In 1848 she becomes a popular literary motif in W. M. Thackeray’s realist novel, Vanity Fair, and by the 1860s she is a recurrent figure in sensation fiction in major works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins. She suddenly resurfaces in the 1890s as the Gothic antiheroine in Dracula and She, novels coincidentally published with the emergence of the New Woman. However, at this point in the century, she becomes a different type of dangerous woman.
Though the femme fatale exists throughout centuries of art, poetry, and literature—from biblical Lilith and Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to Pater’s Mona Lisa, in The Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale—feminist critic, Rebecca Stott, argues that the femme fatale is most prominent in late-nineteenth-century literature. In contrast with Stott, I argue that the femme fatale is equally prevalent in mid-Victorian fiction, on which this project largely concentrates, but she is constructed differently and is more complex than the vampires or she-devils characterized by late-nineteenth-century novelists. Bram Stoker and Rider Haggard portray the femme fatale as a one-dimensional, treacherous woman, the succubus or the barbaric African queen, whereas in mid-Victorian literature, to name her as appallingly wicked is too simple a generalization. Her dire socioeconomic circumstances drive her to commit bigamy or murder as an escape from poverty, and her resilience to such economic hardships undermines any specific definition of her.
Critics who allude to the portrayal of dangerous female characters in mid-Victorian fiction often name Charles Dickens’ Estella in Great Expectations or Wilkie Collins’ Lydia Gwilt in Armadale as the classic nubile femme fatale who uses her sexual prowess to torment and to destroy her male victims.2 However, these same critics tend to ignore more prominent Victorian femme fatale characters, such as Becky Sharp, Lady Audley, Rosa Dartle, Valerie Marneffe, or Cousin Bette, and they do not name these protagonists as a relevant study of the femme fatale motif. In this examination of 1840s and 1860s fiction, I argue that the mid-Victorian femme fatale is a literary signpost of the changing roles of women in the nineteenth century, a period when middle-class women begin organizing more radical feminist movements, and that she foreshadows later protests against society’s treatment of women.