Abstract
Late in the nineteenth century in France, a peculiar combination of circumstances resulted in the visual manifestation of the dangerous woman dubbed the Femme Fatale. Usually associated with the period of the Belle Epoque (1890’s), the Femme Fatale emerged from such symbolist literary sources as Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil.1 An important new subject in symbolist art of the period, the visualization of feminine evil was part and parcel of a much larger cultural context which included a mass-produced consumer culture, continued interest in Japanese paraphernalia, a burgeoning high-fashion industry and changes in the private and public relationships between the sexes. It is through the examination of this larger context that the Femme Fatale can come to be understood as a volatile mixture of fashion and the feminine body; the icon embodies both an advertisement of sensuality and a warning against indulgence in physical pleasure. Perhaps most of all, the figure serves as a visual manifestation of conflicting masculine impulses towards women in general and the then-burgeoning women’s rights movement in particular.
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Notes
See Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle France (Oxford University Press, 1986).
The image appeared on the cover of the March 8, 1879 issue of Le Journal Amusant. It belongs to a series called “Fantaisies Parisiennes.”
See Elizabeth K. Menon, “Henry Somm: Impressionist, Japoniste or Symbolist?” Master Drawings. vol. 33, no. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 3–29.
Consider the following passage from Melandri in “Album du Chat Noir, Henry Somm,”—“… Je crois de mon devoir avant de continuer, de faire ici un aveu dépouillé d’artifice. La description ci-dessus m’a été dictée par Somm lui-m¨ºme. Mais, par les cendres de mes aïeux, elle est plus fausse qu’une pièce du pape!…” See Achille Melandri, ”Album du Chat Noir; Henry Somm,“ Le Chat Noir, 12 February 1882, p. 2. See also J. L. H., ”L’Exposition Henry Somm,“ Le Travailleur Normand, 14 July 1907, p. 2 and especially Georges Dubosc, ”Les «Légendes» d’Henry Somm,“ Journal de Rouen, 22 July 1907, p. 4.
Including “Hu-yo-katzi,” Le Chat Noir, 9 March 1889, p. 2; “Expo des Artistes Indépendants,” Le Chat Noir, 7 April 1888, p. 2; “Contes pour rendre les petits enfants fous,” Le Chat Noir, 20 January 1882, p. 4 and “Contes pour rendre les petits enfants fous; histoire de Mme. Lachemise et des quatre petits boutons,” Le Chat Noir, 3 March 1883, p. 4.
See Didot-Bottin commerce catalogs, 1880–1890. Located at the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris.
The image appeared in Le Courrier Français, August 30, 1885, p. 4.
Le Monde Parisien, April 17, 1879 (cover).
Actes du Musée de Rouen. T. XIII, 1910, p. 2.
For a more thorough analysis of this particular Somm print, see Elizabeth Menon, “Henry Somm’s Japonisme 1881 in Context,” Gazette des Beaux Arts, February 1992, pp. 89–98.
Reprinted inParis and the Arts, 1851–1896: From the Goncourt Journal, trans. George Becker and Edith Philips (Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 106.
The illustration appeared on the cover of the April 26, 1879 issue.
Liza Crihfield Dalby, Geisha (University of California Press, 1983), p. 62.
Kikou Yamata, Three Geishas, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Cassell & Co., 1956), p. 14.
See Bram Dijkstra (cited above) and Edward Marsicano, “The Femme-Fatale Myth: Sources and Manifestations in Selected Visual Media 1880–1920,” Emory University Ph. D. Thesis, 1983.
Dalby, p. xiv.
See Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics,Psychology and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), Chapter Four: “Amazone, Femme Nouvelle, and the Threat to the Bourgeois Family,” pp. 63–74.
Ibid., p. 72. Jozé penned “Le Féminisme et le bon sens” in La Plume, September 15, 1895.
J. Olivier, A Discourse of Women, Showing Their Imperfections Alphabetically, English translation (London, M. DC. LXII), p. 21. Somm’s illustration appears on the 1876 French edition.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 158.
Steven Hause and Anne Kenney, Woman’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic (Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 9.
Ibid.
Claire Moses, French Feminism in the 19th Century (State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 197.
Current location unknown. Photographs of this work exist in the documentation files at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
“Une Dompteuse,” Le Monde Parisien, March 29, 1880, cover.
Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
Pierre Giffard, Les Grands Bazars (Paris, 1882), p. 62. Translated and reprinted in Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Richard Bienvenu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 63.
See Perrot, cited above.
“Au Cirque d’Hiver,” center illustration for “Mort de Cléopâtre,” L’Illustration, February 14, 1891 (vol. 97, p. 161); “La Danse serpentine — Mlle. Loïe Fuller et ses transformations,” L’Illustration, November 12, 1892 (vol. 100, p. 392).
“La Femme et un serpent,” on a page titled Faux Sceptique which appeared in Le Rire on April 6, 1901.
Henry Somm, Mermaid, ca. 1895. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Jersey.
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Menon, E.K. (1998). Fashion, Commercial Culture and the Femme Fatale. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Reincarnating Mind, or the Ontopoietic Outburst in Creative Virtualities. Analecta Husserliana, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4900-6_25
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