The emergence of the femme fatale in Thackeray’s 1848 publication of Vanity Fair appropriately coincides with the promising emergence of the late 1840s middle-class feminist movement. In his portrayal of Becky Sharp, Thackeray is one of the first Victorian novelists to identify oppressive sexist roles among middle-class women, and to show a female character blatantly subvert her assigned domestic role as constructed by patriarchy. In many ways, the image of Becky Sharp is a precursor of the women who later would forge more radical middle-class feminist movements.
By emphasizing the harmful effects of restraint and passivity on women in his characterization of Amelia Sedley, Becky Sharp’s foil, Thackeray forces us to take a serious look at the complicated roles that women play in the 1840s. By the 1860s, a mere twenty-odd years later, middle-class feminists denounce bourgeois ideals that relegate women to the domestic sphere and prevent them from entering into public life. By challenging censorship, insisting on greater sexual freedom, rejecting biased divorce and property laws in 1857, and opposing the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1864, these women demonstrate their refusal to be subordinated to men. However, these social changes also cause much hostility toward women, which is reflected in an ambivalent attitude toward their sexual relations with men.
The femme fatale is part of this evolving assertiveness on the part of women. By characterizing the femme fatale as a specific danger to men, sensation novels in the 1860s implicitly suggest the degree to which an independent woman is viewed as a threat to the fabric of Victorian culture.3 Collins’ Lydia Gwilt and Braddon’s Lady Audley represent these unconstrained women breaking both legal and moral laws as they struggle for self-reliance. As a single, educated woman, the femme fatale––having escaped the polar definitions of domestic or fallen women––is a threat to bourgeois ideology in that she threatens to destroy the structure of the family and obscure the definitions assigned to domestic women.