In the second half of the nineteenth century in French literature, there were significant changes in the interpretation of female characters. If before, in the era of Romanticism, heroines could be divided into angels and devils, then for the decadents of the late century in the foreground comes the femme fatale as the younger sister of the millennial archetype of the devil, as a more deeply felt and thought out its variety: more self-sufficient, more attractive, but no less cruel.

If since the Middle Ages, the ideal woman was considered to be a beautiful lady, now there has been a shift of emphasis, and she was replaced by the one whose features were captured in the ballad of the English poet John Keats (1795-1872) “La Bell Dame sans Merci” (1819), with ruthlessness and merciless in the foreground. Willingly or unwittingly, the “merciless lady” leads a man either to ruin or to a hopeless moral downfall. The fatal woman personifies the inevitability of the weird Fate.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, the attitude to the beauty of a body was somewhat different than it is now. It was considered an indispensable reflection of the inner beauty and positive qualities of a person. The she-devil with the help of dark power only creates visibility, disguised as a beauty.

Beauty serves as a kind of measure of female attractiveness, and only in the novel by English writer Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768) “Sentimental Journey through France and Italy” (1768) a more complex image appears: “interesting woman”, that is, a woman marked by a veneer of mystery. From here, it is not so far to the inscrutability of the femme fatale.

In contrast to either purely positive or infernal beauties, the femme fatale is as she is: beautiful but ruthless, daring and calculating, independent of men, changeable and mysterious, devious and malicious, her beauty is not a gift from God, it is destructive and deadly.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a crisis of the oppositions firmly established in culture: angel and demon, chastity and depravity. Chastity may well turn out to be “with a stench”: virginity does not exclude viciousness and the dangerous ability to use “for evil” its own attraction.

There are cultural stereotypes that first come to mind when we encounter the expression femme fatale. Men have been at each other’s throats in denouncing her vices, and yet their greatest fears have been her ability to destroy lives. Among these unprincipled “destroyers of life” can be attributed to greedy and lecherous creole Cecily, the heroine of “Paris Secrets” (1842-1843) Eugene Su (1804-1857) hot passion for which becomes the cause of painful death of notary Ferran [1].

In the novel “Down There” (1891) by Joris-Carles Huysmans (1848-1907), his wife Hyacinthe Chantelouv acts as a mentor who induces the protagonist to worship Satan. Unlike many other femme fatale beauties, she lacks external attractiveness, but this is compensated for by other traits of a femme fatale: she is charismatic, mysterious, haughty and impassive. This is enough to attract the protagonist and slowly but steadily plunge him into the abyss [2].

The heroine of the novel by Jules Barbe d’Aurevilliers (1808-1889) “The back of the cards or a game of whist” (1849) Countess de Stasvil obsessed with vicious passions, she is able to commit the most heinous crimes: crimes against their own children. Without flinching, she killed the baby born to her from her lover, and poisoned her own daughter, jealous of the man she considered her own [3].

It is noteworthy that poets were particularly cruel and scathing in their denunciations of women. They were the first, as is often the case in art, felt the new mood in society. Theophile Gautier (1811-1872) spoke of the sweet cruelty of femme fatales [4], and Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) in the collection “Flowers of Evil” (1857) represented his Demon in the form of “a woman, unheard of beautiful”, which pours into his mouth “a vile potion, the drink of Evil terrible”. How not to recall in this connection the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), to whom female beauty inspires inexhaustible horror [5], or the poet Albert Samen (1858-1900), in whose imagination a woman is a vampire with an angelic face [6]. According to the poet Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917), a woman has no brain at all, only a sex [7].

It is not surprising that such women want to be replaced by  a safe surrogate, hence the fashion for mechanical Venus, wax female figures, wooden statuettes and all sorts of fetishes that spread at the end of the century. All these surrogates have one thing in common: unlike a living woman, they are safe. But… not always.

In the book by Pierre Louis (1870-1925) “Woman and a puppet” (another translation of the title “Woman and Pagliacci”) as a puppet is a man obsessed with passion, completely subject to the whims of a mysterious and inscrutable woman, ready to abandon him without regrets [8]. This novel touched on the true underlying fears of men, and it is no coincidence that it was screened three times, including by Luis Bonuel in a film called “This Vague Object of Desire” (1977).

The search for the ideal of woman led a number of French writers to blur the very idea of woman. In the wake of this search, the notion of the androgyny — a being in whom female and male characteristics are inseparably united — crystallized. Initially, it was assumed that masculine features of appearance or character would serve as a pleasant complement to feminine ones.

In the light of the new gender policy of inclusiveness nowadays in the Western countries, androgyny has come into fashion again. Living at a time of a new, even more severe crisis of traditional morality, makes us remember that the androgyny of the nineteenth century also owes its origin to a crisis. It was the crisis of bourgeois morality, the expression of which was such a literary movement as Decadence with its interest in the dark sides of human nature and in various deviations from the norm.

To the fashionable theme of androgyny addresses even very far from the Decadence Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) in his novel “Seraphita” (1834), whose main character is a hermaphrodite. This hero appears to us then as Seraphita, then as Seraphitus. Victims of the irresistible appeal of androgyny become both women who see in him an irresistible man, and men, captivated by his beauty, in which they recognize the triumph of femininity. What unites these unwilling victims, however, is that both feel threatened by him and are painfully affected by his coldness and aloofness [9].

The culmination of Joseph Paladan’s (1858-1918) reflections on the search for an ideal devoid of flaws was the novel “Androgyny” (1891), where the author describes his attempt to present us with a supreme being in whom the best features of both sexes are present. Androgyny considers himself a superior being, he manages to make many people from his environment believe in this. However, the writer is forced to recognize that the state of androgyny is a stage of the journey, the worthy conclusion of which is only death [10].

Another reference to the theme of androgyny is the novel by Villiers de Lil-Adan (1838-1889) with the telling title “Eve of the Future” (1886). Ewald, the novel’s protagonist, finds himself on the verge of suicide because his beautiful bride is stupid and soulless. His ingenious friend undertakes to create a machine endowed with the appearance of this bride, which he plans to revive by instilling in it the spirit of his mysterious assistant. The experiment succeeds, but both the new Eve and the bride who served as her prototype die tragically [11].

If we try to look at the history of the development of the femme fatale theme from the point of view of chronology, it should be recognized that, according to some researchers, the change of the female image has already occurred. The beginning of the era of post-fatal woman in literature dates back to the second third of the twentieth century. This image has had time to form and is waiting for its researchers.