The Danger and the Sexual Threat

Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature

In The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature, Jennifer Hedgecock challenges the stereotype of the femme fatale as merely a dangerous seductress. Instead, she reveals her as a complex figure representing the struggles of middle-class Victorian women—navigating poverty, abusive marriages, and societal constraints. Through a Marxist-Feminist lens, the book examines how these characters defied expectations, reshaping ideas of femininity and power in 19th-century literature.

What People Are Saying

“critics of Victorian novels have focused largely on the binary terms of domestic ideal and fallen woman . . Jennifer Hedgecock [however] sets out to complicate that dichotomy in The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature.”

— Cynthia Northcutt Malone, Dickens Studies

“Jennifer Hedgecock shows that the femme fatale, though common in mid-Victorian fiction . . . is more complex . . . formulated as a recognizable type by the late nineteenth century.”

— Martine Englebert, University of Gent

“Hedgecock points out [that] the act of hiding one’s true identity and intentions is intrinsic to this character . . . to conceal her old identity, the stigma attached to her whole concept of selfhood.”

— Catherine Quirk, The Wilkie Collins Journal

“In particular, Hedgecock observes that the emergence of the femme fatale in [Victorian] novels corresponds to that of middle-class feminist movements in mid-nineteenth century Britain.”

— Dasan Kim, University of Texas at Austin

Story Snippet

Sample of Femme Fatale

The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature is a Marxist-Feminist reading of the dangerous woman in nineteenth-century British literature that examines the changing social and economic status of women from the 1860s through the 1880s, and rejects the stereotypical mid-Victorian femme fatale portrayed by conservative ideologues critiquing popular fiction by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Honoré de Balzac, and William Makepeace Thackeray. In these book reviews, the female protagonist is simply minimized to a dangerous woman.

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