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Binias, Silke
Symbol and Symptom

The 'Femme Fatale' in English Poetry of the 19th Century and Feminist Criticism.

This study analyses the literary motif of the 'femme fatale' in selected nineteenth-century English poems from Romanticism and the Victorian Age to the 'fin de siècle'. As a contribution to the third wave of feminist literary criticism, it interrogates feminist findings about this image of femininity. The re-readings undertaken in each chapter challenge second-wave feminist critical practices of politicising dualistic social constructions of female sexuality, such as marginalisation, objectification and a silencing of the female voice as well as phallocentrism, sexist stereotyping and exploitative male voyeurism. In key poems of that era, the study problematises feminist conclusions about poetic misogyny and authorial chauvinism which result from those programmatic parameters. The texts analysed are: Percy Bysshe Shelley's "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery", John Keats' "Lamia", Robert Browning's "Porphyria's Lover", Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Lilith", Charles Algernon Swinburne's "Laus Veneris", and Arthur Symons' "Variations upon Love". An appendix includes some additional observations on John Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci". Those androcentric nineteenth-century poems were selected because they were chosen by feminist critics themselves as prime examples of textual denunciations and demonisations of women as 'femmes fatales'. It can be shown that the texts not only question stultifying constructions of femininity but also of masculinity. 233 Seiten, gebunden (Anglistische Forschungen; Vol. 379/Universitätsverlag Winter 2007)