Film Noir’s “Femmes Fatales”: Moving Beyond Gender Fantasies

In her essay “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf says, “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality” (1988). Nowhere is this insight truer than in the culture’s preoccupation with the “femme fatale,” a figure I want to identify as a phantom, an illusion and myth that I wish not so much to kill, but to deconstruct as a category that feeds cultural gender fantasies. Feminist film critics have long recognized the ideological power of the “femme fatale”: first in terms of her role as a projection of male fear and desire; later, as a politically forceful symbol of unencumbered power. I want not only to extend emphases by critics such as Christine Gledhill, Elizabeth Cowie, and Jans Wager on how noir speaks to women but also to show the striking extent to which “femmes fatales”—seductresses whose desires and malevolence are seemingly unmotivated—don’t in fact exist in the noir movies in which so-called bad women appear.