The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale

Download or read book The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale written by R. Stott and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1992-11-20 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the rise of the femme fatale as a prominant fictional type in late nineteenth-century British culture. As a stereotype she has been 'fabricated', that is to say constructed as a 'figure in the carpet' of the fin-de-siècle. The book argues that Rider Haggard's She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed , Bram Stoker's female vampires and Conrad's destructive Malayan or African women, even Hardy's Tess , are all caught up in a series of late nineteenth-century contexts: biological determinism, imperialism, race, theories about female sexuality, degeneration and evolutionary theory.