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영어

There have been lots of previous researches investigating various figures of femme fatale in Western literature and painting; however, scarcely have there been ones which are dealing with the reason for femme fatale’s preponderance in the fin-de-siècle Europe and America. Even if we acknowledge that every age produced its own femme fatale, the fin-de-siècle Europe and America was notoriously unique for their mass production and consumption of various evil femme fatale figures like Lilith, Salome, Judith and Lulu, to name a few. This article is, therefore, an effort to investigate the reason why femme fatale phenomenon was rampant especially in the 19th fin-de-siècle, while analyzing the transmutation and degradation of femme fatale to prostitute at that specific period especially in France. Even if one explains femme fatale is a phantasy and masculine projection derived from the fear of feminism in the anxious age of urban industrialism and imperialism, one cannot easily identify its popularity in the end of the 19th century because this definition of femme fatale is not directly related to its formation and genesis. The question to be raised here is therefore that why there was a reflective projection against women and how could easily be the process of projection made? The fin-de-siècle men could do this because they could find an appropriate projection in the iconic figure of prostitutes, the number of which was notoriously increasing around that time. Among many various figures such as “prostitute, new woman, suffragist, virago, primitive woman, and liberated woman” (Stott 30), prostitute was an easy projectile target for a decadent symbol in the fin-de-siècle Western defensive male imagination because she was easily to be regarded as a death dealing agent of then incurable syphilis which haunted men for several ages. The rampant existence of prostituting femme fatales in the end of the 19th century left a very negative impact upon the image of women. However, the namesake of femme fatale is soothsayer (託宣巫女), “a figure who transmits heaven’s will and order,” and even can be understood a manifestation of female subjectivity in modern sense. It is time now therefore to recover the initiatory meaning of femme fatale, “the one who gives life,” as evidenced by original femme fatale, Eve whose literal meaning is, as contrary to popular belief, life (Hawah), not death.