B. v.R.: Negative sterotypes and women's credibility

(1993) 110 A.L.R. 432 (High Court of Australia).     

Fatal Women of Romanticism. Adriana Craciun. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

The fatal woman, or femme fatale, is a familiar archetype: an aggressive seductress who lures her enemies into compromising situations. Literature is full of vivid characterizations of this type: Eve, Pandora, Cleopatra, Salome, Lady MacBeth. Film noir has rendered indelible images of fast-talking dames in pencil skirts and seamed stockings, exhaling cigarette smoke as they misdirect our heroes. In this incarnation, the fatal woman is often celebrated, as in film reviewer Mick LaSalle's recently published Complicated Women, and can be seen, in the right smoky light, as a protofeminist. Academics such as Virginia Allen and Bram Dijkstra have dissected the history of the femme fatale as a male fantasy, an "erotic and fatal muse" (Allen) and an "idol of perversity" (Dijkstra). What interests Adriana Craciun in Fatal Women of Romanticism is not the issues or intentions of male authors who invoke the archetype, but the appearance of femmes fatales in the works of several women writers of the Romantic period.     

The Woman in the Red Dress: Gender,Space, and Reading. Minrose C. Gwin. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002.

An eclectic montage of literary analysis, autobiography, and reader response, taking the form of personal anecdotes and autonomous essays, The Woman in the Red Dress takes the reader on a journey in which Minrose C. Gwin analyzes both metaphoric and physical personal space. As Gwin defines it, space is "not an entity that contains something else but [is] the swirl of social relations and productions in particular locations, whether these locations be material, cultural, or even psychological" (6). The purpose of Gwin's work, as she says, perhaps too repetitively is: "to dramatize textual encounters in which narrative, space, and gender inscribe themselves on one another and their readers" (38). The title of this volume refers to the first work Gwin discusses in her introduction: Native American poet Joy Harjo's poem, "Deer Dancer," about a woman in a stained red dress who dances naked on a bar, changing not just the lives of those present, but also those who, like the narrator, merely hear the story (6-7).