VV(V): V.

[Dave Monroe]

While I have this at hand, and seeing as we're on to Vera Meroving here, 
from Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis 
(New York: Routledge, 1991), "Introduction: Deadly Women, Epistemology and 
Film Theory," pp. 1-14 ...

The femme fatale is the figure of a certain discursive unease, a potential 
epistemological trauma.  For her most striking characteristic, perhaps , is 
the fact that she never really is what she seems to be.  She harbors a 
threat which is not entirely legible, predictable, or manageable.  In thus 
transforming the threat of woman into a secret, something which must be 
aggressively revealed, unmasked, discovered, the figure is fully compatible 
with the epistemological drive of narrative, the hermeneutic structuration 
of the classical text.  Sexuality becomes the site of questions about what 
can and cannot be known.... (1)

The femme fatale emerges as a central figure in the nineteenth century, in 
the texts of writers such as Theophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and 
painters such as Gustave Moreau and Dante Gabriel Rosetti.  If, as Christine 
Buci-Glucksmann point out, the archaeology of modernity is "haunted by the 
feminine," the femme fatale is one of its most persistent incarnations.  She 
is associated with the styles of Decadence, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau as 
well as with the attention to decoration and excessive detail linked to a 
persistent and popular Orientalism (in the constant return, for instance, to 
the figures of Salome and Cleopatra).  Her appearance marks the confluence 
of modernity, urbanization, Freudian psychoanalysis and new technologies of 
production and reproduction (photography, the cinema) born of the Industrial 
Revolution. (1)

[Doane is here citing Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La raison baroque: de 
Baudelaire a Benjamin (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1984), p. 34.  This has 
since been translated by Patrick Camiller as Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics 
of Modernity (London: Sage, 1994), which reminds me ...]

... this is the moment when the male seems to lose access to the body, which 
the woman then comes to overrepresent.  The "working body" is "confiscated 
by the alienation of machines" and "submitted to industrialization and 
urbanization."  At the same time, in a compensatory gesture, the woman is 
made to inhere even more closely to the body.  The feminine body is 
insistently allegorized and mythified as excess in art, literature, 
philosophy.  It becomes the "veritable formal correlative" of an 
increasingly instrumentalized reason in a technological society.  
Consequently, it is appropriate that the femme fatale is represented as the 
antithesis of the maternal--sterile or barren, she produces nothing in a 
society which fetishizes production.

[and here Doane cites Buci-Glucksmann, La raison baroque, pp. 203-4 (will 
note pagination in the English trans. when I dig it out), and notes as well, 
in re: sterility, Virginia M. Allen, The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon (Troy, 
NY: Whitston, 1983), p. 4, which I'm not familiar with, but will look into 
...]

In what does the deadliness of the femme fatale consist and why is she so 
insistently a figure of fascination in the texts of modernity?  Her power is 
of a peculiar sort insofar as it is usually not subject to her conscious 
will, hence appearing to blur the opposition between passivity and activity. 
  She is an ambivalent figure because she is not the subject of power but 
its carrier (the connotations of disease are appropriate here).  Indeed, if 
the femme fatale overrepresents the body it is because she is attributed 
with a body which is itself given agency independent of consciousness,  In a 
sense, she has power despite herself.  The evacuation of intention from her 
operations is fully consistent with the epistemological recognition accorded 
to the newly born psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious,  The femme 
fatale is an articulation of fears surrounding the loss of stability and 
centrality of the self, the "I,' the ego.  These anxieties appear quite 
explicitly in the process of her representation as castration anxiety.  
Virginia Allen has associated the femme fatale with "that moment of 
abandonment in the sex act" and the ensuing "loss of self-awareness" [Allen, 
p. 2].  The power accorded to the femme fatale is a function of fears linked 
to uncontrollable drives, the fading of subjectivity, and the loss on 
conscious agency--all themes of the emergent theories of psychoanalysis.  
But the femme fatale is situated as evil and is frequently punished or 
killed.  Her textual eradication involves a desperate reassertion of control 
on the part of the threatened male subject.  Hence, it would be a mistake to 
see her as some kind of heroine of modernity.  She is not the subject of 
feminism but a symptom of male fears about feminism.  Nevertheless, the 
representation--like any representation--is not totally under control of its 
producers and, once disseminated, comes to take on a life of its own. (2-3)

... which I think to no small extent contextualizes, interprets, and perhaps 
even problematizes that figure of V. (a feminine figure, perhaps an 
automaton--though, interestingly, and no doubt significantly, not feminine 
when ultimately revealed as such--who does indeed take on many of the aspect 
above), those figures of Victoria Wren and Vera Meroving (and note that eye 
...) and Hedwig Vogelsang and Veronica Manganese and the Bad Priest and ... 
and, again, see as well in these regards Felicia Miller Frank, The 
Mechanical Song: Women, Voice and the Artificial in Nineteenth Century 
French Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995), among others ...

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