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

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.