Elements of mythical and historical women influence traits of the midcentury femme fatale, which cannot be ignored. According to Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is the first Romantic incarnation of the Fatal Woman, and her exoticism appropriately reflects the passionate energy of the early nineteenth century (214).5 Though the Fatal Woman became pervasive in Romantic literature, Praz explains that “there is no established type of the Fatal Woman” (201). The femme fatale embodies different types of female characters from Shakespeare’s early sixteenth-century vision of a somewhat mannish yet provocative Cleopatra, to Matthew Lewis’ Matilda, a diabolical beauty in The Monk (1797). This study shows that certain features of the femme fatale become more prominent depending upon the current sociopolitical climate of that age. Throughout Romantic poetry, the erotic signifying power of the femme fatale is often associated with death and violence that ends in the destruction of her male partner or nemesis, suggesting a reversal in economic and social power fueled by radical economic cycles of inflation and depression, and threatens the tenuous social power of the old aristocracy as demonstrated by the American and French Revolutions. While Shakespeare’s characterization of Cleopatra (her strength and guile) powerfully influenced the Romantics, mid-nineteenth-century poets and novelists simply borrowed elements of the dangerous woman from John Keats and Matthew Lewis to build on their own conceptualizations of the sexual danger of the femme fatale in Victorian culture.
Keats’ poetic interpretation of the Fatal Woman in La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1820) led to the mysterious background in Une Nuit de Cleopatre (1845) by Theophile Gautier, in which male admirers worship Cleopatra because she is unattainable. Yet Victorian writers draw from the power of Cleopatra’s sexuality, an end in itself that makes it possible for the nineteenth-century femme fatale to murder her lover and run off with his wealth. Mid-nineteenth-century writers show that her desire for independence and autonomy now threatens the ideology of the new emerging bourgeois class. Over the course of the nineteenth century, writers introduce several variations of the femme fatale, showing that she is paradigmatic, dangerous, yet vulnerable, inciting fear, yet driven into action by fear.