In his 1851 Essai sur les Femmes, Arthur Schopenhauer presented women as fixed in a latent stage between man and child. And it is from the seed of this misogyny that the femme enfant concept flourished in the naturalist, symbolist, decadent and even realist texts of that time period, as Mireille Dottin-Orsini has shown in her book, Cette Femme qu’ils disent fatale. While… Read more →
Tag: youth
Writing the “Femme Enfant”
Mario Praz has emphasized the difficulties in cataloguing the femme fatale, but he did not consider the possibility of a fatal (and possibly virgin) femme enfant which makes the classification of such a figure an even richer procedure. In an attempt to both introduce and re-contextualize the way in which women’s youth might have become dangerous, the initial paper of the panel will… Read more →