Feme Fate : The Common Characters Of The Femme Fatale

Along with chiaroscuro, lighting a dark weather, the femme fatale is one of the main traits of film noir. It is the femme fatale that excites and draws in the audience.

She plays the role of the not so noble protector who cares about her sister. Marlowe initially likes Vivian because of her looks (she has great legs) and she plays the role of the temptress extraordinarily well. During his investigation, Marlowe goes so far as to make a pass at her. Her power lies in being the strong female with a masculine sensibility. She knew how to use her looks to manipulate Marlowe. Both she and Carmen frustrated Marlowe in very different ways.

To analyze the impact of women in the picture, one must examine Philip Marlowe, the hero and epitome of masculinity. Throughout the novel, Marlowe displays the admirable qualities of a man: intelligence, strength and justice. Additionally, Marlowe’s role as the hero of the film creates an example to which all men should strive. He represents the goals and desires of men, and as such his behavior helps define the position of women. Women constantly throw themselves at Marlowe, allowing him to pick from a fairly wide selection. His choice of Vivian holds considerable weight in determining the traits that make a woman popular. Marlowe’s interactions with all women help reveal the complexities of 1940s feminine attraction.

In Trifles, Susan Glaspell debates the roles between men and women during a period where a debate was not widely conducted. Glaspell wrote Trifles in the early 1900s—a time when feminism was just getting started. In this play, Glaspell shows us her perspective on the roles of men and women and how she believes the situation would play out. Trifles seems like another murder mystery on the surface, but the play has a much more profound meaning behind it. Glaspell presents the idea that men and women analyze situations differently, and how these situations are resolved based on how we interpret them. Research shows that women’s brains “may be optimized for combining analytical and intuitive thinking.” On the other hand, male brains are predominately “optimized for motor skills and actions” (Lewis). In the play, this research shows true when the women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, analyze details rather than looking at the apparent, physical evidence, and they find out the motive of the murder. The men, on the other hand, look at broader evidence that does not lead to any substantial conclusion. When Glaspell was writing this play, she wanted the women to be the real instigators, the ones that would end up solving the mystery. While the men in the story laugh at the ‘trifles’ that women worry about, these details mean a great deal in Glaspell’s eyes. Glaspell presents the idea what men and women are different in the way they live their lives through detail.

Does deviating from one’s gender norms inevitably doom one down a spiral of moral corruption? Tim O'Brien, author of “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” and Ernest Hemingway, author of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, certainly seem to hold this view, as evident by the fates of the major female characters in their respective works. The deviance of the major female characters in both works appears to corrupt not only themselves, but also pollute their partners, causing them to suffer injury or harm as a result. The degree of injury ranges from negligible, like Fossie’s demotion and broken heart, to fatal, like the bullet that rips through Macomber’s skull. It begs the question, are these stories meant to serve as cautionary tales for their female readers, or possibly for their husbands, so they may recognize gender deviance and stop it in its tracks before their wives transform into Margot Macomber or Mary Anne Bell? This essay will analyze what such characters say about pervading views of women, both in society and in literature.

Susan Glaspell’s one-act play, Trifles, weaves a tale of an intriguing murder investigation to determine who did it. Mrs. Wright is suspected of strangling her husband to death. During the investigation the sheriff and squad of detectives are clueless and unable to find any evidence or motive to directly tie Mrs. Wright to the murder. They are baffled as to how he was strangled by a rope while they were supposedly asleep side by side. Glaspell artfully explores gender differences between men and women and the roles they each fulfill in society by focusing on their physicality, their methods of communication and vital to the plot of the play, their powers of observation. In simple terms, the play suggests that men tend to be assertive,

The classic femme fatale in forced to resort to murder to free herself from an unbearable relationship with a man who would try to possess and control her, as if she were a piece of property or a pet. According to Sylvia Harvey, author of Women's place: The absent family, the women of film noir are "presented as prizes, desirable objects" for the leading men of these films. The femme fatale's unique power is her brazen willingness and ability to express herself in sexual terms. By this the femme fatale threatens the status quo, and the hero, because she controls her own sexuality outside of marriage. She uses sex for pleasure and as a weapon or a tool to control men, not merely in the culturally acceptable capacity of procreation within marriage. Her sexual emancipation commands the gaze of the hero, the audience, and the camera in a way that cannot be erased by her final punishment. Attempts to neutralise the power and blatant sexuality of the femme fatale by destroying her at the end are usually unsuccessful, because her power extends beyond death. Noir films immediately convey the intense sexual presence of the femme fatale by introducing her as a fully established object of the hero's obsession. Since the camera often represents the hero's subjective memory, revealed

Susan Glaspell’s one-act play covers issues regarding female oppression and patriarchal domination. The play still exists as a fascinating hybrid of murder mystery and social commentary on the oppression of women. When Margaret Hossack was charged with the murder of her sixty year old husband John, the man she had been married to for thirty three years. Killed by two blows to his head with an ax, John Hossack was thought to be a cold mannered and difficult man to be married to, but he didn’t deserve his

“A Jury of Her Peers” is a short story written by Susan Glaspell in 1917 illustrates early feminist literature. The two female characters, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, is able to solve the mystery of who the murderer of John Wright while their male counterparts could not. This short story had been adapted from Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles written the previous year. The play consists of the same characters and plotline as the story. In both works, Glaspell depicts how the men, Sheriff Peters and Mr. Hale, disregard the most important area in the house, the kitchen, when it comes to their investigation. In the end, the women are the ones who find clues that lead to the conclusion of Minnie Wright, John Wright’s wife, is the one who murdered him. Both of Glaspell’s female characters illustrate the ability to step into a male dominated profession by taking on the role of detective. According to Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, written by Lois Tyson, a reader-response critique “focuses on readers’ response to literary texts” and it’s a diverse area (169). Through a reader-response criticism from a feminist lens, we are able to analyze how “A Jury of Her Peers” and Trifles depict how a patriarchal society oppresses women in the early twentieth century, gender stereotypes confined both men and women and the emergence of the New Woman is illustrated.

These three brides represent the femme fatale, the fatal woman. The over sexualised women whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. These women serve as monstrous reminders of what happens if the boundaries of proper behaviour and traditional gender roles are crossed. These women, although beautiful, possess the wrong type of beauty, one of which brands them as evil, openly sexual and seductive women. Who, in addition lack the chaste passivity and fragility of the ideal Victorian lady, thus making them deserving of some form of punishment in order for them to be returned to their pure, innocent, albeit dead, human form.

As one of the most famous hard-boiled crime fictions, The Long Goodbye enjoys its reputation not only for the story itself, but also for its delicate social criticism. In fact, this novel is representative of how female characters are formed in the noir world. There are basically three main female characters in the book: the victim Sylvia Lennox, her sister Linda Loring, and the criminal (or villain) Eileen Wade. These characters show the typical roles that women play in the noir world – women can be very emotional, and thus commit crimes. Compared with men, who may get involved with crime for money, revenge and other issues, women seem to have more emotional desires, which in most cases involve love. In The Long Goodbye, Eileen, the representative of “Blonde,” somehow also portrays the “femme fatale” image that would often appear in noir fiction, while Linda Loring, who is pure and innocent and who falls in

Euripides and Sophocles wrote powerful tragedies that remain influential to this day. The vast majority of work recovered from this time is by male authorship. What remains about women of this time is written through the lens of male authors’ perspective and beliefs about the role of women in Greek culture. The works of these two playwrights frequently characterize women as unstable and dangerous. Agave, Antigone, and Medea are all undoubtedly the driving force behind the tragic action in these plays. It is their choices that lead to the pain and death of the people around them. Through an examination of the evidence from three separate works, Antigone, The Bacchae, and The Medea, the role of women in ancient Greek tragedy becomes clear. The actions of Agave, Antigone, and Medea repeatedly prove their characters instability and danger.

To analyze the impact of women in the picture, one must examine Philip Marlowe, the hero and epitome of masculinity. Throughout the

The issue of female persecution throughout many of Hitchcock’s films has been fiercely contested, none more so than the controversial issue of assault and the attempted rape of a woman. Views that Hitchcock represents the archetypal misogynist are supported, Modelski suggesting that his films invite “his audience to indulge their most sadistic fantasies against the female” (18). Through both the manipulation of sound and the use of language, none more so than in Blackmail and Frenzy, the idea of rape and violence does effectively silence and subdue not only the women in the films, but the also the women watching them (18).

“Jane Eyre” is a book centred around female duality. In a time when females were still expected to fulfill their “womanly duties,” Charlotte Bronte wrote a novel dealing with a woman’s view on morality & sexuality, passion & sensibility, and conformity & insanity, among other themes. This motif of duality plays a strong part in the dynamism that makes up the book, and is not limited to the themes, but is also used to relate many of the characters to the titular Jane. In “The Mystery at Thornfield,” Valerie Beattie makes claims that the character Bertha Mason’s insanity is a representation of rebellion toward the limitations of Victorian women. Not only is