“You Avenge the Others”: The Portrait of a Femme Fatale in Gladys Huntington’s Madame Solario

• Authors: Alicja Piechucka
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The article deals with the concept of femme fatale as presented in Gladys Huntington’s 1956 novel Madame Solario. The eponymous protagonist, Natalia Solario, displays several characteristics of this female archetype, omnipresent in literature, culture and visual iconography. As a femme fatale, Natalia is beauty, danger and mystery incarnate. The cause of tragedies, but also a tragic figure herself, Madame Solario is both victim and victimizer. The article explores the interplay between innocence and experience, life and death, the erotic and the thanatic, as well as the motifs of transgression, ambiguity, love, passion, desire, perversion, dominance and control crucial to Huntington’s novel. Madame Solario reminds us that, paradoxically, the femme fatale usurps certain stereotypically masculine traits. This, in turn, brings us to the novel’s feminist dimension: the femme fatale is victimized by men, but she is also the agent of female revenge and, ultimately, liberation, symbolically marking the transition from patriarchy to women’s emancipation.

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 5
• Pages: 112-128

Dates

published

2015-11-01

online

2015-11-17

Contributors

author

Alicja Piechucka

• University of Łódź

References

• “Femme fatale.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Web. 8 Nov. 2014.
• “Femme Fatale.” Webster’s New World Dictionary. Ed. Victoria Neufeldt. 1989. Print.
• Hart, Josephine. Damage. New York: Random House, 1996. Print.
• Huntington, Gladys. Madame Solario. Surrey: The Book Society, 1956. Print.
• Markus, Ruth. “Femme Fatale at the Turn of the 20th Century.” Femme Fatale. Tel-Aviv: Museum Tel-Aviv, 2006. 179-88. en.ruthmarkus.com. Web. 8 Nov. 2014.
• Minor, Nata. Qui a écrit Madame Solario? Paris: Éditions Métailié, 1992. Print.
• Piechucka, Alicja. “‘Saint Brother and Saint Sister’: The Motif of Fraternal Incest in Gladys Huntington’s Madame Solario.” Polish Journal for American Studies 7 (2013): 65-81. Print.
• Sacher-Masoch, Leopold Ritter von. Venus in Furs. Project Gutenberg. 1 Nov. 2004. Web. 8 Nov. 2014.

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/texmat-2015-0009