FEMMES FATALES AND DIVAS OF THE FILM NOIRE By Maximillien de Lafayette
Photos
: Marlene Dietrich.
The femme fatale, is an irresistible dramatic and dangerously attractive woman. She is "la Femme" who directs men toward the abyss of danger. Ironically, the literature of the sacred and the damned does not include hommes fatales. Even, Charles Boyer, Jean Gabin and Tyron Power do not fit the description of a fatal persona. La femme fatale dates back to classic myth and ancient folklore. Astarte (Ashtaroot in Aramaic and Phoenician) was one. Circe, is another half woman half divine femme fatale who turned Odysseus' men into swine in Book X of The Odyssey and the Sirens, whose beauty and alluring song attracted his sailors and high seas adventurers.
Photo:
A publicity still of Theda Bara, 1914.
Dr. Maerling once explained that the necessity of extra-human help in resisting the femme fatale's sexual temptation is an ancient feature of the archetype; adherence to the "code" fills this role in the hard-boiled novel. In the Middle Ages, Christianity refashioned this archetype as a devil, called the succubus. The hard-boiled novel, as Marling has shown, draws on this concept of a female sexual spirit who visits men in their sleep and has sexual intercourse with them. Succubae were thought to disguise themselves in women and to be identifiable by such features as small, pointed teeth, pointed ears, and sharp noses.
To contrast with the succubus, medieval Grail Romances developed several more noble types: the compassionate Queen, La belle dame sans Merci (to modernize, a "heartbreaker"), and the true love. An important attribute of the hero became his ability to distinguish between types of women and to respond accordingly, to discern "good women" from bad. The femme fatale has been roundly condemned as misogynist by feminist literary criticism, though in most (and especially contemporary) hard-boiled narrative the reader is more apt to find modern female characters with some archetypal traits, and female characters unrelated to the archetype at all, rather than the pure archetype. Hammett's Dinah Brand (Red Harvest) and Janet Henry (The Glass Key) are early examples of femmes fatales who defy the misogynist label. CONTINUES NEXT