The one you seek for, to your death: Representation of femme fatale in Lady Audley's Secret and the Crimson Petal and the White

The present thesis inquires the changing representations of the Femme Fatale archetype in a Victorian novel and a neo-Victorian counterpart. It adopts a comparative framework in discussing female stock characters in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White in order to argue for a shift in perspective from one century to another and the relevance (if any) of the author's gender to character depiction. The study examines the defining features of the archetype in the light of Steve Simkin or Rebecca Stott's recent analysis of femme fatale archetype, Sigmund Freud's life and death drives Eros & Thanatos, and Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject. Separate chapters on Lady Audley and Sugar analyse the representation of the femme fatale stock characters from various feminist approaches. Considering two key questions —does the femme fatale must die/punished at the end, and can a femme fatale be a real-life figure?— the study concludes the femme fatale archetype changes through the Victorian period to modern period, some of the features of the archetype being transformed or be lost in the process. Though in the novels the representation of the two characters resembles each other, a clear shift in the attitudes of the authors towards the archetype can be observed in this research.