2.9. Depicting Unconventional Women: The Implications behind the Femme Fatale Figure
Within the analysis of women’s reactions to their limiting situation, the notion of
‘mixed’ characters is somehow viewed with distrust, as such a figure entails a degree of fault that heroines could never exhibit and, as such, mixed heroines were usually taken as negative examples of what would happen if one were to resist the ideal configuration that entailed their utmost virtuousness and perfection.
Eve Taylor Bannet’s The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (2000) introduces the notion of ‘mixed’ characters in a positive light. Bannet argues that mixed characters could be “justified on the grounds of probability, verisimilitude, or realism” (2000: 61) and, thus, could be claimed to embody a much a much closer portrayal of a ‘real’ woman than any idealised heroine, who despite her status as a woman of “rational sobriety and finely tuned sensibility, an exemplar of the emerging middle-class virtues of self-restraint and civilising moral sentiment” (Chaplin 2015: 75) failed to exhibit realistic qualities and instead somehow became such an idealised model that it was extremely difficult to live up to this high standard.
56 Ingrid Tague’s Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690-1760 (2002) approaches the commonplace dichotomy of separate spheres and proposes a resistance of such differentiation by focusing instead on the “ways in which women could ignore, accept, or even exploit ideals of feminine behavior depending on their particular circumstances, often in ways quite different from the intentions of the theorists who propagated those ideals” (2002: int 6).
Hence, Tague also shares the vision that binary oppositions should be questioned and calls for an exploration of women’s particular responses to their specific set of circumstances. Such responses prove crucial to analyse the woman question and try to determine the degree of compliance that woman actually ‘agrees’ to.
In Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing. Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress (2002) Roxanne Eberle observes that some radical writers resisted the
“’common’ sense pragmatism and the domestic woman” (2002: int 4) and, instead, espoused the presence of a “sexually aggressive but articulate speaking subject” (2002:
int 4). Their writing put forward the need to excel the culturally accepted configuration of the ‘proper’ lady and propose an alternative to that model, one that would allow for the presence of a desiring female subject who could express herself and become the articulate speaking subject Eberle refers to. This need to excel the widely accepted figure of the ‘proper’ woman is vital in my reading of the texts, and lies at the centre of my research question, as to which level of narrative authority females actually attain in those texts.
This prompts a (re-) evaluation of previous literary accounts of woman in the search for an expansion of those in ways that can reconcile the felt tension between female subjectivity and the pressures that hinder its expression.
57 Ariana Craciun’s Fatal Women of Romanticism (2003) points out that this preoccupation with reputation and the fear of transgression were constant motifs in fiction, especially in fiction produced by women. In such texts, the presence of unconconventional female characters entailed “critiques and interrogations of sexual difference (the ‘natural’ realm of biological sex) as a historically stable and stabilizing reality” (2003: int 3). Unconventional females were a powerful destabilizing force, as they opposed social and cultural mores and defied the very definition of ‘acceptable’
feminine behaviour. Those females who refused to ‘willingly’ accept their prescribed role and who “did not fit in the ‘good’ category, not wanting to conform to the requirements that were bestowed upon her” were immediately identified as ‘fallen’, fatal women.
Femme fatale figures, who clearly cannot be categorised as ‘proper’ women, are present in some of the texts I will analyse in this thesis, and will prove critical to pose an implicit threat to the status quo through their “inherent ‘doubleness’ as both feminine and fatal” (Craciun 2003: int 7) to The allure of femme fatales resided precisely in their ability to surpass boundaries and appear to be “nebulous, ethereal and impenetrable” (Braun 2012: int 1) as they do so.
Elizabeth Kraft’s Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814 in the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers (2008) argues that works that have traditionally been denoted as ‘amoral’ are in fact “ethical precisely because of the presence of female subjectivity, desire, and pleasure” (2008: 22). Such presence was traditionally taken as indicative of immorality but, as Kraft rightly notes, desire and pleasure do not necessarily entail viciousness and can actually become signals of morality.
58 The constant ‘menace’ of being accused of amorality was very much felt, especially from the part of women. There was a constant fear of transgression, of
‘violating’ those moral codes that would deny them their status as ‘proper’ females.
In Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century (2003), Katharine Kitredge reflects on the fact that, the moment a transgression occurred, women were perfectly aware of the fact that their destiny was from that moment ‘doomed’ to social ostracism and that there was no possible way in which they could return to their previous ‘virtuous’ state. Kitredge argues that women “understand that once they have moved outside society’s behavioral/sexual boundaries, there will be no return and no alternative place of safety” (2003: int1).
Alessa John’s Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (2003) provides an analysis of the role unconventional or ‘fatal’ women play in the configuration of the female persona was sometimes associated with the notion of feminine utopias, in which
“innovative visions were not linked to political upheaval, subversion and radical ideology” (2003: int 16). Instead, what these feminine utopias espoused was located in a personal level “in order to anticipate deep reforms in the microeconomy of personal relationships and everyday community interaction” (2003: int 16). Femme fatale figures allowed for a reconsideration of the ways in which personal relationships were established in the sense that they called for a reform of the ways in which it was
‘acceptable’ to behave, both privately and publicly, and brought attention to alternative modes of behaviour that defied such established social norms.
Malgorzata Luczynska-Holdys’ Soft-Shed Kisses: Re-visioning the Femme Fatale in English Poetry of the 19th Century (2013) also reflects on the notion of female transgression by paying attention to the appealing figure of the femme fatale.
Luczynska-Holdys claims that the irresistible charm of femme fatales is not restricted to
59 their “sexual allure” (2013: int 6) but on their capacity to go beyond that and maintain their “independence, submissiveness, elusiveness, unattainability” (2013: int 6). Femme fatales appear to be impossible to attain and therein lays their potential, as the mystery and ambiguity that surrounds their persona reinforce their ‘power’
C: CONTENT ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION