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Foreword
The femme fatale is a standard archetype in American literature. The enchantress, the siren, the dangerous man-trap, has been a feature of American fiction from the outset. James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne both employ alluring dark-haired ladies, often as foils for their innocent blondes, to captivate their heroes and distract them from their manly pursuits: women like Cooper’s Cora Munro and Hawthorne’s Hester, Zenobia, and Miriam. Similar seductive females populate the works of modern and postmodern writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan enchants and eventually causes the downfall of Jay Gatsby, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita mesmerizes Humbert Humbert, and Lennie falls victim to Curly’s wife in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Little has been written, however, about the role of the femme fatale in the fiction of the naturalistic writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps because the seductive power of the femme fatale implies much greater agency than the naturalistic writers’ vision would permit.