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    Powerful Women, Threatened Men: The Femme Fatale Myth: Women's Power in Culture
    Powerful Women, Threatened Men: The Femme Fatale Myth: Women's Power in Culture
    Powerful Women, Threatened Men: The Femme Fatale Myth: Women's Power in Culture
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    Powerful Women, Threatened Men: The Femme Fatale Myth: Women's Power in Culture

    By Edith Zack

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    The femme fatale is a male topos in which masculine traits are attributed to a woman. Thus, she is powerful, initiating, and independent; yet being also beautiful and erotic she is associated with seduction and corrupting forces which lead men to their own destruction. Though this topic had existed since the beginning of humankind, her image was presented almost obsessively at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact the femme fatale is a vital sign of the emergence of a new feminine image since the 1850s; a consequence of social, political and cultural circumstances. 

    "Fascinating!!! Brilliant ideas!" 
    (Elvin Gerhardt) 
    "The history of feminism from an artistic point of view..." 
    (Catherine Boise)
    "This writer is a person of brilliant insight, sometimes wild and heretical but always challenging" 
    (Steven Baum )

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEdith Zack
    Release dateNov 13, 2013
    ISBN9781513080024
    Powerful Women, Threatened Men: The Femme Fatale Myth: Women's Power in Culture
    Author

    Edith Zack

    Edith Zack was born in Slovakia in 1947 to Holocaust survivor parents and came to Israel with them in 1949. She holds a PhD in musicology from Bar Ilan University together with Edinburgh University. Zack has lectured in the music departments of Bar-Ilan University and Beit Berl College, as well as giving music therapy in a number of frameworks for problem youth. As a scholar, she is an expert on women in music and the semiotics of music; she has given lectures in Oxford, the Sorbonne, Helsinki, Mexico, the USA, the Vatican, and has published articles in major professional journals. Her first novel 'Travels with Vera' was published in 2011. www.edithzack.com

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      Book preview

      Powerful Women, Threatened Men - Edith Zack

      Powerful Women, Threatened Men;

      The Femme Fatale Myth

      Edith Zack

      image001.jpg

      Copyright © All rights reserved to the author of this book, Edith Zack

      zacked@zahav.net.il

      This publication, as a whole or in part, may not be photocopied, translated, stored in a digital or optical database, or distributed by any means including electronic mail, without prior written permission from the author.

      Contents

      The Literary Model

      The Psychological Model

      The Historical Background

      The Masculization of Art

      Feminist Criticism

      Conclusion

      Bibliography

      For many decades, the image of the feminine fascinated creative artists in several fields. Their portrayals were often reflections of life experiences, and thus could be indicators of the perception of gender in western culture.

      Every era has its special feminine imagery, modelled according to the aesthetic and philosophical views of the time; the Baroque, for example, tended to emphasize woman’s heroic and patriotic sides, while the 19th century started to see women as individuals.

      Yet there are certain images which became almost stereotypical throughout the centuries. The most striking one of these is the femme fatale, which was endemic during the later decades of the 19th century. Her image is portrayed in art, poetry and the novel as well as in many other artistic forms, beginning in Germany early in the century, travelling to Victorian England and Symbolist and Decadent France later and reaching Scandinavia at the beginning of the 20th century.

      Who and what then, is the femme fatale? She is a feminine image who appears almost obsessively in 19th-century male narratives as an irresistibly attractive woman who lives according to her free will. Unlike the traditional female of patriarchy, who is dependent on her husband physically as well as spiritually, the femme fatale acts like a man; thus, she makes her own choices in life and takes responsibility for it. Like men she is an independent entity; powerful, initiating and dominating. Yet, being also beautiful and erotic, this powerful woman is associated with seduction and corrupting forces, which are manifested within unbounded sexuality and barrenness. Often, her erotic power is combined also with exoticism; thus, the femme fatale appears in many of the 19th century’s texts as a woman whose origin is the Orient. All these features bind together attraction and danger. Hence, men who desire this sort of woman are risking their lives, as their desire often leads them to their own destruction.

      A Male Topos

      The femme fatale is a male idea; it became over the years a topos, an image of the feminine which contained a set of characteristics that seem to have their origin in texts. This is not to say that the new type of woman who took responsibility for her own life did not exist in reality. Yet, the way she is presented in works of art from the mid-19th century arose from a masculine style of thought about the feminine, which constituted a new vocabulary concerning the new Woman. This style of thought was represented in all sorts of narratives in individual works by Romantic male creators. Its roots lay in the psychological state of mind of the patriarchal male creator, which was undoubtedly the consequence of socio-historical matters affecting patriarchal society in Europe. In order to have a profound understanding of the femme-fatale topos and its function in the Romantic era, one has to trace it on a wider canvas. Thus, it will be examined from three different points of view, literary, psychological and socio-historical.

      The literary account will examine the femme fatale as she appears in European narratives in the 19th century. The psychological account will deal with this feminine topos as an archetype, a set of images which existed in the collective mind of the human race throughout the ages, and became almost an obsession with male creators in the middle of the 19th century. This will naturally be related to C.G. Jung’s theory of archetypes.

      In the social-history account the image of the femme fatale will be examined as part of the modern perception of gender roles at the turn of the century. The obsession of male creators with this image of the feminine will, thus, be related to significant changes in women’s status in European societies starting from the Industrial Revolution to the foundation of the feminist movement and the events of the first decades of the 20th century.

      A feminist criticism section, which will deal with the different waves of feminism that effected the representation of the new image of Woman in culture, will follow the socio-history account. Feminism will, thus, be related to cultural criticism in general and opera criticism in particular. It will be argued that the operatic femme fatale although conceived by male creators, becomes a vocal authority that takes over the male’s text and establishes a new poetic language. This language presents Difference as a positive value; thus, the femme fatale that was traditionally perceived as demon and destructive will be interpreted as an alternative form of positive valued Otherness which is communicated in music.

      The Literary Model

      From the literary point of view, although the theme of the Romantic femme fatale was mostly significant in the 19th century, it occupied the minds of European creators from all spheres for more than a century; starting in Germany in the 1770s, through France and England in the 19th century and reaching Scandinavia in the first decades of the 20th century. Thus, during more than 130 years the literary image of the femme fatale went through a development which appears as the buildup and decay of femininity. This is to say, the feminine features of the fatal woman were accumulated within a pyramid, till they reached a climactic point of femininity and attractiveness in the 1850s, with a feminine image that was irresistibly beautiful and attractive, erotic, exotic, seductive and mystical. From this point till the turn of the century, a process of deformity and disintegration of the image took over; this irresistibly attractive woman, the embodiment of beauty and femininity, turns into a sexual cannibal and a hermaphrodite, an unidentified sexual object who is half male, half female, or male and female together.

      The Duality of a Good and a Bad Woman: The Fatal Triangle

      The Western male style of thought produces the literary femme fatale as a theme which involves an opposition. Often, the erotically fascinating but destructive woman is matched by another character in the drama who is simple and saintly. This creates a triangle model which is represented in many works of the 19th century dealing with the femme fatale (Zack 1997, p. 165): two females who represent the polarity of good and evil, and a dialectic male who moves between these extremes, trying to find his way between the two worlds (Figure 1.1).

      image002.jpg

      The triangle represents the nucleus of the masculine view of a new sort of Woman, a view that appears in the midst of the 19th century in opposition to the traditional patriarchal woman. In order to understand the typology of this new feminine image with all its complexities, one must study her functionality within the framework of the triangular construction, as it is presented in male narratives.

      The fatal triangle appears already in the middle of the 18th century in the works of Wolfgang Goethe and of Matthew Lewis (which will be discussed below). Both Goethe’s male protagonists in Götz von Berlichingen, Götz and Weslingen, are confronted with a feminine polarity; the diabolic figure of Countess Adelheid on one hand and Götz’s sister Maria, who represents the traditional feminine world of patriarchy. In Lewis’s work (The Monk), monk Ambrosio is confronted by the satanic beauty Matilda on one hand and the virginal figure of

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