femme fatale

femme fatale, a seductive and beautiful woman who brings disaster to anyone with whom she becomes romantically involved. The femme fatale is an archetype that appears throughout history in mythology, art, and literature and became a principal character in the hard-boiled detective novels and classic film noir of the 20th century.

The femme fatale has been dismissed as a sexist figure of male fantasy but also defended as a subversive character who transgresses women’s limited social opportunities. She is a stock character who embodies many negative tropes about women, but she is also multifaceted and complex. Her intelligence is as essential to the archetype as her beauty. It is her conniving and ambition that often drives plots.

The femme fatale archetype dates back to ancient cultures. Greek mythology, for example, is filled with female figures who lure men to ruin or death. These include Circe, who entices Odysseus’s men into her home and transforms them into pigs; the Sirens, who lead sailors to their destruction through the sweetness of their song; and Clytemnestra, who draws her husband, Agamemnon, into a false sense of security upon his return from the Trojan War and murders him. In many ancient societies, legends attribute the downfall of great rulers to the malevolent influence of a mistress. According to Chinese legend, Zhou (c. 1075–46 bce), the last sovereign of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 bce), was supposedly encouraged in his extreme debauchery by his concubine, Daji. His depravity ultimately led to the dynasty’s fall.

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In the philosophy of early Christian leaders like St. Jerome, the untrustworthiness of women was prefigured by Eve, who led Adam into eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, thus dooming humankind to death and original sin. Biblical women like Salome, who demanded the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and Jezebel, who provoked conflict that weakened Israel for decades, became synonymous with female duplicity. In Jewish folklore, Adam’s first wife was Lilith, who was expelled from Eden after refusing to be obedient to her husband. She subsequently became a demon who seduced men and gave birth to succubi, demons that assume female forms and have sex with men while they sleep.

In Romanticism, the femme fatale well-suited the movement’s ethos of tragic love and fascination with mystery and beauty. The archetype appears in many Romantic works, notably as an evil supernatural creature disguised as a lady in distress in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished Gothic ballad “Christabel,” and as the beautiful woman without pity in John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

In the 20th century the archetype flourished in film and pulp fiction. Silent movies cast so-called exotic actresses such as Theda Bara and Greta Garbo in vamp roles in which their sensual and mysterious personas entrance the luckless men who fall in love with them. Flapper types like Louise Brooks played reckless but alluring characters that countered the winsome virgins and “America’s sweetheart” roles pioneered by Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford. Early films also fictionalized the stories of historical women regarded as real-life femmes fatales, such as the Egyptian queen Cleopatra and the Dutch dancer and spy Mata Hari.

The popular detective stories and crime fiction of this time almost always feature a hard-edged, amoral female character—whether an underground figure like a gangster’s moll or a more mundane character such as a dissatisfied housewife—who preys on the male hero’s weaknesses and leads him astray and into danger. Many of these stories, written by famous authors of the genre such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane, were made into movies after World War II, when the film noir style was emerging.

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The prototypical film noir femme fatale is often considered to be Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944). Her character, Phyllis Dietrichson, is a calculating, dark sunglasses and gold anklet-wearing, peroxide blonde who lures an insurance agent (played by Fred MacMurray) into killing her husband and staging the murder as an accident to cash in on a double indemnity policy. Other quintessential film noir femmes fatales include those played by Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Ava Gardner in The Killers (1946), and Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947).

Scholars have suggested that the growing prominence of femmes fatales in the cinema and fiction of the mid-20th century may have been linked to shifting gender roles. During World War II, women took jobs outside the home and held down households while men served overseas. The femme fatale and her deceptions also suited the cynicism and dark mood of the film noir genre. Compared to the more maternal or “good girl” characters of the time, she appears as less passive and more complex and compelling. Because of the Hays Code, a set of self-imposed guidelines that restricted portrayals of immoral behavior in movies, the femme fatale was typically punished by the film’s end.

In the neo-noir films of the latter 20th century, femmes fatales reflected the social advances brought on by the feminist movement, even if they were still drawn as the kind of woman to avoid. She emerges triumphant as played by Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (1981) and Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction (1994), two films that otherwise closely follow classic noir plots. As played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Demi Moore in Disclosure (1994), she’s a vindictive, sexually voracious, career woman. The femmes fatales played by Pam Grier in Foxy Brown (1974), Anne Parillaud in La Femme Nikita (1990), and Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, and Darryl Hannah in Kill Bill (2003–04) are street-smart gunrunners, trained assassins, and martial arts experts. They are as physically strong as they are alluring and beautiful. In the live-action/animated comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), the character of Jessica Rabbit (voiced by Kathleen Turner) both pays tribute to and spoofs the classic film noir femme fatale. Sharon Stone’s performance as a bisexual murder suspect in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992) attracted notoriety both on-screen and off-screen, and the film divided many feminist critics.

By the 21st century the femme fatale had become even more morally ambiguous. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson introduced the avenging computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, a young woman who wreaks revenge on sexually abusive men. Gillian Flynn’s best-selling thriller Gone Girl (2012), in which a woman fakes her own kidnapping to make it appear as if her straying husband did it, sparked conversation about gender politics in relationships. Critics disagreed about whether the story’s depiction of its deadly and duplicitous antiheroine was feminist, misogynist, or even both. The femme fatale in the British dark comedy television series Killing Eve (2018–22), is an assassin who stalks another woman. The female grifters in the true-life crime film Hustlers (2019), starring Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu, form a sisterly bond while working in a strip club and enacting a plan to fleece their wealthy Wall Street customers. The film Promising Young Woman (2020), addresses rape culture with a femme fatale (Carey Mulligan) who avenges a friend’s assault, sometimes through unnerving means.