Femme Fatale

When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad I'm better.

--Mae West

A femme fatale is a stock character, a villainous woman who uses the malign power of sexuality in order to ensnare the hapless hero. The phrase is French for "fatal woman".

She is typically portrayed as sexually insatiable. The prudery of our Victorian period ancestors imagined women to be sexless beings. Confronted with evidence that things were otherwise, Victorian men found themselves somewhat disconcerted. So it came to pass that the stereotype of the femme fatale was created. In the Anglo-Saxon world, she is often of foreign extraction. She is often portrayed as a sort of sexual vampire; her dark appetites were thought to be able to leach away the virility and independence of her lovers, leaving them shells of their former selves. Only by escaping her embraces could the hero be rescued. On this account, in earlier American slang femmes fatales were often called "vamps," a word that is associated with the fashions of the 1920s.

This stock character is celebrated in the song Femme Fatale by the Velvet Underground.

Table of contents

1 Famous femme fatales 1.1 Fictional characters 1.2 Historical figures 2 References

Famous femme fatales

Fictional characters

• Circe
• Medea
• Lilith
• La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats
• Morgan le Fay

Historical figures

• Salome
• Lucrezia Borgia
• Erzsébet Báthory
• Cleopatra VII of Egypt
• Mata Hari
• Theda Bara

References

Bram Dijkstra has written two shrill but nevertheless amusing books that discuss the femme fatale stereotype at great length:

• Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siecle Culture, ISBN 0195056523
• Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Culture, ISBN 0805055495