Fatal Women of Romanticism. Adriana Craciun. Cambridge

The fatal woman, or femme fatale, is a familiar archetype: an aggressive seductress who lures her enemies into compromising situations. Literature is full of vivid characterizations of this type: Eve, Pandora, Cleopatra, Salome, Lady MacBeth. Film noir has rendered indelible images of fast-talking dames in pencil skirts and seamed stockings, exhaling cigarette smoke as they misdirect our heroes. In this incarnation, the fatal woman is often celebrated, as in film reviewer Mick LaSalle's recently published Complicated Women, and can be seen, in the right smoky light, as a protofeminist. Academics such as Virginia Allen and Bram Dijkstra have dissected the history of the femme fatale as a male fantasy, an "erotic and fatal muse" (Allen) and an "idol of perversity" (Dijkstra). What interests Adriana Craciun in Fatal Women of Romanticism is not the issues or intentions of male authors who invoke the archetype, but the appearance of femmes fatales in the works of several women writers of the Romantic period

Art · Art history · Romanticism · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics