No artist lives in a vacuum. Artists, just like writers, musicians, and politicians, are products of their time and place. Social pressures, economic and political change, technological advances and historically-grounded taste all affect what, why, and how artists paint, sculpt, or plan.
The concept of the femme fatale in art developed in the second half of the nineteenth century against a backdrop of profound change (Huvenne and van Twist, 7). Artists' place in society was shifting as new technology – photography – raucously burst onto the great stage of Art. No longer were painters needed to render commonplace scenes or portaits with careful attention to detail and fidelity to reality; one man or woman with a camera could capture any scene from life in just seconds for only a sliver of what it cost to produce a painting with new and rapidly-evolving photographic technologies.
Why do artists choose their subjects?
Exotic allure and escapism
In addition to the new challenge which photography levelled on painters' work and livelihood, the radical shifts in social relations that had been spurred on by booming industrialization and urbanization in the first half of the nineteenth century were fully fleshing out as the decades mounted.
The extreme growth facilited by capitalist national economies and concentrated among the bourgeoisie produced a large middle class with disposable income, leisure time, a passion for keeping up with the times and tastes, and a burning need to prove themselves cultured and refined.
However, being an average middle class citizen in any society, even one as bustling and booming as nineteenth century Europe, is really, in all likelihood, still boring, monotonous, and dull at some points.
Audiences who had grown accustomed to the daily grind of their increasingly economically-fixed lives yearned for fantasy worlds bursting with tragedy, intrigue, reverberating symbolism and richly saturated colors into which they could escape (Huvenne and van Twist, 8).
Cue the femme fatale: passion, seduction, deception, danger, death, downfall and delectable drama all depicted within a single motif. Stories from antiquity, biblical tradition, folklore and legend were all dragged up to the surface for fresh interpretation. Artists of the late nineteenth century's femmes fatales drew apon established conventions in artistic depictions of women – pale skin, draped clothing, and traditional compositions, for example – while establishing their own visual canon of expressions, gestures, postures, ornaments, and color, among other details.
The Depths of the Sea
Edward Burne-Jones, 1886
Social relations and gender norms in the nineteenth century and fear of failure. Of course, the technological challenges of the art world and the escapist fantasies of the middle classes cannot fully explain the rise in the sharp portrayal of these countless female figures as bewitching, provocative, destructive seductresses. Scenes can have plenty of passionate drama and exotic escapism without evil women lurking behind enticing, guileful eyes.
Gender roles in the nineteenth century were sharply delineated in a binary system of strict complementarity. As Ruskin described in Sesame and Lilies, “[e]ach [sex] has what the other has not; each completes the other, and is completed by the other: they are nothing alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other can only give." Men and women were understood to be fundamentally different creatures whose temperaments and functions stemmed from their biological differences. For Ruskin, Man was to embody everything active in the world: he was to compete in the great daily battles within the political and economic realms and be the protector of his family from these troubles. Woman was a fundamentally domestic creature, naturally benevolent, virtuous, and self-sacrificing. Her proper place was in the home, creating a peaceful, regenerative respite for her battle-scarred husband from the awful atrocities he had to face in his daily life ("often he must be wounded, or subdued; often misled; and ALWAYS hardened," dramatized Ruskin). “Woman’s great function is Praise,” Ruskin asserted – praise of her husband's deeds and actions, that is, based in her superior moral judgement (which would always find that her husband needed a great deal of Praise with a capital P of course).
This "oppressive male sentimentality about the soul-healing power of female virtue" became firmly entrenched in nineteenth century society (Dijkstra, 9) – "[t]he expulsion of the middle-class woman from participation in practical life had become fact; woman had never been placed on a more llofty pedestal" (Dijkstra, 4) – and "[a]ny public–or even private – display of levity or physical energy on the part of women was a clear indication of the spiritual frivolity of such women and their concomitant inability to serve as efficient vessels for the care and feeding of their husbands' souls" (Dijkstra, 8).
Underlying the cultish belief that the inherent virtue of femininity would become appalled at all sin – such as that pictured in William Holman Hunt's "The Awakening Conscience" showing a 'kept woman' rising from her lover's lap toward the open window with the glow of happy redemption in her eyes – was a festering suspicion that woman was "too weak a creature to be able to sustain man's lofty dreams of her material sainthood" (Dijkstra, 4).
Artists who depicted femmes fatales in the late nineteenth century transferred the anxieties of the male public onto canvas; this confrontational subject matter filled audiences' desire for exotic, captivating drama and intrigue while opening up avenues for artists to maintain their livelihood in the art world by depicting fantastical scenes in vivid colors which photography could not produce.
But why so many women?
The Awakening Conscience
William Holman Hunt, 1853
The threat of independence
Woman's opportunity as Man's defeat. The threat men felt at the increasingly visible reality of women's survival without men was a real and pervasive phenomenon. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, women were gaining legal rights through reforms – in Britain these included such civic reforms as divorce legislation, child custody provisions, and women's rights to own property and represent themselves in court – the opportunity for economic independence through the wave of 'pink collar' positions which opened up for women – as sales clerks and secretaries, for example – the expansion of women's education – new women's colleges continued to open through the late nineteenth century – and, most directly, by the campaigns and efforts of women themselves to procure their own goals and aims – the militant practices of suffrage movements at the turn of the century, including destruction of property, vandalism, and hunger strikes – terrified a male public whose very identity was based in active opposition of all the traits and characteristics which defined Woman.
Dangerous sexuality. This palpable danger was manifested in and mirrored by the danger femmes fatales posed to their male victims. "Diabolical women with the light of hell in their eyes were stalking men everywhere in the art of the turn of the century," Dijkstra explains. Christian figures like Sir Percival and St. Anthony were plagued by women of "catlike mien" whose only wishes were to dissipate the men's heroic, saintly virtue and secure their downfalls. Figures taken from mythological tales like John William Waterhouse's Hylas, for example, found themselves at the mercy of alluring, naked young female figures – nymphs, in this case – who "wound their soft arms around his so that they might drag him brusquely into their watery bower, where they could be expected to have their fill of him even as he drowned" (Dijkstra, 252–253).
Lilith with a Snake
John Collier, 1892
Art as a coping mechanism
Eroticism and condemnation. Femmes fatales were almost always portrayed as beautiful nudes, enticing and appealing to male audiences. The veneer of placing nudity in the context of mythological or fantastical subject matter provided an acceptable context for sexualized and eroticized content. In portraying these enticing seductresses, artists and audiences could condemn the femmes fatales for their sinful, deceptive ways while deriving pleasure from creating and viewing their ravishing beauty and sexuality in a publically condoned manner. These sexually voracious women stood in sharp contrast to the passive sexuality to which all respectable, 'normal' women were bound.
Individuals like Salome and mythological figures like sirens fit this mold perfectly. Portrayed as primarily eroticized beings in mythical garb, these sexualized female figures could be depicted in an acceptable, publically condoned manner. As exotic, legendary figures, they were not bound by the strict standard of propriety and virtually nonexistent sexuality to which women of late nineteenth century society were subjected.
Hylas and the Nymphs
John William Waterhouse, 1896
As Europe in the nineteenth century faced a barrage of changes in society catalyzed by the expansion of capitalism and the rapid growth of the middle class, intense anxieties about gender relations blended with escapist desires and strict social laws governing sexuality to birth the seductive, dangerous femme fatale as a popular and widely-depicted subject.