In a society ruled by patriarchal thinking, for example, many saw the Women’s Movement as a threat to British culture, in the same way that the femme fatale in Victorian literature is seen to corrupt middle-class values. Victorian ideology that attempted to keep women within these constraints largely depended on the belief in a woman’s moral purity.
The link between Thackeray’s realist novel and the bizarre situations and illicit passion described in sensation fiction by Wilkie Collins may appear too casual a connection, but both genres address turbulent socioeconomic problems and the burlesque get-rich-quick schemes carried out by sly female heroines. In The Maniac in the Cellar, Winifred Hughes agrees that “the realists and the sensationalists are trying to come to grips with the same overwhelming experience of urban, technological society; both reflect a diminished stature of the individual amid the crowding and the complexities of modern existence” (57). Given the rapid rate at which urbanization, industrialization, and technology flourish, the idea of selfhood is lost within new social codes instituted by religion, medicine, and family used to keep individuals controlled. However, despite these changes, midcentury society is plagued with sanitation problems, overcrowding in London, prostitution, underpaid wage labor, and inequality within the new social class system. The femme fatale embodies the cruel conditions of modern life in which poverty, sickness, disease, slum dwelling, and prostitution echo the moral turpitude of the nineteenth century, and she mirrors social anxieties that conflict with prudish and often unrealistic ideological standards of modern Victorian life.
So, to watch women like Lydia Gwilt, a woman whose appearance is one of cultured sophistication, moving about freely among city streets under her heavy paisley shawl and black veil, is a threat to this order. Her behavior is deemed taboo: good women do not lead public lives, and therefore must not be seen among this urban setting addled with sanitation problems and social disease. All mid-Victorian women are similarly ruled by these external circumstances.
Images of the femme fatale are more pervasive during socially and economically troubled times that coincide with the publication of Vanity Fair, and the sensation genre, and reflect sexual ambiguity in Victorian society. Her sudden emergence signals societal hardships and anxieties especially reflected in fictional dominant male figures ruled by precarious circumstances that jeopardize their authority and power.