Folkroots: The Femme Fatale at the Fin-de-Siècle

by Theodora Goss

Several years ago, on a rainy afternoon in Boston, I wandered into the Museum of Fine Arts. There, I saw one of the most beautiful exhibits I have ever seen: a collection of art nouveau jewelry. As I walked among the gilded lilies and trembling dragonflies, astonished at the precision and delicacy of the brooches and hair ornaments, I came upon a sculpture. It was the only sculpture in the exhibit, and it was not delicate or gilded or trembling, although it did demonstrate considerable artistic skill—surprisingly, since it was sculpted not by an artist but by the actress Sarah Bernhardt. It was a sculpture of her own head, looking properly Victorian, with a lace collar and upswept hair. But below, the body was that of a beast, with the haunches and claws of a predator, and on her back were a bat’s wings. It was not simply a work of art but a functional object, an inkwell that had sat on her own desk.

How strange, I thought, to find the image of a woman, beautifully made but also grotesque, among these ornaments designed for the wrists and shoulders of women who had the artistic taste and, even more importantly, the wealth to purchase them from masters such as René Lalique. I knew a little about Sarah Bernhardt. She was the most prominent actress of her day, the daughter of a Jewish courtesan who rose to become a member of the Comédie-Française, and then one of the first important silent film stars. Her talent, particularly in tragic roles, earned her the nickname “The Divine Sarah.” At the height of her fame, she was probably the most photographed woman in the world, and she was painted by famous artists such as Alphonse Mucha, who created a number of posters advertising her stage performances. She was one of the women who could have afforded Lalique’s jewelry. Yet she had chosen to depict herself as a monster. Why?

This question was particularly important to me because I have long been fascinated by female monsters of various sorts, from Grendel’s mother to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Geraldine, from the sirens of Greek mythology to the alien in Ridley Scott’s Alien film series. I thought of Bernhardt’s inkwell as belonging to a particular subset of the female monster, a subspecies, as it were: the femme fatale. If we consulted a dictionary, it would tell us that a femme fatale is simply a deadly woman. However, the term has taken on a more specific connotation. The femme fatale is a woman who is fantastical and seductive: it is these qualities that make her deadly. In Darwinian terms, she has evolved from the line of sirens rather than Grendel’s mother. Whereas Grendel’s mother kills men, the sirens entice men to kill themselves. And the great era of the femme fatale, the time period during which she was most popular and important, was the fin-de-siècle (approximately 1870–1910).

The history of female monsters is as old as the history of women, meaning as old as history itself. It goes back to Ereshkigal and Lilith and Medusa. Here, I will focus on one brief moment in that history, the moment that created our modern world. During the fin-de-siècle, man was reduced to a thinking ape, automobiles replaced horses on the streets of London, and the dream of Icarus became a reality. However, despite the birth of our scientific and technological modernity, women were depicted as fantastical creatures, sphinxes and vampires, in literature and art. These depictions can give us a hint as to what Bernhardt may have been thinking when she gave herself claws and wings.

I. A Brief History of the Femme Fatale

In The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon, Virginia Allen identifies the femme fatale as one half of the dichotomous Eternal Feminine, a term she ascribes to the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In mythological female pairs such as Eve/Lilith and Athena/Medusa, the femmes fatales are Lilith and Medusa. In Jewish mythology, Lilith was supposed to have been the first wife of Adam, created from the same earth: when she refused to obey her husband, she was cast out of Eden, condemned to become a demoness who seduced men and devoured children. Like Ereshkigal, the Sumerian goddess of the underworld, Lilith has wings—she is a precursor for Bernhardt’s bat-winged sculpture. Like Medusa, Lilith was also associated with the serpent; a sculpture on the façade of the Notre Dame depicts Lilith, with a serpent’s tail, tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.

According to Ovid, Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden who was raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. As punishment, Athena transformed her hair into serpents and gave her a countenance that could turn men to stone. But earlier Greek mythology identifies Medusa and her sisters, the Gorgons, as children of the sea deities Phorcys and Ceto—perhaps that original association with the sea is reflected in the later story of the rape by Poseidon. Like Lilith, the Gorgons are also winged. It is interesting to note that both Lilith and Athena are associated with the owl; aspects of the Eternal Feminine are always both opposites and counterparts of each other, fragments of the original Great Goddess that splintered into monsters and deities.

Based on these figures, we can identify several attributes of the femme fatale: she is beautiful, sexual, supernatural, and deadly. (In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Medusa’s sexuality is forced upon her. A modern reader would pity the maiden and condemn her punishment as unjust. However, in Metamorphoses, Athena’s actions are not questioned; Medusa is associated with, and made monstrous for, transgressive sexuality.) The femme fatale’s beauty and sexuality differentiate her from female monsters such as Grendel’s mother, the Alien, and even the monstrous bride that Victor Frankenstein never creates because he is frightened both by her hideousness and her potential to, like the Alien, create monstrous offspring. Such monsters are frightening because they take on the stereotypical attributes of men. They are large, strong, and brutally violent.

In contrast, the femme fatale is a monstrous version of stereotypical femininity. She is deadly precisely because she is beautiful and seductive. Those attributes allow her to draw close to her victims, and to draw them close to her. When she strikes, she does not kill—instead, she drains something from her victims, blood or some other vital force. In this, she resembles the succubus, a demoness who seduces and drains the semen of human men. (Not surprisingly, Lilith was said to be a succubus.) This loss of vitality eventually causes their deaths. The term femme fatale can also be used for a seductive human woman, such as the dancer Lola Montez, mistress of Franz Liszt and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, or the dancer and spy Mata Hari, whose biography is titled Femme Fatale. But such women were femmes fatales in the way that the silent film actress Theda Bara was a vamp—by analogy to the supernatural creatures whose powers of seduction they were supposed to share. The femme fatale is fundamentally a supernatural creature whose seductiveness is more than human.

Although the femme fatale has always existed, she became significantly more popular in both literature and art during the Romantic era. We see her in Coleridge’s Geraldine, whom Christabel finds wandering in the forest, a “damsel bright,”

Drest in a silken robe of white,
That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
The neck that made that white robe wan,
Her stately neck, and arms were bare;
Her blue-veined feet unsandal’d were;
And wildly glittered here and there
The gems entangled in her hair.

We are told that “’twas frightful there to see / A lady so richly clad as she—/ Beautiful exceedingly!”¹ We could call this depiction “Portrait of a Femme Fatale.” Geraldine is beautiful and seemingly innocent. She tells Christabel that she is the daughter of a noble father, captured by knights and brought to this forsaken place. But her initial description already contains the word “frightful,” and Geraldine is indeed going to frighten Christabel. Like the Lady of the Green Kirtle in C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, who is a version of the femme fatale for children, she can turn into a serpent. Both are, at least figuratively, descendants of Lilith and Medusa.

The Lady of the Green Kirtle captures Prince Rilian and keeps him in the underworld, as though she were a Narnian Ereshkigal. Another important Romantic femme fatale also captures and imprisons men. John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” literally the beautiful woman without mercy, is described as “full beautiful, a faery’s child,” with long hair, light foot, and wild eyes. The knight who believes she loves him falls asleep and dreams of “pale Kings, and Princes too,” who tell him, “La belle dame sans merci / Hath thee in thrall!” Their thrall is a sort of living death; the knight describes them as “death pale,” and he himself, waking from his dream, is left to wander through a winter landscape, “Alone and palely loitering.”² Similarly, Geraldine enthralls Christabel’s father, Sir Leoline, who rejects his own daughter when she pleads with him to send Geraldine away.

I have used the word “enthrall” deliberately because it has a double meaning: both to imprison and to give pleasure to, as a spectacle may enthrall an audience. The femme fatale enthralls in both senses of the word. We see this double sense of the word in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most interesting female characters, Ligeia. Like Geraldine, Ligeia is beautiful, but her beauty is strange; indeed, Poe tells us that true beauty needs “some strangeness in the proportion.”³ This strangeness is a characteristic that all femmes fatales seem to share: they are beautiful but also disturbing—or even frightening, like Geraldine in the forest. Ligeia’s beauty and her great learning enthrall her husband; after she dies, he turns to opium to ease his pain and constructs the fantastical room in which she can return to him by stealing the body of his second wife, Rowena. When she does return and the cerements of Rowena drop from her body, her husband shrieks that he recognizes the dark eyes of his “lost love,” the Lady Ligeia.⁴ Is he welcoming her back, or shrieking in fear? For the lover of the femme fatale, the answer is—probably both.

And yet the femme fatale herself can love, as we see in another important character from the middle of the nineteenth century, Beatrice Rappaccini. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” we meet the femme fatale as a creation of the mad scientist, a theme that will be echoed in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, in which the mad scientist does create a bride for his monster. Beatrice demonstrates the paradoxical nature of the femme fatale: although she is deadly, she is not necessarily evil. Beatrice infuses her lover with the poison that is an intrinsic part of her own physiology, turning him into a monster like herself, but she does so unintentionally. She cannot help being what she is. The femme fatale is capable of loving her victim: even the Belle Dame sans Merci looks at the knight “as she did love.”⁵ However, that love is almost inevitably destructive. The femme fatale does not destroy her victims through violence, as Grendel’s mother might. Instead, like the victims of the vampire, they come to her willingly, and more often than not, they enjoy dying at her hands—or joining her in monstrosity.

As this brief history indicates, the femme fatale has an ancient lineage. She has been with us since at least the days of Sumer, seducing us, enthralling us, destroying us—and although we have found her frightening, we have also fallen under her spell. However, it was during the fin-de-siècle, in the literary and artistic movements of the turn of the century, that the femme fatale reached her fullest expression.

II. The Femme Fatale and the New Woman

During the fin-de-siècle, the femme fatale proliferated. Ancient and Romantic versions of the femme fatale became important artistic and literary images. Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Lady Lilith and wrote a poem, inscribed on the frame, in which he identified her as a beautiful and seductive femme fatale:

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.

Rossetti’s Lilith “Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave, / Till heart and body and life are in its hold”; like La Belle Dame sans Merci, she enthralls and imprisons men. La Belle Dame sans Merci herself was depicted almost obsessively by painters of the time, appearing in paintings by Frank Cadogan Cowper, John William Waterhouse, and Frank Dicksee.

However, writers and artists also introduced new forms of the femme fatale, perhaps most importantly the vampire. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jonathan Harker wanders around Count Dracula’s castle and falls under the spell of his hungry vampire brides. He identifies them as “ladies by their dress and manner,” but the “kisses” they offer are actually bites that will drain his blood. Nevertheless, he lies back, waiting to be bitten “in an agony of delightful anticipation.”⁶ Harker’s reference to the vampire brides as “ladies” is significant because later in the novel a lady becomes a monster: Dracula’s bite transforms the innocent Lucy Westenra into a vampire. Once Lucy rises in her vampire form, she takes on the femme fatale’s traditional attributes. She is even more beautiful than she was in life, but we are told that her sweetness has turned “to voluptuous wantonness.” She calls her lover, Arthur Holmwood, to join her, telling him that her arms are hungry for him, and her “lawn death-robe” is described as stained with the blood of children from whom she has been feeding. Like a modern Lilith, Lucy seduces men and devours children. When she is angered, her brows wrinkle “as though the folds of flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes.”⁷

The image of the vampire was so powerful at the fin-de-siècle that it even appeared where it was not originally intended. Edvard Munch’s painting Love and Pain was retitled The Vampire after a fellow writer identified it as containing vampiric themes. The depiction of a woman consoling a man was transformed into a femme fatale feeding. But why was the image of the vampire so powerful, and how can we account for the proliferation of femmes fatales? They appear in works of art as different as Munch’s painting, The Siren by Waterhouse, Des Caresses by Fernand Khnopff, and even a brooch shaped like a dragonfly designed by René Lalique. In The Siren and Des Caresses, we see the traditional function of the femme fatale: to lead men to their destruction. Waterhouse’s siren sits on a rock, playing her lyre and gazing down at the sailor who, enthralled by her music, does not seem to care whether or not he drowns. Khnopff’s femme fatale, a sphinx with the head of a woman and the body of a leopard, nestles up to the soldier standing beside her, as though rubbing her cheek against his. Like the sailor, he seems perfectly content to stay by her side. Lalique’s dragonfly brooch appears to be a representation of the femme fatale herself, a beautiful female figure with delicate wings but monstrous claws. She seems as dangerous, in her diminutive way, as the siren or leopard woman.

In Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, Bram Dijkstra argues that such images were misogynistic representations of a fin-de-siècle fear: that women would rise up and take social, political, and economic power. The New Woman movement posed a challenge to the prevailing separate spheres ideology of the Victorian era, the idea that men belonged in the public sphere and women’s proper place was in the private sphere of the home. New Women wanted to cut their hair, ride bicycles, and go to college. They wanted to work and vote, perhaps even—most scandalously—find love outside of marriage. According to Dijkstra, representations such as Des Caresses and The Siren revealed men’s fear that women were taking power, threatening their own prerogatives as the vampire brides threaten Jonathan Harker. Indeed, when Rudyard Kipling warned that “the female of the species is more deadly than the male,” he meant in the political arena as well.⁸ Her deadliness was a justification for keeping her in the private sphere—ironically, since earlier in the century it had been her innocence, her unsuitability for the rough and tumble of public life, that had justified the same position.

In Dracula, Lucy represents the fear that ladies are turning into monsters. They are taking on the attributes that the New Woman shares with the femme fatale, rejecting traditional female roles, destroying marriage and motherhood. But paintings such as Des Caresses and The Siren cannot entirely be explained by Dijkstra’s argument. They are too beautiful, the femmes fatales in them depicted too lovingly. The male figures in the paintings do not seem threatened by the deadly women they are encountering. In The Siren, the sailor reaches up toward the siren singing to him, and in Des Caresses, the soldier leans into his leopard bride. They indicate our own complicated response to the femme fatale. She frightens us, but she also fascinates us. And what can we say of Lalique’s dragonfly brooch? I saw that brooch in the exhibit of art nouveau jewelry that also included Bernhardt’s inkwell. It was small, no larger than the palm of my hand, and it was clearly meant to adorn an evening dress. If the dragonfly woman was meant to be a representation of monstrous femininity, what message would wearing such an ornament convey? What would it say about the woman who displayed it, most likely a wealthy socialite? It might suggest the fundamentally double nature of womanhood itself at the fin-de-siècle. Perhaps the femme fatale was so popular in literature and art because she embodied that doubleness: she was both desirable and dangerous, both what we longed for and what we were afraid we might submit to—or become. Wearing Lalique’s dragonfly brooch would have been a powerful if ambiguous message. Would you have chosen to wear it? I would, if I could have afforded such an ornament.

III. Women Appropriating the Femme Fatale

We can at least begin to answer the question I asked that day in the museum—why Sarah Bernhardt would represent herself as a monster—by considering the ambiguity of the femme fatale. Although Dijkstra argues that the femme fatale was a misogynistic representation of the New Woman by fin-de-siècle artists and writers, he also indicates that at least some women may have found the image of the femme fatale empowering. After all, paintings such as Des Caresses and The Siren depicted female figures as powerful, in a position of control—some women may have considered it “better to be feared as a predator than to be disdained as a fool.”⁹ We do see women writers of the fin-de-siècle appropriating the femme fatale for their own purposes: Vernon Lee’s “Dionea” and Mary Coleridge’s “The White Women” present us with two versions of the femme fatale that differ in interesting ways from the tradition, and that would be difficult to label misogynistic.

“Dionea” begins with a child washed up on the beach of an Italian town, supposedly from a shipwreck. That child, named Dionea, grows up in the town’s convent, but scandalizes the nuns by her unconventional ways, summoning pigeons and attempting to put on the gown and veil reserved for the Madonna. After she leaves the convent, Dionea becomes the town’s witch, living in a hovel by the seashore and making a living by selling love potions. She is so beautiful that at least one man kills himself for love of her, although she herself seems to inspire, but not return, love. When the sculptor Waldemar and his family move into town, he asks Dionea to model for a statue of Venus, incorporating an altar that is said to have stood in Venus’s temple. One morning, the town is shocked by terrible news: Waldemar lies dead at the foot of a cliff, and his wife has been sacrificed on Venus’s altar. Presumably, she was his offering—to Dionea. Such seduction and death seem typical for the femme fatale, but clues scattered throughout the story make clear that Dionea is something more—an incarnation of the goddess Venus reborn in modern times, when goddesses are no longer recognized. What can Dionea do, being what she is? She must cause destruction by her very nature.

Coleridge’s White Women are also destructive: men who look upon them die, as though they had seen Medusa. Both Coleridge and Lee incorporate references to Medusa, connecting their characters back to the ancient lineage of the femme fatale; although Dionea is not deadly to look upon, she is described as having a serpentine smile. Coleridge’s White Women also have the femme fatale’s beauty and power:

Taller are they than man, and very fair,
Their cheeks are pale,
At sight of them the tiger in his lair,
The falcon hanging in the azure air,
The eagles quail.

Coleridge tells us that “The deadly shafts their nervous hands let fly / Are stronger than our strongest—.”¹⁰ Her description of the White Women seems to have been influenced by the legend of the Amazons, whose arrows were also deadly. These Amazonian White Women must have presented a liberating image for women of the fin-de-siècle. At a time when proper ladies still needed chaperones to walk about town, being a wild white woman before whom tigers quail must have seemed like an attractive alternative.

Sarah Bernhardt did not need a chaperone. At a time when ordinary women’s lives were restricted, hers was extraordinary and unrestricted. Publicly, she was The Divine Sarah—a celebrity, as close as we get to a goddess in the modern world. But on her desk, in the privacy of her study, stood a representation of her with the body of a beast and a bat’s wings. We cannot know for certain why Bernhardt sculpted herself in this way. But I like to think that she did so to acknowledge her own ambiguous, fantastical qualities, to claim the history of the femme fatale for her own. After all, the femme fatale could be interpreted as an image of female power, as a siren or Dionea. Bernhardt was one of the most powerful women of the fin-de-siècle, an actress with the ability to enthrall an audience. It is no wonder that she identified with the beautiful, dangerous, but always fascinating femme fatale.

Selected Literature and Art:
Bernhardt, Sarah. Fantastic Inkwell (Self-Portrait as Sphinx). 1880.
Coleridge, Mary. “The White Women.” 1900.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Christabel.” 1816.
Cowper, Frank Cadogan. La Belle Dame sans Merci. 1926.
Dicksee, Frank. La Belle Dame sans Merci. 1902.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” 1844.
Keats, John. “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” 1819.
Kipling, Rudyard. “The Female of the Species.” 1911.
Khnopff, Fernand. Des Caresses. 1896.
Lalique, René. Dragonfly Woman Corsage Ornament. 1897–98.
Lee, Vernon. “Dionea.” 1890.
Lewis, C. S. The Silver Chair. 1953.
Munch, Edvard. The Vampire. 1893–94.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “Ligeia.” 1838.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Lady Lilith. 1868.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897.
Waterhouse, John William. La Belle Dame sans Merci. 1893.
—. The Siren. 1900.

Selected Scholarship:
Allen, Virginia M. The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon. New York: Whitston Publishing Company, 1983.
Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

 

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