Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction “No One Mourns the Wicked”

   1. Introduction “No One Mourns the Wicked”

      • Julie Grossman

      Pages 1-18

3. Part I Rereading Film Noir

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

      PDF

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

      • Julie Grossman

      Pages 21-40

   3. “Well, aren’t we ambitious”: Desire, Domesticity, and the “Femme Fatale,” or “You’ve made up your mind I’m guilty”: The Long Reach of Misreadings of Woman as Wicked in American Film Noir

      • Julie Grossman

      Pages 41-66

   4. Psychological Disorders and “Wiretapping the Unconscious”: Film Noir Listens to Women

      • Julie Grossman

      Pages 67-89

4. Film Noir’s Janus Face

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 91-91

      PDF

   2. Looking Back—Victorinoir: Modern Women and the Fatal(e) Progeny of Victorian Representations

      • Julie Grossman

      Pages 93-131

   3. Looking Forward: Deconstructing The “Femme Fatale”

      • Julie Grossman

      Pages 132-152

5. Back Matter

   Pages 153-176

   PDF

In the context of nineteenth-century Victorinoir and close readings of original-cycle film noir, Julie Grossman argues that the presence of the "femme fatale" figure, as she is understood in film criticism and popular culture, is drastically over-emphasized and has helped to sustain cultural obsessions with "bad" women.

• culture
• film
• gender
• women

2010 Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE

'This is a compelling, informed, well-researched, and deeply original book.'

- G. A. Foster, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Choice

'Rethinking the Femme Fatale poses important questions for feminist work on noir, underlining how the style also remains a contested and rewarding critical terrain.'

- Yvonne Tasker, Journal of Gender Studies

JULIE GROSSMAN is Interim Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English, Communication and Film Studies at Le Moyne College, New York, USA. She is co-editor of A Due Voci: The Photography of Rita Hammond and has published articles on film noir, Francis Ford Coppola, Todd Haynes, Oscar Wilde and Karen Finley, and Thomas Hardy and Henry James.

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