How does a body that is routinely suppressed and symbolically annihilated manage to make a space in which to live, a space for freedom? How does this body circumvent systems of control and coercion? In order to answer these philosophical questions, I look to the femme fatale as a trope of artistic production and social culture during the turn of the twentieth century. The femme fatale—the hypersexual, mysterious, magnetic, and “dangerous” woman—was the enemy of the fin-de-siècle, her “danger” stemming from her construction as a symbol of the negation of masculinity, life, fate, rationality, verbal prowess, and identity, among other facets. I argue that the femme fatale trope was a catalyst that contributed to the erosion and fracture of musical form that characterized the Modernist period: it was the trope itself, endowed with certain qualities of subjectivity, that led to innovations of musical form and to the transcontinental exchange of the femme fatale—from French and German opera to Harlem Renaissance vaudeville performances, from an anarchist Jewish woman in 1900 to a gender non-conforming Black woman in 1908. In essence, the femme fatale became an avatar of resistance; she resisted and subverted gendered norms and formal musical norms while at the same time becoming a medium for racial and social dissent.

            The driving question of this interdisciplinary monograph that guides it towards answering the philosophical questions above is, “Was the proliferation of femme fatale appearances between 1875 and 1937 simply a reaction to contemporary fears of women and questions of their agency—a way of transducing contemporaneous social and cultural qualms—or did the femme fatale also drive aesthetic innovation as a result of the characteristics of the trope? To answer this, I turn to the most notable occurrences of the trope in operas of that time period: Georges Bizet’s Carmen, Jules Massenet’s Thaïs, Camille Saint-Saens’s Samson et Dalila, Richard Strauss’s Salome, and Alban Berg’s Lulu.

            Modernist women understood the femme fatale archetype and their access to it as a way of subverting dominant narratives and critiquing oppressive systems of power. They knew of its ties to dangerous femininity and otherness. I explore how these links have justified violence and oppression against women and marginalized groups at the narrative level of fiction. I then go on to demonstrate how, rather than succumbing to the negative characterizations of the femme fatale trope, both fictional characters and real women alike embraced the femme fatale persona and used it to their advantage. In other words, they adopted the femme fatale as an avatar for the purposes of survival, they embodied “strategic essentialism” and in so doing remade the world around them. The result of such a centering of minoritized bodies is a revised history of aesthetic innovation and global modernism that will be of interest to scholars and educated lay readers in musicology, women’s studies, gender and sexuality studies, and historians of culture.