Definition and Representations of Femme Fatale Before Wilde And
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Chapter 1: Definition and Representations of Femme Fatale Before Wilde and
Beardsley
1.1 Introduction
A femme fatale is a mysterious and daunting figure whose exceptional beauty
overwhelms males so much as to bring forth misfortune; she is a female figure who
threatens to realize men’s fear/fantasy of being castrated. She is an immense source of
inspiration for many writers and painters during the nineteenth century, and her presence
is especially prominent during the fin de siècle. In England, writers like Keats and
Swinburne create memorable femme fatale figures from their pens, and the
Pre-Raphaelites make significant literary and visual renditions of femmes fatales.
Femme fatale, as Mario Praz points out, has always existed “both in mythology
and in literature” (199), but it is undeniable that representations of femme fatale had
particular prominence during the nineteenth century1. To understand what the definitive
qualities of a femme fatale are, it is essential to take a look at some of the representative
examples throughout the nineteenth century. In his book The Romantic Agony, Praz
makes an extensive investigation upon how the femme fatale motif developed in the
1 It is interesting that Mario Praz also traces in the nineteenth-century European texts a shift from a preoccupation with the l’homme fatal (The Fatal Man) to that with the femme fatale. As a consequence, the vampire figure in the latter half of the nineteenth century is predominantly female. In addition, Rebecca Stott also asserts that “the prominence of the femme fatale figure in the literature and art of this period appears to be culturally and historically specific” (1), but then she is careful to point out that femme fatale as a cultural phenomenon is not necessarily a causal effect of the social background of late Victorian era.
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nineteenth century and discusses in depth some important attributes of the femme fatale
figure. Fathoming the characteristics of nineteenth-century femmes fatales is also
essential to my discussions on Wilde’s and Beardsley’s Salomés. In academic treatises
dealing with Wilde’s and Beardsley’s Salomés, “femme fatale” is the term readily applied
to describe her, and indeed Salomé – especially Wilde’s and Beardsley’s representations –
is among the most cited examples when one discusses the femme fatale motif. As a
result, I will investigate some important femme fatale representations in this chapter and
rehearse their quintessential qualities.
To explore the nineteenth-century British femmes fatales before Wilde’s and
Beardsley’s Salomés, I select to discuss some notable examples from both literary texts
and paintings, including Keats’s ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci and several
Pre-Raphaelite paintings. These examples may give a general idea on the definitive
qualities of femme fatale, especially the ways she lures men and makes herself appear
dangerous to men.
1.2 Femme Fatale in Romantic Literature
Femme fatale is generally understood as an attractive female figure whose
presence seems to be accompanied with misfortune upon men who long for her, and the
men’s misfortune seems to result from being seduced by her physical charm. As
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Rebecca Stott succinctly points out, femme fatale is characterized “by her effect upon men:
a femme cannot be fatale without a male being present, even where her fatalism is
directed towards herself” (viii, original emphases). But exactly what characteristics
contribute to a femme fatale’s fatalism? Indeed, when one takes a look at the various
characters in literary and artistic works that have been identified as femmes fatales
through the centuries, sometimes one cannot help but notice that there are considerable
diversities among the qualities believed to define these female characters as fatal.
The characteristics of a femme fatale seem to consist in her physical charm and
the sense of malice or danger lurking behind that charm. These qualities may be best
summarized in a phrase by Flaubert, “la femme belle et terrible” (qtd. in Praz 222), the
woman beautiful and horrifying. What makes her horrifying, then? Praz offers a general
conception of femmes fatale, characterizing her relationship with her male victims:
In accordance with [the] conception of the Fatal Woman, the lover is
usually a youth, and maintains a passive attitude; he is obscure, and
inferior either in condition or in physical exuberance to the woman, who
stands in the same relation to him as do the female spider, the praying
mantis, &c., to their respective males: sexual cannibalism is her monopoly.
(215-16)
As the above generalization of the femme fatale figure shows, the figure is characterized
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by a combination of manipulative aggressiveness and insatiable sexuality, and it is this
sexuality that propels her to manipulate the male characters, turning herself into a
vampire-like figure. In contrast to her fatal sexual power, the males at her side tend to
assume a weaker personality, possessing no means to resist the dominance of the femme
fatale. The generalized image of femme fatale in the passage quoted above is one that
many scholars invariably refer to. As envisioned in this generalized image, femme
fatale is aggressive, exploits men for her needs – especially sexually –, and thrives on a
bloodthirsty vampirism, endangering either men’s sexual virility or their lives.
This image, however, often do not match many of the important
nineteenth-century European representations of femme fatale. While physical charm
and sexual aggressiveness are quintessential qualities a femme fatale possesses, these
qualities may have different levels of intensity. In The Romantic Agony, Praz surveys
several important femmes fatales found in nineteenth-century European Romantic
writings; he not only discusses their characters but, more importantly, draws a
comprehensive map of the evolution of the femme fatale figure as a literary motif.
Although Praz himself admits that it is only “an arbitrary arrangement” (201), he reckons
that these femmes fatales represent some quintessential qualities of a femme fatale. In
the following I will review some of these femmes fatales and sort out their important
characteristics.
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The first example Praz discusses is Matilda from the British novelist Matthew
Gregory Lewis’s gothic novel The Monk. Matilda is a representative femme fatale figure
whose qualities can be identified in some later femmes fatales, including Salammbô
(Flaubert), Carmen (Mérimée), and Cécily (Sue) (Praz 201). Matilda is a witch, and in
Lewis’s story she seems to be a female incarnation of Mephistopheles with the seductive
acts of a Manon Lescaut. The male protagonist Ambrosio is originally a monk with a
saint’s reputation, but after she voices her love and bares her breast to him, he bows to her
charm. Matilda offers her knowledge of witchcraft and further tempts Ambrosio with a
beautiful Antonia undressing herself to bathe. However, Matilda later becomes ruthless
and even tempts Ambrosio to commit criminal acts that make both of them end up behind
the bars. Matilda uses her magical arts to escape, but before she disappears, she
encourages Ambrosio to renounce God, “who has abandoned” him, and to raise himself
“to the level of superior beings.” Her farewell speech is mingled with such a “wild
imperious majesty” that she “inspire[s] the monk with awe” (qtd. in Praz 204).
The two characteristics that make Matilda representative of the femme fatale
figure, in my opinion, are her assertive independence and exotic paganism. Both
qualities are related to her magical power. First of all, this command of magic
demonstrates her assertive independence, which is a characteristic generally shared by the
other femmes fatales Praz mentions. Secondly, her magical arts are contextually set as
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paganism against Christianity. This pagan background bequeaths Matilda with a natural
antagonism tinted with exoticism.
Exoticism or exotic settings prove to be a quality shared by several of the femmes
fatales Praz discusses, and it is a quality that can imply eroticism and/or antagonism.
Besides Lewis’s Matilda, the French novelist Prosper Mérimée’s creation Carmen is a
gypsy localized in Spain, a place that promised exotic imagination during the end of the
nineteenth century; Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbô is set in the North African
Carthage during the Punic Wars before Christ, namely in the “traditionally” exotic Orient;
and Cécily from the French novelist Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris is a Creole. As
Praz comments, “the exotic and the erotic ideals go hand in hand,” and “a love of the
exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire” (207). Salammbô is a
good example of such fantasy, where Flaubert obviously resorts to “an atmosphere of
barbaric and Oriental antiquity, where all the most unbridled desire can be indulged and
the cruelest fantasies can take concrete form” (Praz 207). On the one hand, the exotic
other may imply antagonism or chaos, hence giving male characters a sense of
uncertainty, but on the other hand, the concomitant exoticism also has a potential to
emanate charm and erotic enticement.
Aside from exoticism, several of the femmes fatales often appear aloof and
unattainable, showing an indifference that distances themselves from the yearning males;
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this unattainable quality can at times be presented with a teasing attitude. Matilda and
Carmen both know how to turn a deaf ear to the pleading men; Cécily’s sole aim is to
inflame the male protagonist’s passion without satisfying it; and Salammbô simply
becomes “frigid, unfeeling, fatal” like a beautiful and yet cold marble sculpture
worshiped and desired by the man (Praz 205). To those men, this unattainability implies
two meanings: while a femme fatale can appear as an allumeuse (teaser-woman) that
tempts with inviting sensuality, she at times seems to be an unfeeling woman that cruelly
utters downright rejections.
The representative femme fatale figures in Romantic literature that Praz
investigates demonstrate a number of qualities in common: they tend to be independent,
possess seductive power, and often emanate an exotic charm. Their independence
sometimes might make them appear aloof or unattainable and thus induce the men’s
suffering. The sensuality of these femmes fatales may seem man-devouring at times, but
sometimes it can also be presented in a pleasurably teasing and alluring manner.
Although the exoticism in these femmes fatales can be combined with a certain amount of
antagonism or even dominance, these femme fatale representations hardly come close to
being sexually cannibalistic or the vampire figure as the generalized image of femme
fatale suggests. Praz’s examples demonstrate that, while a femme fatale’s autonomy and
exoticism can be presented in a cruel and man-rejecting way, they can also contribute to
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her pleasurable sensuality.
1.3 Femme Fatale in Nineteen-Century British Literature
It is important to take a close look at the important femmes fatales in Britain that
appeared before Wilde’s and Beardsley’s Salomés; as a result, I will examine some
examples from the realms of both literature and visual arts. As Praz points out, there is
one type of femme fatale that has fully developed in Britain in the nineteenth century.
This type of femme fatale is characterized by an exoticism that hardly indicates any
specific temporal or spatial references, and her story is usually set in a vague and
supposedly remote locale that can very well be anywhere. Among the
nineteenth-century British writers, John Keats is most well-known for portraying the
charm of femme fatale, and as is generally acknowledged, Keats creates significant
femmes fatales in poems such as La Belle Dame sans Merci and Lamia, which are
considerably inspiring to later writers and painters, especially several Pre-Raphaelites2.
As Praz observes, various elements found in Keats’s works are to be developed later by
the Pre-Raphaelites and subsequently passed on to both French Symbolist writers and
Algernon Charles Swinburne (211, 223). With regard to femme fatale’s association of
2 It may be worth mentioning, though, that Barbara Fass specially takes pains to distinguish la belle dame sans merci from femme fatale. In the introduction to her book La Belle Dame sans Merci & the Aesthetics of Romanticism, Fass complains that Mario Praz, in Romantic Agony, obscures the distinction between la belle dame sans merci and femme fatale, taking them to be synonymous (19). Nevertheless, her argument seems valid only in that la belle dame sans merci has a supernatural background that not every femme fatale is associated with (21-22).
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timelessness, John Keats’s several representations are especially noteworthy. An
important inherited attribute of Keats is a sort of “ecstasy of the exoticist” – an “ecstatic”
experience, “an exile from [one’s] own present and actual self” endowed with a “magical,
metaphysical meaning” (Praz 212), and hence Keats is able to characterize his femmes
fatales with a particular sensual and exotic charm. In this section, I will discuss how
Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite artists present their femmes fatales and how the seemingly
timeless exoticism is brought out in them.
Keats’s poem La Belle Dame sans Merci, whose title is borrowed from a French
courtly love poem3, is a re-telling of the Tannhäuser story, in which the minstrel
Tannhäuser is lured away by Venus in the mountain where she dwells (“Venusberg”). In
Keats’s ballad, however, he chooses to tell the story without applying the names of
Tannhäuser and Venus; instead, his poem focuses on a concise subjective account of how
a magical enchantress ensnares her male victims. In Keats’s ballad, the first two stanzas
present a passerby’s inquiry as to why a “knight-at-arms” (63) looks so miserable, and in
the remaining nine stanzas the knight replies. The passerby observes that the knight is
loitering alone, being “So haggard and so woe-begone” (Keats 63), and as the knight tells
his story, it appears that he is not the only one suffering this wretched state.
According to the knight, he met the seductive femme fatale, namely the lady Belle
3 As Fass points out, Keats borrows the title from the fourteenth-and-fifteenth-century French poet Alain Chartier, who is known for a number of courtly love poems. For more discussion on Chartier and his influence, see Fass’s book La Belle Dame sans Merci & the Aesthetics of Romanticism, 15-18.
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Dame sans Merci, in a dreamy and mysterious countryside presented in a magical and
sensual light. The knight met the lady “in the meads”: with “anguish moist and fever
dew” on her face, she is “Full beautiful – a faery’s child,/ Her hair was long, her foot was
light,/ And her eyes were wild” (Keats 63). In addition, the knight’s interactions with
the lady suggest a sensual intensity: he “made a garland for her head,/ And bracelets too,
and fragrant zone; She look’d at me [the knight] as she did love,/ And made sweet moan”
(Keats 63). As Earl R. Wasserman sees it, Keats weaves into the narrative a “pleasure
thermometer, a series of increasing intensities that absorb the self into essence: nature,
song, and love” (69). All these pleasures are presented in an aestheticized light; both the
lady’s beauty and the dreamy splendor around her seem to belong to an idealized world in
a halo. The pleasurable sensual appeal of the beauty stems from its being seemingly
remote and exotic.
Essential to a femme fatale is her seductive power, namely how she brings the
male “victims” to “destruction.” In the case of Keats’s Belle Dame sans Merci, the knight
reports that she sang “A faery’s song” and took him to her “elfin grot”; in addition,
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said –
“I love thee true.” (64)
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In the end, she lulled the knight to sleep, and yet he woke up on the cold hillside,
subsequently reduced to a wretchedly yearning state. The seduction scene is
embellished with mellow nectar associated with the fairy world, and the seductress’s
amorous words serve to make the men fall into languorous obsession. And although the
lured men end up being pale and pitiable, everything linked with La Belle Dame sans
Merci is depicted as delightful, far from a sexually aggressive vampire figure.
What can be said to make Keats’s Belle Dame sans Merci “dangerous” is then her
sensuality that the knight feels unable to resist. She is a femme fatale that leads men to
their destruction in the sense that, in the end, the men become bewitched and addicted to
her presence. Compared with her power, the pallid and aimlessly loitering males appear
to be passive characters. Nevertheless, since Keats’s ballad gets its title from a French
courtly love poem, it is not difficult to see how closely Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci
can be affiliated with the tradition of courtly love: just like the lady in a courtly love
poem, this Dame sans Merci is also an unattainable beauty, and the men’s desire for her
remains unfulfilled. As Wasserman observes,
Like the lady of the tradition of courtly love, she is the ideal whom the
lover must pursue but whom he can never possess; and hence he is
doomed to suffer her “unkindness,” which is her nature although not her
fault. (75)
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Hence, similar to the unattainable lady in a courtly love poem, Keats’s La Belle Dame
sans Merci seems like an almost harmless beauty in an idealized form. The only thing
that makes her different from a courtly lady, then, is her sensuality.
Keats portrays the sensuality of his Belle Dame sans Merci in a suggestive
manner: her foot was light, her eyes wild, and she made sweet moans; all these illustrate
her latent but uninhibited sexuality. Nevertheless, the sexuality of this Belle Dame sans
Merci is associated with a distant, mysterious world where sensual pleasure rather than
devouring sexual menace reigns; both her sensuality and beauty serve to reinforce the
exotic and charming atmosphere in Keats’s ballad. The knight in the ballad, as well as
the “pale kings and princes” (64) before him, has to suffer yearning after encountering her,
while her elfin grot seems to the men more like an ideal world once known but no longer
attainable. Although the men in Keats’s ballad suffer because of the unattainability of
La Belle Dame sans Merci, the poem represents a rather enjoyable sensual imagination of
the exotic to the readers.
1.4 Femme Fatale in Nineteenth-Century British Visual Arts
1.4.1 Idealized Images of Femme Fatale in the Pre-Raphaelites
After the discussion of nineteenth-century femme fatale in British literature, I
want to explore some significant femme fatale representations in British visual arts. I
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will focus on the works of the Pre-Raphaelites to examine how their femme fatale
representations are, as Praz points out, greatly influenced by Keats’s femmes fatales. As
discussed in the previous section, Keats creates a mysterious, exotic setting for his femme
fatale; the sensual, magical atmosphere suggests a remote world with fantastical
enjoyment. And his femme fatale, as befitting to the surroundings, is more tenderly
charming rather than voraciously devouring.
The exotic sensuality Keats designs for his femme fatale, as discussed earlier, is
fully realized in the Pre-Raphaelites’ idealized images of women. The Pre-Raphaelites
produce many memorable female figures in their paintings and poetry, and they often
have alluring, voluptuous features; as John Dixon Hunt points out, many Pre-Raphaelite
paintings present the image of “a woman with large, staring eyes and masses of heavy
hair” (xii). In addition, the atmosphere of the paintings is usually sensual or dreamy,
depicted in a rosy or golden tone aiming to create an other-than-the-mundane world.
Many Pre-Raphaelite artists are devoted to creating beauty in an idealized form, a
kind of idealized beauty shared by many of their female figures, both chaste ladies and
dangerous temptresses. For example, Dante Gabriel Rossetti portrays quite a number of
different female characters, ranging from Virgin Mary, Beatrice, and the Blessed Damozel
to Mary Magdalene, Jenny and Circe, but all these female figures, as John Dixon Hunt
observes, share Rossetti’s emphasis of “idealism” in feminine beauty (179). Edward
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Burne-Jones is another example of pursuing idealized beauty when portraying women: he
shows his brand of aestheticism by making his figures, as David Cecil sums up his style,
“all as beautiful as possible”; his taste for refinement makes him portray women “with
their more obvious and animal sexual characteristics softened and subdued” (189).
Physical ugliness is not to be found in the Pre-Raphaelite portrayals of women; even their
“dangerous seductresses” are not depicted to appear intimidating or have sexually
aggressive characteristics.
An important feature of this Pre-Raphaelite idealism, however, seems to be
sensuality. It is shown not only in the designs of the paintings but also in the beautiful
features of the female figures. While using very different languages to describe the
stories of the chaste and “corrupting” types of women, Rossetti does not wish “to
maintain any strict distinctions between sensualist and idealist notions” (Hunt 179).
Thus, both the two types of his female figures “have the same heavily sensual lips, the
massive hair, the thick column of neck” (180). But it is through their eyes that “Rossetti
best communicates the special emotions that lie behind one particular picture” (180).
The eyes of the Pre-Raphaelite female figures are decisive in revealing their sexuality,
and I will further address this issue later.
In investigating the femme fatale figure, Lothar Hönnighausen observes how
similar a femme fatale can be to the Pre-Raphaelite chaste lady, or “the ideal beloved”
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(172). According to Hönnighausen, the “cult” of Pre-Raphaelite paintings of women is
influenced by a “Seraphita motif,”4 which depicts the image of an ideal beauty and gains
an international significance (172). A femme fatale may seem to be far from a chaste
lady, but as Hönnighausen investigates, poets such as Swinburne and Charles Baudelaire
compare their femmes fatales to Madonna and even go as far as associating them with
quasi-religious traits (174), such as mysticalness and even eternity. Walter Pater, for
example, juxtaposes the following four characters to present Leonardo Da Vinci’s La
gioconda: “And as Leda, / Was the mother of Helen of Troy / and, as St Anne, / Was the
mother of Mary” (qtd. in Yeats 1). Helen of Troy is traditionally regarded as the cause
of the Trojan War, hence a character that suggests chaos, quite contrary to the saintly
Mary and Anne. However, since the eternity the four figures share links them together,
the disruptive quality associated with Helen is infinitely toned down. The threatening
facets of these femmes fatales are downplayed; the mystic quality claims the spotlight
instead.
To illustrate how a femme fatale can be associated with the ideal lady, I would like
to compare a pair of Rossetti’s paintings, The Beloved (“The Bride”) (1865-6, fig. 1) with
Lady Lilith (1864-8, fig. 2). “The Beloved” is King Soloman’s bride, undoubtedly a
4 This term is derived from Balzac’s novel Séraphita, a work supposedly inspired by Pierre-Jules-Théophile Gautier’s poem “Symphonie en Blanc Majeur” or Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy’s poem “Seraphitus.” The ideal figure depicted in Balzac’s novel is associated with other literary works by writers including Swedenborg and Baudelaire, and as the well-known German playwright Hofmannsthal’s early essays on Swinburne and Pater confirm, this “Seraphita motif” has its international significance and leaves its mark on the idealized woman of the late romantics. See Hönnighausen's book The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature: A Study of Pre-Raphaelitism and Fin de Siècle, 172-81.
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chaste ideal woman: she is the bride depicted in “Song of Soloman,” a biblical passage
often read as denoting the relationship between Christ and the church. In contrast, Lady
Lilith is said to be Adam's first wife, a seductress and demon-woman that gave birth only
to bad people. In fact, Rossetti refers to the painting “Lady Lilith” in his Sonnet
LXXVIII of “The House of Life,” entitled “Body’s Beauty.” In the sonnet, Rossetti
associates her beauty with her sinister capacity to seduce:
Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
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And round his heart one strangling golden hair. (161)
In Rossetti’s words, Lady Lilith is at once a snake, a spider, and a female strangler,
endeavoring to deceive, ensnare and murder men.
Although one is an ideal beloved and the other a temptress, Rossetti
characteristically endows them both with the idealized features like voluminous hair,
thick lips, and dreamy looks. In addition, both figures are tinted with an exotic,
other-than-this-world magnetism. In the case of “The Beloved,” Robert Upstone claims
that Rossetti not only bestows her the “overwhelming beauty” (100) of a woman but also
clothes her in “exotic fabrics and trappings” in order to “increase her sensuality” (101).
In addition, the black boy in front of the bride also enhances the exoticism in the setting.
Rossetti thus creates for both “The Beloved” and “Lady Lilith” a similarly fleshly
atmosphere. The difference between the two female characters is mainly details that
signal their sexuality.
What then determines these females to be seemingly chaste or manifestly sensual
lies basically in the eyes: “The Beloved,” being the chaste bride of Soloman, looks
straight out of the picture and places the viewer in the role of her lover (Upstone 100);
Lady Lilith, on the other hand, casts downward looks dreamily at her own image in the
hand-held mirror, as she is combing her hair. Whereas her looking away from the
viewer suggests her defiant autonomy, Lady Lilith’s focus on the mirror and her
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free-flowing hair hint at a certain self-eroticism. As Swinburne comments on Rossetti’s
“Lady Lilith,” she
draws out through a comb the heavy mass of hair like thick spun gold to
fullest length; her head leans back half sleepily, superb and satiate with its
own beauty; the eyes are languid, without love in them or hate; the sweet
luxurious mouth has the patience of pleasure fulfilled and complete, the
warm repose of passion sure of its delight […]. The sleepy splendour of
the picture is a fit raiment for the idea incarnate of faultless fleshly beauty
and peril of pleasure unavoidable. For this serene and sublime sorceress
there is no life but of the body; with spirit (if spirit there be) she can
dispense. (William Michael Rossetti and Swinburne 46, italics mine)
Swinburne’s comment leads one to suspect that Lady Lilith’s dangerous charm lies almost
exclusively in her narcissistic satiation of her own beauty; female’s narcissistic
self-indulgence in the painting, then, seems to be what threatens men.
Both Rossetti’s poem and Swinburne’s comment regard Lady Lilith as a femme
fatale, but in Rossetti’s painting she is depicted at a frozen moment rather than in a
narrative that reveals how she interacts with men. Her “danger,” as revealed in the
painting, lies mainly in the gesture of her autoeroticism. Although critics like Barbara
Bryant comment that Lady Lilith uses her beauty to “ensnare unsuspecting victims” (102),
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her only action in the painting is to comb her hair silently and languidly; her allure,
despite being the source of her proposed threat, remains passive.
Rossetti’s contemporaries regard his Lady Lilith as a femme fatale, but her impact
on the male victims is only indirectly suggested in an imagined scenario and is related in
viewers’ comments. For instance, Swinburne comments upon her obvious
self-indulgence in her own sensual beauty and decides that she is a “sorceress” who only
pays attention to her own body and can surely dispense with either spirit or soul (William
Michael Rossetti and Swinburne 46). Rossetti himself also suggests that her heavy
golden locks, which she herself is so much satiated with, can strangle men (161).
However, the comments upon the threat Lady Lilith seems to pose are based upon not
what is presented in the painting nor iconographic connotations in the painting. Instead,
the commentators “derive” Lady Lilith’s malicious character from stories freely drawn
from other sources.
The Pre-Raphaelites are keen to portray female characters in an idealized form of
beauty; even when it comes to a seductress, the Pre-Raphaelites characterize her with
sensual charm rather than intimidating aggression. If Rossetti’s Lady Lilith should
indeed be regarded as a femme fatale, ferocious sexual vampirism is not one of her
features. Instead, the sole source of her possible “threat” to men is her sensuality that
men might find to be irresistible. Having discussed the Pre-Raphaelites’ dedication to
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portraying idealized female beauty, I will continue my discussion to John William
Waterhouse’s famous painting La Belle Dame sans Merci (1893, fig. 3), and see how the
Pre-Raphaelite depicts a femme fatale’s seductive act.
1.4.2 Waterhouse’s La Belle Dame sans Merci
Waterhouse’s rendition of La Belle Dame sans Merci’s seduction is among the
most famous that took up the subject Keats made popular earlier in Britain with his ballad.
In Keats’s ballad, the knight meets La Belle Dame sans Merci, looking into her eyes and
making garland and bracelets for her, and she looks back “as she did love,/ And made
sweet moan” (63); this is the beginning of the seduction. Paintings dealing with the
subject of La Belle Dame sans Merci generally focus on how she encounters and seduces
the knight; Waterhouse’s is no exception.
In his painting, Waterhouse creates a dreamy and sensual atmosphere without
references to a specific time or place. In addition, the action of the two characters is
portrayed in a gentle tone. Waterhouse makes his Belle Dame sans Merci a nymph-like
girl; her bare feet, silky dress, and her gaze as if in a trance seem to denote her
supernatural origin. To perform her seduction, this Belle Dame sans Merci looks into
the eyes of the almost faceless knight, pulling him forward tenderly by his cape and
holding in her hands both the knight’s cape and some of her own hair. The hair, as that
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of Rossetti’s Lady Lilith, seems equipped with an ensnaring power.
Although her flowing hair and yearning look do suggest a possibly uninhibited
sexuality, there is also a vulnerable quality in this Belle Dame sans Merci. Portrayed as
a young girl, she has a rather innocent look; she rests on the ground in a crouching
position, as if entreating the knight. As Anthony Hobson investigates Waterhouse’s
creative process and career, he finds Waterhouse’s Belle Dame sans Merci offers “not
men’s slavery but the possibility of dominating her”; she sees men “to their end in a most
entrancing and half-apologetic manner, being [herself] in the grip of forces [she] hardly
understand[s]” (75, italics original). While she is engaged in the act of seducing the
knight, she looks somewhat helpless and perhaps even saddened as if she is incapable to
do otherwise. As Elisabeth G. Gitter observes, this Belle Dame sans Merci’s hair seems
to have “trapped the trapper and ensnared the snare; the spider is held motionless by the
strands of her own web; the lady is looped in the loops of her own hair” (948).
While her red hair may imply her possible unruliness and wildness, Waterhouse’s
Belle Dame sans Merci does appear to be more of a “damsel in distress,” waiting to be
rescued, rather than an evil enchantress with a cannibalistic sexual desire. In addition,
by assigning La Belle Dame sans Merci a helpless and beseeching position, Waterhouse
makes her charming rather than menacing; if her beauty leads to the destruction of the
men, it is far from her intention and beyond her control. Their eventual calamity, as
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many commentators believe, is determined by fate. To sum up, sensual charm and
exotic pleasure seem to be what the Pre-Raphaelites choose to highlight in a femme fatale,
and the only reason why these beautiful females are considered suggestive of cruelty and
evil power seems to be their sensuality.
1.5 Conclusion
In this chapter I discuss the defining qualities of a femme fatale. Obviously
charm is one important requisite for a femme fatale, while she is expected to cause danger
to men. Nevertheless, what makes her seem threatening or dangerous is depicted
markedly differently by various writers and painters. In Mario Praz’s comprehensive
research on femme fatale as a literary motif that obtained particular prominence in the
nineteenth century, he points out that a femme fatale is characterized by an active
sexuality that denotes both her independence and irresistible charm. Her independency
might sometimes turn into a desire to sexually manipulate men, and her irresistible charm
is usually stressed via her unattainability to men. These qualities may have a
threatening undertone, but different writers and painters present them with different
intensities.
In his book The Romantic Agony Praz presents a generalized image of femme
fatale as sexually devouring and aggressively manipulative, but I find that many
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nineteenth-century representations of femme fatale can have a much gentler profile.
Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, for example, chooses to show a seductive femme
fatale in an sensually inviting light that suggests a mysterious and pleasurable world of
supernatural elements. Her sexuality is portrayed in a sensual way that emphasizes an
escapist enjoyment. As a consequence, although her charm induces men’s obsession
about her and possibly causes them to lose their reason, such tragic dénouement in the
literary works are not necessarily caused by her. In fact, the femme fatale may at times
be as much victimized by fate as the men.
In the late nineteenth century, the Pre-Raphaelites also present quite a number of
memorable femme fatale figures in their paintings, and they pay more attention to the
physical attraction of their femmes fatales. The Pre-Raphaelites’ portrayals of femme
fatale emphasize her idealized features and fleshly sensuality that often suggest an exotic
aura; the only thing that distinguishes her as a dangerous and fatal woman is usually a
mild suggestion of her autonomous sexuality. This sexuality may be portrayed as a
narcissistic self-indulgence or desirous yearning. For example, Roseetti’s Lady Lilith
lavishes considerable attention on her reflection in the mirror combing her plentiful hair.
And when Waterhouse’s Belle Dame sans Merci seduces the knight, she does it with a
look as if yearning or even pleading. Although these sexual expressions, especially the
female narcissistic quality, challenge the “female as sexless” ideal in the Victorian era,
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their seemingly “threatening” aspects may be regarded as part of the exoticist, escapist
charm that the Pre-Raphaelites aim to achieve.
Although the concept of femme fatale is an embodiment of man’s anxiety of being
castrated or persecuted by a beautiful and sexually autonomous woman, the femme
fatale’s “persecution” can be depicted with different levels of intensity. The femmes
fatales found in the nineteenth-century British literature and paintings are mostly
characterized by their appealing sensuality; their unattainability makes the bewitched
male characters languish, but they tend not to be sexually aggressive vampires.
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