“You Avenge the Others”: The Portrait of a Femme Fatale in Gladys Huntington’s Madame Solario

Alicja Piechucka

doi:10.1515/texmat-2015-0009

Authors

Alicja Piechucka University of Łódź

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2015-0009

Abstract

The article deals with the concept of femme fatale as presented in Gladys Huntington’s 1956 novel Madame Solario. The eponymous protagonist, Natalia Solario, displays several characteristics of this female archetype, omnipresent in literature, culture and visual iconography. As a femme fatale, Natalia is beauty, danger and mystery incarnate. The cause of tragedies, but also a tragic figure herself, Madame Solario is both victim and victimizer. The article explores the interplay between innocence and experience, life and death, the erotic and the thanatic, as well as the motifs of transgression, ambiguity, love, passion, desire, perversion, dominance and control crucial to Huntington’s novel. Madame Solario reminds us that, paradoxically, the femme fatale usurps certain stereotypically masculine traits. This, in turn, brings us to the novel’s feminist dimension: the femme fatale is victimized by men, but she is also the agent of female revenge and, ultimately, liberation, symbolically marking the transition from patriarchy to women’s emancipation.

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Author Biography

Alicja Piechucka, University of Łódź

Alicja Piechucka is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Literature at the University of Łódź. From 2001 to 2005, she was a Ph.D. student. In 2002, she came runner-up in the British Vogue Talent Contest. In 2006, she received her Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Łódź. Her doctoral thesis was on T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Her academic interests include American modernist poetry and contemporary American prose. Much of her research focuses on comparative studies of American and French literature. She is also interested in the visual arts and American visual culture. She teaches, among others, courses in American literature and American painting. A literary critic, she has been a regular contributor to Nowe Książki and Tygiel Kultury.

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