The Femme Fatale in American Literature (review)

Ghada Suleiman Sasa's The Femme Fatale in American Literature focuses on representations of the femme fatale in literary naturalism. Using McTeague, Sister Carrie, The Awakening, and Quicksand, Sasa argues that authors of literary naturalism reshaped the femme fatale to suit the needs of the genre. However, Sasa quickly moves from this statement of authorial intent to something like a meditation on the free will of literary characters, posing as her central question the following: "Is [the femme fatale] a determined character, or is she a free agent with a will of her own?"

Problematically, it seems clear that given Sasa's focus on a literary figure and lack of contextualizing research, the answer is necessarily the former. Nevertheless, Sasa's answer in the book is a waffling "both," which tries to insist on valorizing these characters as revolutionary feminist agents working to overcome biological determination and gender stereotyping (though it's hard to imagine Trina McTeague having this kind of metafictional self-awareness), who sadly end up succumbing to forces greater than themselves. So, in fact, Sasa ends up supporting the first position as well. In addition to the perplexing insistence that nearly all female characters in American naturalism are femmes fatales (including poor Maggie of Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets!), what remains unclear throughout this work is what the payoff might be for understanding these women as femmes fatales, especially since Sasa's argument ultimately recapitulates the commonplace that American literary naturalism is concerned with questions of agency and determinism.

In addition to her alternating treatment of these figures as both representations and as something like human agents with a multiplicity of choices available to them, Sasa also makes an interesting verbal slip between women as victors and women as victimizers. Both of these categories appear opposed to characterizations of women as victims, but Sasa has strange moments of plot explication in which she describes male characters like Hurstwood and McTeague as victims of their female companions, even going so far in her troubling reading of McTeague as to claim that the dentist's uxoricide puts an end to the cycle of victimization in the novel. It is unclear to this reader why we should understand Hurstwood and McTeague as victims of the women in their lives and not, as Sasa argues in the case of her femmes fatales, of determinist forces. A more interesting argument might have involved historical research to position the femme fatale as a kind of force herself, echoing cultural changes at the turn of the century—although this is a version of the argument Jennifer Fleissner makes about the New Woman in her book Women, Compulsion, Modernity.

Reading this book, one is likely to feel frustrated with Sasa and Cambria Press for the presentation of this book in its current form. Cambria Press's website boasts, among various other points of recommendation, a comparative chart, which unsurprisingly works out in Cambria's favor and against more traditional university presses. Cambria's top selling point, as it appears on its website, is publication speed (between four and twelve weeks). Although Cambria states that it engages top scholars in the field to peer review its publications (and Sasa must hold some of the blame for her slim bibliography, under-theorization of terms, and overreliance on a few select sources), this reader couldn't help but wish that the author had had the benefit of a longer editorial process and a far more rigorous peer review. Early on, Sasa makes the dubious claim that there is no set definition of the femme fatale, yet she does not include Mary Ann Doane's excellent 1991 work, Femmes Fatales, in her bibliography. An unfortunate lack of engagement with top and well-known scholarship undermines this work time and again. Certainly, most readers of this journal will be surprised to see that a book on naturalism omits the work of Mark Seltzer and Walter Benn Michaels; scholars of Dreiser may be disappointed...