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Different from the midcentury literary femme fatale, her physical image in art more explicitly pronounces her as a threat and a danger. Dante Rossetti represents such women in art with masculine features, implying that the subject positions of women change from the frail domestic ideal commonly portrayed in early to mid-nineteenth-century fiction by Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens, to more decadently epic figures of women in art beginning in the 1860s. In Femme Fatales, Patrick Bade explains, “the curves of breasts, waist and hips are hidden or suppressed” (13). Even a woman’s sexuality is obscured in art by stronger and more robust features, reflecting a shifting representation of women from docile, domestic goddesses to aggressive bourgeois women. Dominant masculine features characterized in Rossetti’s paintings reflect the daunting nature of the femme fatale that in literature is revealed by her actions against her enemies. Hence, when Robert Audley first views the portrait of Lady Audley hanging in her chambers, he is shocked and overcome by what he sees, something other than what he recognized when he first met her, later exclaiming “I don’t like the portrait; there’s something odd about it” (73).
In literature, particularly in sensation fiction, a common theme is that, physically, the male victim is no match for the femme fatale’s hidden exuberance. Relationships between the femme fatale and her male victims resonate with fear in mid-Victorian fiction when dangerous, murderous women easily prey upon infantile and often spoiled, youthful males such as Robert Audley or Allan Armadale. To identify a female character as a femme fatale, such a male protagonist, sheltered and naïve, must be present. His gullibility is tested in the presence of the femme fatale, who threatens to destroy him. Here we see one of the main characteristics of the femme fatale: she affects men and must have an effect on them; unless the male protagonist is present, the woman is not fatal.
Frequently, he becomes the novel’s detective, a role forcing him into manhood. Robert Audley’s investigation specifically compels him to face his fears and obsessions about women. He complains about Alicia Audley because she is domineering while he obsesses about Clara Talboys who seems cold and detached; Lady Audley embodies his fear of women, eliciting feelings of inadequacy and inferiority demonstrated in his relationships with Alicia and Clara. Sexual tension is inevitably present between the sexually repressed male protagonist and the sexually experienced femme fatale, and is often threatening to the male protagonist who lacks knowledge about the power of erotic desire.