While nineteenth-century society generalizes and polarizes women as either virtuous or fallen, the femme fatale subverts these dichotomous categorizations. She imitates the domestic woman convincingly, but in fact she is neither a domestic nor a fallen woman. Despite her sexual transgressions, she will not tolerate society’s degradation of her, as does the fallen woman Emily, for example, in Dickens’ David Copperfield. Escaping to London’s underground, Emily cannot face her family after running away with the egocentric aristocrat, Steerforth. In contrast, the femme fatale reinvents herself and immediately reintegrates into society, all the while concocting even higher aspirations. In fact, she treats her own defiance of domesticity—what some might regard as her “fallenness”—as a kind of victory, to show that social dogmas about women cannot defeat her.
Though the midcentury femme fatale conjures up devious schemes to exploit men, and often plots to murder them, she actively changes traditional representations of women as domestic or fallen by shamelessly rejecting bourgeois moral imperatives meant to restrict women. In fiction, she suggests that disaffected middle-class women, marginalized from other privileged bourgeois women, will risk everything to gain power. They see social boundaries as a challenge to be transgressed and manipulated at will.
The Victorian femme fatale isolates herself from social and political orthodoxy and challenges prescribed moral and sexual ideology, which ultimately brings about major changes in the portrayal of women as more assertive and less likely to submit to oppressive social codes. Since attitudes about women change as a result of small feminist uprisings and different depictions of women in popular fiction, Victorian culture desperately codifies sexuality as a means to control women. At first, most men and even numerous middle-class women fear cultural changes symbolized by the femme fatale. Men fear losing social power to ambitious women, while other women fear losing their economic security should fewer men decide to marry. Meanwhile in retaliation to their work, conservatives refer to young, female, midcentury sensation writers such as Florence Marryat or Rhoda Broughton as revolutionaries and anarchists, accusing them of trying to thwart the existing British social order. In spite of such criticism and controversy, these midcentury novelists initiate an examination of changes concerning society’s perception of women, hence beginning a reevaluation of women’s roles.