FEMMES FATALES AND DIVAS OF THE FILM NOIRE                                                  By Dr. William Maerling and Maximillien de Lafayette

Photos: Marlene Dietrich.

The femme fatale, defined simply, is an irresistibly attractive woman, especially one who leads men into danger. In hard-boiled fiction, she is usually the protagonist's romantic interest. There have not yet been any hommes fatales (though they abound in gothic and romance fiction). The protagonist's involvement with her may range from mild flirtation to passionate sex, but in the denouement he must reject or leave her, for the revealed plot shows her to be one of the causes of the crime. Like the hard-boiled hero, the femme fatale dates to classic myth. Examples are Circe, who turned Odysseus' men into swine in Book X of The Odyssey and the Sirens, whose beauty and alluring song attracted his sailors in Book XII. Odysseus vanquishes the first with a magic root from Hermes and the second by sealing his men's ears with wax.

Photo: A publicity still of  Theda Bara, 1914.

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. ¹ 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.

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