FEMME FATALE
by Arthur Holmberg

Judith by Gustav Klimt, 1901.

What do men desire most in women? Their sexual allure. What do men fear most in women? Their sexual power. Doing research for Men in Love, Nancy Friday discovered that male sexual fantasies weave together love and hatred of women. Nowhere does this pathology come into sharper focus than in the fin-de-siècle. Painters, poets, and novelists fell under the sway of la femme fatale. Circe or Medusa, Judith or Pandora - whatever mythological name artists used, they drew her as an irresistible sphinx whose greatest joy was luring men to destruction. Emile Zola (Nana), Stéphane Mallarmé (Hérodiade), Oscar Wilde (Salomé), and Marcel Proust (Odette) - all surrendered to her fatal charm. Social historians see this obsession with femmes fatales as a response to the first wave of feminism at the end of nineteenth century. In England, she was called the New Woman, and she demanded the right to vote, the right to work, and access to higher education. Traditional definitions of masculinity were crumbling. One Philadelphia newspaper predicated that "the governor may have to call out the militia to prevent a gynecocracy." An army of she-devils swarmed into the male sexual imaginary.

In Germany, this tradition led to Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. In America, it culminated in the great siren of the silent screen: Theda Bara. Bara, a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati named Theodosia Goodman, claimed to have been "born on the banks of the Nile." When one skeptical journalist demanded exactly where, Hollywood's first sex symbol retorted, "The Left Bank!" Asked why she treated men so badly, she replied, "They deserve it." They certainly got it. Nibbling her pearls, dropping rose petals on the bodies of her victims, Bara led one male after another to drink, death, and damnation.

Chekhov too fell prey to la femme fatale. She makes her appearance in almost all his full-length plays: Ivanov (Sasha); The Seagull (Mme. Arkadina); Three Sisters (Natasha); and Uncle Vanya, which has his most subtle version of this nineteenth-century icon. Chekhov tried hard to disguise the stock characters he inherited from melodrama, and given his genius for psychological complexity, he succeeded. Yelena - her name suggests the temptress who "burnt the topless towers of Ilium" - is a fatal woman sans le savoir. Confused, conflicted, but not quite innocent, she both wants and does not want to seduce Astrov. She wants to help Sonya, yet betrays her. The disarray she sows is the same as if she were the most heartless vamp.

The play opens with first Astrov, then Vanya, sipping tea and grumbling about the stupidity of life. As he straightens his fashionable tie, Vanya complains: "I just sleep and eat and drink. ... It's no good!" Before long, the reason for all this disorder slithers through the garden, settles into the swing, sways back and forth, and shows her beauty to great advantage. Each time Yelena walks across the stage, I think of the poem Baudelaire wrote for his mistress, Jeanne Duval:

A te voir marcher en cadence,
       Watching your rhythmic walk
Belle d'abandon,
       Beautiful in your languor,
On dirait un serpent qui danse
       One would think you a serpent,
Au bout d'un bâton.
       Dancing at the end of a stick.

Yelena seduces the men in the play through sensuous nonchalance. Obsessed by this phantom of sexual bliss, Astrov and Vanya behave like the victims of any femme fatale. Losing their sense of purpose in life, they stalk Yelena. "You're bored," Sonya tells Yelena, "and your boredom is catching. Look: Uncle Vanya does nothing, just follows you about like a shadow. ... Astrov rarely came to visit us before, once a month perhaps, and then it was hard to persuade him, but now he drives over every day; he's deserted both his forests and his medicine. You must be a witch."

Yelena does her own stalking. Sexually frustrated like everyone else in the play, she wants to commit adultery but lacks the courage: "Yes, I'm bored when he's not here, and I smile just thinking of him. ... Uncle Vanya says I have mermaid's blood in my veins. 'Let yourself go for once in your life.' ... Well? Perhaps that's what I ought to do. ... But I'm a coward, timid. ..." But not so timid that she does not arrange a rendezvous with the man she desires. "You charming bird of prey," Astrov tells her, "You must have victims. ... Well then? I'm conquered. ..."

As Astrov grabs Yelena's waist and kisses her, Chekhov pushes his play from melodrama to farce. With the untimely arrival of Vanya, a typical trick from farce, the play builds to its simulated climax. Guns go off, but no one gets shot. Tempers flare, but the visitors leave before the uneasy truce aborts. Yelena sails out the door and into the night, leaving behind three aching hearts - Astrov, Vanya, and Sonya, who now knows Astrov will never marry her since he has tasted the forbidden fruit of Yelena's lips.

Marlene Dietrich

In his "Essay on Comedy," George Meredith wrote, "The heroines of Comedy are like women of the world, not necessarily heartless from being clear-sighted: they seem so to the sentimentally reared only for the reason that they use their wits, and are not wandering vessels crying for a captain or a pilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with men." Given more experience and the right opportunities, Yelena might develop into Meredith' s "woman of the world." But in that case, she will leave Russia and head for the happy hunting ground of Paris, where she will take a young French lover. After all, she does admit to Sonya that she wishes her husband were not quite so old. But that provides the subplot for another play, which Chekhov later wrote and called The Cherry Orchard. One reason Mme. Ranevskaya cannot focus on saving the estate is because she cannot get her mind off her French gigolo. And as Yelena takes her leave, Astrov says: "Go, then. Finita la commedia!" So what comedy is over? The comedy of sex. Chekhov called his early farces "jokes in one act." Astrov's comment suggests Vanya is a joke in four acts. But what is the joke? In Feydeau's farces, respectable bourgeois rush from bed to bed, hysterically seeking sexual pleasure. But the object of desire slips through their fingers, and the frustrated bourgeois slump home - sadder, but no wiser. Duped by desire, they lose their respectability and their purse, and we laugh. Feydeau has torn the mask off civlization.

Similarly, Sonya, Vanya, Astrov, and Yelena end as they began: sexually frustrated. But we cannot mock them as we mock Feydeau's puppets. Chekhov has so balanced lucidity with compassion that we have no choice but to identify with them. Our hearts break as well. Thus Yelena - mermaid, witch, bird of prey - emerges as the most seductive of femmes fatales because she is the most human. Uncle Vanya may be the greatest sexual farce ever written, but no one leaves the theatre laughing.

Arthur Holmberg, Associate Professor of Theatre at Brandeis, is Literary Director of the A.R.T.

A publicity still of Theda Bara, 1914.