Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Culture

Bram Dijkstra begins this analysis with the 1915 silent film A Fool There Was, in which Theda Bara first embodied our century's vision of the Vamp — kohl-eyed and predatory, seducing respectable men and destroying them with her voracious appetite. Dijkstra makes clear that this wasn't just a vision conjured up by a misogynistic artist but was a point of view shared by turn-of-the-century biologists, gynecologists, psychologists, geneticists, and sociologists, all of whom promoted distorted ideas of gender, sex, and race. Dijkstra goes on to show how these distortions are reflected in painting; in popular and literary fiction, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to the novels of Conrad, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner; and in such femmes fatales of the cinema as Louise Brooks, Garbo, and Dietrich.

• Author
• Bram Dijkstra

• Format
• paperback

• Pages
• 496

• Publisher
• Owl Publishing Company

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 978-0-8050-5549-8

• EAN
• 9780805055498

• Genres
• history, feminism, sexuality, gender, art, research, sociology

• Release date
• 1998