Anxiety regarding female sexuality as toxic was rife in the 20th Century; from the physical fears of women carrying diseases such as syphilis to the idea explored much earlier in Shakespeare’s Othello, that if a woman shows any slight signs of her sexuality, men become overridden with jealousy and hatred. (Bullough, G, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare) So it seems that if men show any signs of sexuality, they are glorified, whereas women are ultimately condemned. Due to the AIDs epidemic at the turn of the century, sexuality and sex itself was fraught with fear and danger, causing men to have castration anxiety both literally and metaphorically.
Fashion is a symptom of our environment and is symbolic of our society, therefore it reflects any contemporary anxieties such as these. 1990’s fashion, the femme fatale was a well explored concept, from Jean Paul Gaultier to Alexander McQueen. In her book exploring, ‘Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness’, Caroline Evans argued that much of 1990’s fashion depicted, ‘images of a woman so powerfully sexual that no one would dare lay hands on her, a woman who used her sexuality as a sword rather than a shield’. As Caroline Evans argues, ‘Women are made glamorous and fascinated by their open sexuality, yet condemned for using it as a seductive weapon’ and as Simone de Beauvoir wrote in the mid 19th century, ‘there is both a fascination with and lust for the sexualised woman, and yet stern condemnation of such desires’. (De Beauvoir, S. and PARSHLEY, H.M, The Second Sex,136) Perhaps as sex was so fraught with dangers and death, sexuality in fashion had replaced the danger of sex itself and therefore in fashion and visual culture female sexuality was being celebrated rather than controlled? In her book, ‘Fashion, desire and anxiety: image and morality in the twentieth century’, Rebecca Arnold suggested that, ‘fashion presented the interplay of contradictions: self expression, self-creation, sensual desire counterbalanced with ambiguity,threat and anxiety’.
Jean Paul Gaultier’s woman tended to look almost robotic, thus exploring the beauty of the skeleton, shown by the models wearing structured yet fetishised clothing. His women often appeared deathly, with their hair pulled tightly back, dramatic eyes, pallid face and blood red lips wearing clothing reminiscent of a skeleton. This idea is explored in Charles Baudilaire’s poem ‘Danse Macabre’ where a picture of a dancing skeleton, ‘Her deep eye-sockets are empty and dark, And her skull, skilfully adorned with flowers’ and her entrancing beauty is painted.’
Rather than creating an emblem of typical beauty, Alexander McQueen himself spoke to The Times in 2010 of beauty coming, ‘from the strangest of places, even the most disgusting of places’. His 1996 collection, ‘The Hunger’ was based on vampires, who were a traditional view of the femme fatale in 20th century film and theatre and his collection included a plastic corset with live worms pressed between the model’s flesh and the garment.
Most notably, the femme fatale was a leading theme in Hollywood film noir in the 1940’s and 50’s and, the female lead became a spectacle of femininity which was fetishised. Characters in the films of Hitchcock and many others, depicted strong, uncompromising and sexually powerful women. The representation of female sexuality as terrifyingly dangerous has been a long standing fear of men in society and femme fatales turn their feminine characteristics into a beautifully terrifying power.
Drawing on the concept of castration anxiety and Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘Male Gaze’, – analysing its elements it is clear to see the subject of the ‘gaze’ is vital to how femininity is portrayed. The term ‘gaze’ first became popularised in feminist film criticism with Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. In which, she argued that ‘cinematic viewing was the interplay between narcissistic identification and erotic voyeurism’ (Nelson, R, Shiff, R, Critical Terms for Art History. 321). Here she is claiming that viewers associate the male characters with themselves and that women are predominately being eroticised with sexual feelings being projected onto them. She argues that the woman is being presented as an object of eroticised viewing and men derive pleasure from looking at her. This is also known as scopophilia (a term created by Freud in his theory of fetish). Mulvey draws comparisons to Lacan’s concept of ‘the Mirror Stage’ and combines this with a scopophilic aspect to the way in which women are viewed. Mulvey describes, ‘a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy on the female figure which is styled accordingly.’ Here, Mulvey raises the idea of sexual imbalance and women being styled in accordance with male desire. An interesting idea that Mulvey raises is that the female image always represents a threat. As she argues,’in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure.’
In terms of Art History and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the femme fatale became fashionable in European avant-garde paintings. The painter Gustave Moreau, depicted an image of Salome brandishing the head of John the Baptist, insinuating the terrifying power of a woman’s sexuality.
The femme fatale also flourished during the Romantic period in the works of John Keats, notably in his poem ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ translated as ‘beautiful lady without mercy’ where the idea of a temptingly beautiful woman who leads the male to destruction is evidenced.
In her book, ‘The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis’, Barbara Creed explores the role of women in horror films and the way in which females are frequently presented as victims. Creed identifies that when the female is presented as ‘monstrous’, she is frequently done so in relation to her ‘mothering functions’. This echoes the argument of Julia Kristeva in ‘Powers of Horror‘, that monstrosity and repulsion of the feminine is linked directly to the natural, reproductive and maternal functions of the woman’s body.
Representations of the monstrous feminine have historically permeated mythology, art and literature. From the European Witch trials, where women were accused of crimes ranging from castration and murders, causing natural disasters such as storms or floods and myths of female vampires. However ‘The Medusa’, is the ultimate emblem of the femme fatale in mythology, Freud linked the sight of ‘The Medusa’s head’ to the equally ‘horrifying’ sight of a woman’s vulva. If we accept the ideology that the, Medusa’s head takes the place of a representation of the female genitals’, we must accept that seeing the woman as a monster is different from that of a monstrous male in that it is directly linked to her sexual power.
In Marjorie Garber’s exploration of the uncanny in relation to Shakespeare, she argues that, ”The Medusa, like the murderous Lady Macbeth, becomes an emblem of gender ambiguity, neither purely masculine, nor purely feminine, but a monstrous hybrid’. It seems to be that particular hybrid, which lacks the typical associations of femininity as gentle and delicate – gaining animalistic elements, which forms the true femme fatale.
In combining animalistic visuals with femininity, something other worldly is created – neither purely masculine nor purely feminine, nor entirely human – this action creates a whole new type of ‘woman’, more powerful that any one gender or species , this is the epitome of a femme fatale.