The Femme Fatale in American Literature By Ghada Sasa

And for her to escape, she deliberately chooses to use her beauty and charm. In Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Helga Crane is cursed because of the limitations imposed upon her by heredity, environment, society, and the color of her skin. Therefore, she chooses the same path that other femmes fatales have chosen. Like in Edna’s case, we are made more aware of Helga’s suffering than we are of the male characters’ suffering in the novel.

Therefore, this study, in its examination of each of the femme fatale figures discussed, shows how male authors such as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, writing within the tradition of American naturalism, mention but undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women in order to foreground the suffering of the male character. On the other hand, writers like Kate Chopin and Nella Larsen reinforce the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of their women characters and subtly attempt at justifying the course of action that these women choose as victims of the combined forces of sexism, heredity, and environment. Elaine Showalter explains in her article “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” “[W]omen’s writing is a ‘double-voiced discourse’ that always embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant…” (263).

Background and Definitions of the Femme Fatale

In literature, the femme fatale has existed for centuries, and her image has developed according to the demands and needs of each literary movement. Examples of literary femmes fatales range in time from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales created in the fifteenth century, to Hawthorne’s Beatrice in “Rappacinni’s Daughter,” and into the twentieth century to include figures such as Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises.