Introduction
Dashiell Hammett ’ s The Maltese Falcon ( 1930 ) is perhaps best known from John Huston ’ s 1941 film of the same name . This film is now regarded as a prime example of film noir and , as a convention of film noir , Brigid O ’ Shaughnessy is viewed as the “ quintessential ‘ femme fatale ’” ( Grossman 2009 , 22 ). However , as Julie Grossman points out , while the femme fatale may now be thought of as being synonymous with film noir , the figure existed well before the movement of the 1940s and 1950s . Stevie Simkin writes on the history of the figure of the femme fatale :
The figure of the beautiful but lethal women or femme fatale has a long history of having been ‘ drawn that way ’. She is a familiar archetype in Western culture , from early modern tragedy , via British Romantic poetry and Gothic fiction , popular art in fin de siècle France , and noir cinema of the 1940s-50s , to the cycle of movies featuring psychotic females of the 1980s-90s . In fact , her roots lie even deeper : she can be traced back to the biblical story of Eve tempting Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge . ( Simkin 2014 , 5 )
It becomes obvious then , from Simkin ’ s historical account that the femme fatale has a rich history both before and after the film noir movement and this has been an ‘ archetype ’ ( Simkin 2014 , 5 ) or a label used to define women for centuries . Could it be that women at some point began to use these femme fatale archetypes to their advantage ? As this essay asks , is it possible to read within classic noir texts a playing-with those defined roles set out for women by men – the femme fatale and the angel in the house – in order to underpin those very roles ? Judith Butler ’ s notion of performativity can be used here to suggest that women merely perform the role of the femme fatale or the angel in the house because those are the socially accepted definitions of femininity . Butler writes :
In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause , gender identity might be re-conceived as a personal / cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practises which refer laterally to other imitations and which , jointly , construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanism of that construction ( Butler 1999 , 188 ).