The Femme Fatale inVogue: Femininity Ideologies in Fin-de-siècle America

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 270-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuko Minowa ◽  
Pauline Maclaran ◽  
Lorna Stevens
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Fin De Siècle

This article explores how marketing influences ideologies of femininity. Tracing the evolution of femme fatale images in Vogue magazine in 1890s America, we develop a typology around four archetypal forms of the femme fatale that prevailed during this period. In doing so we respond to calls for more critical historical analyses on femininity. While studies on masculinity ideologies proliferate, there is a paucity of research on dissonant representations of femininity in popular culture media. The femme fatale, often a self-determined seductress who causes anguish to the men who become involved with her, is an intriguing and enduring challenge to traditional notions of femininity. Thus, in studying the femme fatale in her historical context and revealing the multiplicity of feminine ideologies contained within this trope, we contribute to a deeper understanding of marketing’s role in both reflecting and reinforcing societal assumptions, attitudes and problematics around gender norms.

scholarly journals De perseguidas a fatais: personagens femininas, sexo e horror na literatura do medo brasileira

Opiniães ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (6-7) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Júlio França ◽  
Daniel Augusto P. Silva
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Fin De Siècle

As temáticas sexuais e a figura feminina são sistematicamente exploradas pelas narrativas de horror. Desde a literatura gótica no século XVIII, a mulher é retratada em situações associadas à morte e ao medo. Nessas histórias, é recorrente o tópos da damsel in distress, isto é, a presença de uma personagem feminina que é vítima dos mais diversos tipos de violência, física e/ou psicológica. Já no século XIX, as representações da mulher na literatura se tornam mais diversificadas. No Romantismo, ganha força a femme fatale e o sexo é encarado como conflito entre alma e corpo. Se durante a literatura romântica tal mulher é idealizada e constitui uma ameaça emocional, no fin-de-siècle ela representa um perigo eminentemente físico. No final do XIX, ela encarna a busca por independência e a contestação do domínio masculino. Este trabalho pretende apresentar um panorama dessa transformação na literatura do medo brasileira, tomando como demonstração as seguintes obras: Noite na taverna (1855), de Álvares de Azevedo; A ilha maldita (1879), de Bernardo Guimarães; “Palestra a horas mortas” (1898), de Medeiros e Albuquerque; “O bebê de tarlatana rosa” (1910), de João do Rio; e “Noites brancas” (1920), de Gastão Cruls.  

scholarly journals The diary of Bertha Marks as a heterotopia, as articulated in the artwork, The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters

Literator ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leora Farber ◽  
Elfriede Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Southern Africa ◽  
Social System ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Fin De Siècle

This article explored the conception, historical context and theoretical underpinnings of Leora Farber’s 2010 artwork entitled The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters, which forms an extension of the work on her exhibition entitled Dis-Location/Re-Location. The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters falls within Dis-Location/Re-Location’s thematics, but focuses on one aspect thereof, namely, how fin-de-siècle Jewish colonial women who were immigrants to southern Africa, as exemplified in the persona of Bertha Marks (1862–1934), experienced nineteenthcentury Victorian gender ideologies. Their life experiences often entailed resistance to their positions as subjects of a patriarchal social system; yet, as women, they were simultaneously complicit in upholding discriminatory colonial ideologies and in maintaining the racial,social and cultural prejudices and forms of subjugation that underpinned them. Bertha Marks is shown to have occupied a personalised heterotopia: whilst operating from within, and maintaining the racial and social prejudices of the colonial era, she was simultaneously constrained by her positioning within it. This heterotopic life experience is reflected in the diary extracts which comprise The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters, which reveal that she occupied the conflicting positions of victim, witness, bystander, collaborator and beneficiary of colonial injustices and exploitation, and assumes varying degrees of co-responsibility and co-liability for her roles and actions.

“The Rage of Caliban”

2019 ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Michael Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Otto Weininger ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Bodily Difference ◽  
A Site

Chapter 2 focuses on works that mark the transition from fin de siècle aestheticism to works of high modernism. The primary focus is the role of embodiment in modernist aesthetics, specifically as it appears in music. The chapter looks at several works based on Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) in which the figure of the court dwarf represented in the painting becomes a site for anxieties about bodily and sexual difference. Alexander Zemlinsky’s opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) from 1922 is the primary text, based on Oscar Wilde’s story “The Birthday of the Infanta” (1891). The libretto for Zemlinsky’s opera by George Klaren transforms Wilde’s story of recognition and betrayal into an allegory of dysgenic characterology, based on the work of Otto Weininger. What Wilde perceived as a story about the noble soul beneath the grotesque body, Zemlinsky transformed into a eugenicist allegory of man’s fatal alliance with the femme fatale. As a work that embodies elements of late Romantic chromaticism as well as modernist atonality, Der Zwerg is a site for studying musical representation of bodily difference.

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