Despite nineteenth-century critics’ sententious reviews of sensation fiction, especially their attacks on libertine female characters, Victorian women flocked to Mudie’s lending library to read novels that delineate fatal women, increasing the popularity of dangerous female characters throughout the mid-nineteenth century.4 In rapid perusal of this fiction describing the antics of the femme fatale, these readers more than likely related to the degree to which the conventional mid-nineteenth-century ideal was simply used to keep women powerless within the domestic sphere.
Furthermore, subversive images of women may have led young Victorian female readers to believe that rebelling against social codes is not a moral crime. Due to the constant theme of women’s economic and social powerlessness and sexual repression in the midcentury novel, and in the limited opportunities available to middle-class women in Victorian England, female readers may have identified with the agitation and frustration the femme fatale experiences in her social climbing adventures. Hence, the Fatal Woman (another name for the femme fatale) makes a profound impression on nineteenth-century popular culture, embodying the socioeconomic vulnerability of the Victorian woman.
Thus, this feminine trope of the dangerous woman seems unabashedly to subvert the bourgeois ideology that disenfranchises a woman who transgresses social boundaries and exploits men for their power and wealth. Unlike the domestic or fallen woman, mid-nineteenth-century femmes fatales take action against such conventional restraints by threatening men who represent the dominant Victorian ideology that oppresses women. Cunning, strong-minded, independent, and unconventional—these indeed describe accurately the traits of the femme fatale, but these features alone do not earn her the name. So, why do I recognize certain female Victorian characters as femmes fatales while earlier examples of strong self-sufficient heroines like Jane Eyre are not? How and why does the midcentury femme fatale warrant that name?