antithetical to the image of female domesticity, and murderous crimes became an index for that departure. The act of committing a crime placed the perpetrator at odds with organized and lawful society. Not satisfied with simply living up to the expectations of her gender as wife and mother, the femme fatale does not disrupt contemporary expectations: she destroys. She is not different; she is deviant. This act of transgression, while against social codes, becomes sensationalized through mass media, creating a sense of pleasure through the fetishization of crime. The media obsession with killers, especially serial killers, is heightened when a woman commits homicide. The femme fatales who graced the covers of the hard-boiled fiction acted as both fantasy and nightmare to the predominately male-reading population. Ultimately, the goal of this thesis is to redeem the femme fatale from her status as a sexual object who is simply a tool of patriarchy. The significance of the femme fatale is that she occupies the role of a serial killer while cunningly concealing her criminality through the mask of domesticity. The femme fatale manipulates, maneuvers and ultimately forces her way into America’s consciousness without giving up her image as a sexually independent woman. Many would say that because the femme fatale is a murderer, she cannot be a redeemable figure and offers a negative image for feminists. However, because the crimes of the femme fatale indicate iv her as a cold and calculating serial killer rather than as a hysteric subject that one would find in Freud, the murderous vixen actually creates a newly imagined space that had not been previous occupied by women because of outdated notions of science and criminology. v INTRODUCTION Instead of slowly biding her time and hoping for new roles for women, the femme fatale aggressively imposed a new place for herself within American culture in the late 1940s and 1950s. The 1950s is often thought to be a defining era in which women were positioned in the home after a period of relative freedom brought about by the Second World War. Thus, the 1960s is assumed to be the decade that is associated with second-wave feminism and the civil rights movement. Many scholars identify the 1950s as a time in which a minority of women entered the workforce and an active feminism slowly began to emerge.1 The femme fatale, however, did not simply step into a new role for women; she erupted into the literary and cultural scene, forcing America to acknowledge her presence. By becoming criminals and literally destroying the men in their path, femme fatales created a role in which women could be violent and aggressive, throwing into crisis the very definition of traditional gender roles. In Femmes Fatales, Mary Ann Doane claims that the femme fatale is not “a heroine of modernity” because she is not in control of her own image (2). Doane suggests that because of her highly sexual image, the femme fatale becomes a “function of fear” for a mass culture that is driven by patriarchy (2). Doane’s beliefs, however, pertain to the image of the femme fatale as she appears in film noir of the 1940s and 1950s. While Doane may be correct in her assertion that the stylized image of the femme fatale has been exploited in American culture, the femme fatale who appeared in the popular pulp novels of the 1950s functioned as a much more radical and subversive subject than has previously been credited. In The Noir Thriller, Lee Horsley explains that during the noir period, Hollywood was “constrained not only by the Hays Code but by conventional expectations about the ultimate repression of the sexual, aggressive woman,” which “tended to package the femme fatale narrative in ways that limited the ‘progressiveness’ of the cycle and confirmed popular prejudices by figuring the defeat of the independent female and the reassertion of male control” (130). Therefore, it was difficult for film producers to explore the film fatale as she appeared in popular fiction. 1 Breines, Wini. “The ‘Other’ Fifties: Beats and Bad Girls.” Dunar, Andrew J. America in the Fifties. Gilbert, James. Another Chance: Postwar American, 1945-1968. Gilbert, James. Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. 1 My thesis, “She Had to Be Bad: The Femme Fatale as a Serial Killer in 1950s American Pulp Fiction,” will not address the role of the femme fatale in film, as that has been covered extensively in many critical texts.2 Instead, I will review select pulp novels of the hard-boiled genre from the 1950s in order to understand the femme fatale’s role in U.S. popular fiction. I will focus on novels from the late 1940s and 1950s specifically because pulp fiction and American literature in general had changed drastically after World War II. I will examine Dashiell Hammett’s standard detective novel, The Maltese Falcon (1929), followed by Cornel Woolrich’s lesser known tale, The Bride Wore Black (1940), Mickey Spillane’s seminal novella, I, the Jury (1947), and Raymond Chandler’s classic work, The Long Goodbye (1953). Ultimately, the goal of this project is to investigate the femme fatale, who has now become a standard figure in popular culture, and to note how she begins to trouble the categories of gender and sexuality according to the new science of crime and the modern discourse of psychopathology. While pulp magazines had an immensely popular following, the books themselves were given little respect by literary critics. The prominent literary critic Leslie Fielder, for instance, postulates in his influential 1960 book, Love and Death in the American Novel: Not only in the cruder and more successful books of Mickey Spillane, but in the more pretentious ones of Raymond Chandler, the detective story has reverted to the kind of populist semi-pornography that once made George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall a black market best-seller (477). During the 1950s, Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler were subjects of direct and often harsh scrutiny from both literary critics and moralists alike. Spillane was often critiqued by literary critics as “common and low.” His books were often equated with trash and considered to be only books that low-minded, blue-collared men would enjoy. Despite this criticism, Spillane was the most popular author of his time, selling “over 15 million copies of his books by 1953” (Horsley 109). Leslie Fielder wrote in the 1960s of his disgust with the current “low-brow” obsession with Spillane and Chandler, whom he believed to be “anti-feminist” (477). Fielder asserts that the hard-boiled genre “insists … on undressing its bitches, surveying them with a surly and concupiscent eye before punching, shooting, or consigning them to the gas-chamber” (477). Fielder’s views on both Spillane and Chandler’s chauvinistic and sadistic tendencies are 2 Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film theory, Psychoanalysis. Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. 2 well founded when it comes to their detectives’ acts of violence. Mike Hammer and Philip Marlowe do indeed have violent sexual relations with women, which often turns to a sexually violent end of the femme fatale when she is destroyed by her lover/detective.

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