Love is not a contractual barter, but passion. In such unconditional desire, man and woman are at the mercy of each other.
Love is not a simple barter, whoever desires gives himself skin and hair. Still, it’s better not to stop thinking. Scene from the film “Venus im Pelz” from 1995 based on the novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
Femme fatale sounds perfumed today. The haze of a turgidly stylized antiquity surrounds the term. From early modern times to the present, the fatal woman is the culturally over-molded tart who first conquers, then destroys, male resources. It leads a direct line from Lilith and Salome via Medusa, on to Medea and Helena and finally to the vampires of the silent film era and the hetaerae of modern theatre. This is shown by the Hamburg exhibition “Femme fatale. View – Power – Gender” in a beautiful and diverse way (see additional text).
The femmes fatales also materialize at some point. In the modern era: Alma Mahler-Werfel (who, from Gropius to Kokoschka, covets many who have rank, name and talent). Sarah Bernhardt embodies Alexandre Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias in the cinema. Long before Gottfried Benn invented the double life as the ultima ratio of artistic life, Mata Hari led a dual existence as a freelance dancer and spy.
A shabby term
These days we’ll settle for Kim Kardashian, who is said to have done much to distort Kanye West’s character. We met a character from the repertoire of narcissistic pathology in Amber Heard, the ex-wife of Johnny Depp. And Meghan Markle enraged even the stiff royals with her stubbornness.
It seems as if the term is little more than a contemporary variety of sexist ideas. The admonition belongs to the femme fatale: “Cherchez la femme!” See who’s directing behind a dilemma. It will be a sophisticated, malicious woman. The fact that the French of all people coined the term femme fatale may have something to do with literary tradition: Zola created Nana in the novel of the same name, Dumas said the camellia lady. Honoré de Balzac knows how to tell of the “glamor and misery of the courtesans”. With Choderlos de Laclos’ “Dangerous Liaisons” – the Marquise de Merteuil as a super-sly sadist – the femme fatale is really deadly in its effects: deadly seductive.
And the rest of the literary world? The Russians have Anna Karenina, the Austrians “Venus im Pelz”. Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” and William Moulton Marston’s insatiable Countess Isabella come from England. The American Edgar Allan Poe unleashes the anemic Ligeia on the audience. The Germans? Oh well. In any case, Gretchen is anything but toxic. On the contrary: she gets crushed by the seducer Faust, who is seduced by Mephistophelia. Countess Orsina from Lessing’s “Emilia Galotti”, then here and there a narcissist here and there – real highlights of cultural history fatal to women have not really become.
Today, femme fatales only appear in the texts of Rammstein in German-speaking countries. Women are called poisonous (the song “Toxic”) or are seductresses with vampire-style fangs who psychologically bleed their victims. It doesn’t get any more subtle – or clumsy, depending on your perspective – when you comb through the local culture.
dialectic relationships
So is the femme fatale the obsolete model of misogyny cultivated on a broad patriarchal front? Is it only good, as people in Hamburg suggest, as a concept that needs to be undermined? This is what the show shows at the end: how feminist artists revalue the femme fatale idea in their productions. She is stylized as a woman of destiny, as a self-empowering critic of male injustice.
This curatorial short-sightedness serves the same logic against which he campaigns dramaturgically. Whereas the femme fatale used to be the enemy, who had to be equipped with the insignia of malice until he could be eliminated as a vampire with a wooden stake, in postmodernism it is the man whom the self-proclaimed fatal women call to account. This idea falls short even of the classic friend-foe thinking. “The enemy is our own question as a figure,” wrote Carl Schmitt. And thus describes the essentially dialectical relationship between actors and their opponents.
One must therefore interpret cultural history differently and think of the femme fatale as an accomplice in a scenario that conveys to us less the old opposites – woman versus man, femme fatale versus their victims – than the intricate dynamics of desire. The psychic events are more complex than a woodcut with women on the dark side and men in the light of morality (or vice versa). Perpetrator and victim roles are often much less clearly defined than assumed at first glance.
The history of myths is instructive in this regard. Medusa, for example, the femme fatale with a snake’s head and a death look, wasn’t just a killer who turned rows of men into stone. She is said to have been beautiful, Athena was jealous of her. Phaedo coveted her. At the end, a bounty is placed on her head, and Perseus, the winged-shod hero with a magic cloak, takes a reflecting shield and watches her in the reflection. Because he knows looking at her directly is deadly. Then: head off.
Here the reflective man competes against the hypnotic Eros. Petrification is, psychoanalytically speaking, also a stiffening. An excited man is no longer able to defend himself, the myth wants to convey to us underhand. So he better thinks before he exposes himself to a woman’s power.
Complete exhaustion
One might find that a bit plain, but empirically it can hardly be dismissed out of hand. And the question arises: Who actually personifies evil here? Who is the perpetrator, who is the victim? Isn’t it rather the case that Medusa wants to put the man into that rigidity that may have characterized him mentally and emotionally from the start? And doesn’t Perseus, conversely, honor a great seductress by devising an epoch-making move as judge and thinker?
A close reading of the myth yields a stalemate. To put it in a more modern way: the contradictions in which we, as loving and desiring people, repeatedly entangle ourselves are revealed. Seen in this way, the femme fatale is not the breaking point of communities that are morally intact because they are regulated by men. Rather, it is the normative claim that anyone who says: I love passionately and deeply must face up to.
The femme fatale cannot be fobbed off with the tepid deals of bourgeois love arrangements. you are nice, i am nice In the end, after a few dating escapades between twenty and thirty, do we end up in paradise with our own home, cargo bike and car sharing subscription? Medea can only smile wearily. The femme fatale spends herself erotically and intellectually. And her lust for revenge is just as exuberant when you try to rip her off. Here, pulling the stool means believing that love is a mercantile relationship in which everyone gets their money’s worth. She is not. It is not a calculated exchange, but an overexpenditure. Not a conservative investment, but a risky business.
This is what the femme fatale reminds us of. And that’s why we need them now more than ever.
The dangerous woman in art
The Hamburger Kunsthalle is dedicating its first major show of the winter to the femme fatale. The dangerous woman who seduces and destroys men has appeared as a fetish and projection of famous painters since the end of the 19th century. The curators understand the femme fatale as an artistic manifestation of misogyny.
The ancestry of the femme fatale presented in Hamburg ranges from the red-haired beauties of the Pre-Raphaelite era to the vampires of genre cinema. Edvard Munch’s «Vampire» (1893/95) is one of the highlights of the show. “Judith and Holofernes” by Franz von Stuck (1927) is another.
The reinterpretation of the classic femme fatale idea can also be seen in the Kunsthalle: since the 1960s, modern artists have been deconstructing the image of the woman of destiny bringing evil with video installations, photographs and graphics. Especially in the light of the #MeToo movement, these works are important contributions to critical feminist art.
“Femme fatale. View – Power – Gender” until April 10, 2023.