Classic French Noir: Gender and the Cinema of Fatal Desire

Since the late 1970s, gender in film noir has been a ‘hot topic’. Feminist scholars have produced an impressive body of work, focusing largely on the femme fatale in American film noir.¹ Yet, despite close connections between French and American noir (film and fiction), both having emerged out of the anxieties and pleasures of a complex and on-going transatlantic exchange,² the issue of gender in French film noir remains relatively unexplored. The present book aims to fill this critical gap, focusing on the dangerous, most often fatal (in the dual sense of deadly and/or ill-fated) desires that are key to the genre. I cover French film noir of the Occupation, Liberation and postwar period (1946–59) as it evolved out of French poetic realism in the 1930s, comparing and contrasting key films with their American counterparts. I look at both fatal females and males, asking to what extent these figures are distinctly French, and what specific sociohistorical and cultural contexts and crises of masculinity inform their construction. Notably, I explore whether these gendered representations provide evidence of latent or blatant misogyny, designed to shore up patriarchal norms, or whether they signal progressive moves in the direction of gender equality. Noir’s constitutive hybridity, its emergence as transatlantic Franco-American exchange, make it an ideal candidate for contrastive sociological analysis, with differences in gendered representations pointing to sociohistorical differences between the two countries. Common features (between French and American noir) point beyond social contexts, to human universals. Thus my primary working hypothesis is that the highly charged atmosphere of noir and its focus on a tightly woven nexus of sexual desire, socioeconomic striving, violence and death enable these films to be read from a biocultural perspective: as sociohistorically, culturally inflected dramas of co-evolved human mate selection and reproduction.

I do not define noir as simply a genre or sub-genre, although I will sometimes refer to it this way, as a kind of shorthand.³ Neither do I see it as primarily a historical cycle or movement, although I will use specific terms like classic French and American noir to refer to historically situated corpora. And though visual style is central, noir is more than a style,⁴ nor is it necessarily linked to a single ideology or philosophy, despite clear links in classic American noir to the left⁵ and to existentialist angst.⁶ In line with recent thinking, I shall define noir as an ideologically diverse, transcultural, transhistorical, transgeneric phenomenon: the coming together of thematic and narrative concepts and visual style expressive of the noir mood as conveying a certain sensibility, optique,⁷ or worldview.⁸ Following Steve Neale’s call for a ‘clear and consistent set of criteria’⁹ and bearing in mind his masterful dissection of the problematic nature of previous canonical definitions,¹⁰ I will use the term film noir for any films which display the following interconnected stylistic, narrative and thematic features, all of which – with the notable exception of romantic love – were mentioned in Borde and Chaumeton’s seminal 1955 study:

1.the association of crime and eroticism: greed, desire or doomed romantic passion and death;

2.sombre emotional tone, reflected metaphorically in visually dark, unbalanced composition, via expressionist lighting (chiaroscuro) and oblique angles, at least for key moments in the narrative;

3.underlying sense of pessimism, fatalism, existential angst and/or cynicism and paranoia, often highlighted by the use of flashback, circular narrative and/or subjective or omniscient voice-over narration;

4.moral ambiguity: the problematisation of conventional boundaries between good and evil, often underscored by an alternation between realism and metaphorical (lyrical or surreal) imagery;

5.absence of positive closure: good does not triumph or merely appears to do so at a surface level. Even when the crime is solved and/or the culprits neutralised, the spectator is left with a feeling of malaise.

This complex of features, none of which are unique to noir, allows the inclusion of generically diverse films, from romance and melodrama, female gothic to adventure, ‘hard-boiled’ police procedural and gangster and heist films. The linkage between crime and desire, outlined in the first point, highlights the centrality of gender trouble to noir, trouble that will play out in wildly diverse and complex ways.

Omitting from my definition specific terms like hard-boiled or femme fatale recognises the transgeneric nature of the phenomenon. Films noirs involving a sexually exploitative fatal male as homme fatal and his female victim(s) also include elements of the melodrama and female gothic, as has been recognised.¹¹ Le polar or crime drama includes police procedural or detective fictions, in which the solving of a violent crime (murder, robbery) drives the plot, and the gangster or heist film. I distinguish straight or conventional polars from noir by the former’s moral and epistemological certainty, their clear distinction between law-enforcing protagonists and criminal antagonists, as reflected in the absence of the last two or three key elements of my definition.

For films which display the first four features but which end well, I use the term film gris or ‘grey film’, as a noir sub-genre.

Film noir is often defined in relation to specific historical moments. Classic American noir, for example, generally refers to black and white Hollywood noir-style studio films made during the 1940s and 1950s. For French noir, films corresponding to my working definition can be roughly divided into four, partly overlapping periods: poetic realism (as proto-noir) 1930–40; Occupation noir, 1940–4; Liberation noir, 1944–6; and classic French noir 1946–59 (roughly covering the period of the Fourth Republic (1945–58)). While often set in the rapidly modernising Parisian capital, my corpus also includes many films with a rural or provincial, small town or historical setting and includes films set outside France, in the USA or ‘exotic’ locations in North and Sub-Saharan Africa.

To date, scholars of French cinema focusing on highly acclaimed authors and works have constructed a small canon, leaving dozens of popular and/or critically well-regarded (but often less accessible) French films noirs unstudied. There have been two book-length studies fully devoted to the subject, both of which provide very incomplete corpora. Robin Buss’ French Film Noir (1994) barely discusses gendered representation, and Thomas Pillard’s recent work, Le film noir français face aux bouleversements de la France d’après-guerre [French Film Noir and Postwar Upheavals] (2014) includes only 25 films from the postwar period, ten of which are comic parody noirs that lack the dark fatalism and paranoia which I see as central to the noir optique.¹² The present study proposes a broad corpus of 101 French films noir from 1931–59 (see Appendix 1), many of which are not mentioned in these previous works and have received little or no scholarly attention. My detailed analyses will often privilege lesser known films, generally with a claim for their artistic contribution,¹³ sometimes simply because their popular success makes them better exemplars in terms of ideological impact, sometimes because their commercial failure is key to understanding the star trajectories and gender dynamics underpinning French noir. Where I gloss over well-known, canonical films, readers are referred to existing analyses.

The term film noir famously owes its origin to French critic Nino Frank writing for L’Ecran Français in 1946, after viewing a large number of cynical American crime thrillers made during World War II.¹⁴ Panorama du film noir (1955), the seminal work on classic American noir, recently re-edited in translation,¹⁵ was of course also written by French film commentators. But even before its inception as a French critical construct of an American phenomenon, film noir emerged out of a transatlantic dialogue. In Dark Crossings¹⁶ I examined French film noir as reflective of French attitudes to American culture and modernity, extending the insights of leading film theorists of French cinema¹⁷ to argue that the sombre tone of French noir, following the novelistic Série noire from which it derives its name, is uniquely placed to translate the love-hate ‘affair’ between France and the USA during the postwar 1940s and 1950s. Moreover, the complex relationship between French and American film noir speaks of noir’s constitutive hybridity: the emergence of classic noir as a French critical construct of an American film phenomenon that was itself heavily inflected by European influences, not the least of which was French poetic realism,¹⁸ with its central narrative focus on doomed passion, as we shall see (Chapter 2).

Starting from the sociological premise that filmic representations emerge from a complex sociocultural matrix, I argue that the equally complex representation of gendered relationships and desire in French noir of the Occupation and postwar decades, and the particular crises of masculinity which it figures, is inflected by a number of interlinked sociohistorical contextual factors, the most salient of which are:

1.traumatic experience of World War II: Nazi occupation, resistance and Vichy collaboration (Chapters 3 and 4);

2.postwar Marshall Plan driven American-led modernisation ushering in an age of prosperity but also consumerism and increased competition (Chapter 10);

3.concomitant changes in gender roles, although French women are still less economically and legally independent and politically active than American women (Chapters 3–10);

4.disintegration of empire: progressive loss of French colonial power culminating in the Algerian Civil War (Chapters 3, 5 and 6);

5.extremely low sex ratio, i.e. large numbers of single women of reproductive age vs a dearth of marriageable males (Chapters 4–8).

Underlying these contextual factors are century-old cultural traditions, e.g. the French obsession with romantic love (although they didn’t invent it!), their constant alternating between extreme idealism and extreme cynicism in matters of love, and their greater tolerance of non-monogamous relationships than in Anglo-Saxon cultures of the period.

In turn, I argue that cultural factors are underpinned by co-evolved, mostly ‘soft-wired’ adaptive features of human sexuality and reproduction.

Feminist film theorists have read the femme fatale and other manifestations of femininity through constructivist and psychoanalytical frameworks whose basic premises are that:

1.gender is, for all practical purposes, independent of biology and entirely culturally constructed;

2.the roots of desire and pleasure are unconscious and function according to very specific Oedipal scenarios of repression and displacement;

3.thus the visual focus on the female form in film is a clear instance of Freudian fetishisation arising from unconscious castration anxiety.¹⁹

Scientific reasoning clearly refutes the Freudian claim that infants have a primary incestuous desire for the parent of the opposite sex, which must be repressed for development to occur.²⁰ I suggest rather that cinema’s focus on female (and male) bodies arises from the primary role of vision, especially among males, in assessing a potential partner’s suitability as a short- or long-term mate: youth and beauty are clear fitness markers, hard to fake signals of health and fertility.²¹

Undeniably, constructivism has outlined and raised important questions about the social mechanisms that modulate human development and behaviour. But despite its ability to map such existing sociocultural mechanisms, notably gender roles (and the oppression of women and minority groups under patriarchy and capitalism), constructivism is powerless to explain why and how these have developed the way they have, with both striking differences and remarkable similarities across cultures and throughout history. More importantly, it cannot tell us why some of these mechanisms are so notoriously resistant to change. Feminist constructivist and psychoanalytical theories can map the oppressive practices of patriarchal cultures and their transmission, yet they cannot explain how patriarchy came about or why it is and has been such a dismally prevalent feature of human cultures for at least the last 10,000 years, since the advent of agriculture.²²

Constructivist explanations for gender differences (and sexual orientation) begin with a demonstrably false assumption: namely, that gender is exclusively a cultural construct. For the constructivist, if not for cultural conditioning, men and women would think and act the same. Such a premise flies in the face of over a century of empirical biological and psychological research (notably into the role of genetic transmission and sex hormones in brain development, morphology, personality and behaviour), not to mention common sense. And even if one can readily accept such constructivist insights as Judith Butler’s into the performative dimension of gender (as both assigned by culture in a process of ‘forced reiteration of norms’ and as a site of endless contestation by individuals who refuse such assignment),²³ this still begs three central questions. Why do particular individuals choose to either perform or contest assigned roles? And what is the origin of psychological mechanisms that lead individuals to conform to or resist cultural construction? More importantly, why are fundamental aspects of gender performativity so cross-culturally uniform at the statistical level? Finally, the premise that gender is a cultural construct can indeed be defended, to the extent that culture itself is recognised as partly a response to and consequence of, as well as contributing factor to the evolved (driven by genes responding to experience) human brain, not simply the sole, sui generis root cause of experience.

For all the above reasons, therefore, this book largely contests canonical constructivist and psychoanalytical claims, adopting an alternative, though overlapping biocultural view, using insights from cognitivist and evolutionary science (cognitive neuroscience, behavioural ecology, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology and evolutionary approaches to psychoanalysis) including the emerging sub-disciplines within the humanities of both cognitivist, biocultural and neuro-psychoanalytical film and literary studies.

Freud was wrong about a lot of things but he got one crucial thing right: the existence of the unconscious. Recognising his contribution, contemporary neuroscience emphasises the central role of unconscious emotional processes in grounding perception, subjectivity, selfhood and intersubjective (personal and social) relationships:

The deep roots for the self, including the elaborate self which encompasses identity and personhood, are to be found in the ensemble of brain devices which continuously and non-consciously maintain the body state within the narrow range and relative stability required for survival … I call the state of activity within the ensemble of such devices the proto-self, the unconscious forerunner for the levels of self which appear in our minds as the conscious protagonists of consciousness: core self and autobiographical self.²⁴

Thus, while rejecting a number of Freudian conceptualisations (e.g. the Oedipus complex, as based on incestuous infantile desire; primary narcissism; female narcissism arising from biological inferiority to and dependence on men²⁵) this book will use a number of robust, psychoanalytically-based concepts and theories of the unconscious (including concepts of projection and identification; Bowlby and Ainsworth’s attachment theory (1965)), in order to describe and analyse aspects of character construction, film production, authorship and reception.

Finally, the book is premised on the adaptive view that cinema and other ‘[i]maginative fictions are far more than entertainment: they are a strategy that human beings have devised, as the human brain enlarged and became more complex, to help ensure their very survival’.²⁶

Evolutionary psychology (EP) is the application of evolutionary principles to the study of the human mind.²⁷ It posits that the mind, as much as the body, is to a large extent a product of Darwinian evolution (random genetic variation, non-random selection) and thus subject to natural and particularly sexual selection. Often erroneously described as ‘the survival of the fittest’ (Darwin never liked the phrase, which was T.H. Huxley’s), natural selection simply means the non-random retention of genes (and traits) that result in better survival and reproduction. Sexual selection operates on two levels, the first being ‘intrasexual’ selection, in which members of the same sex compete with each other for reproductive opportunities or advantage, especially in the case of male-male combats. Secondly, ‘intersexual’ selection operates where individuals secure reproductive advantage by displaying a feature or features attractive to the opposite sex (especially male-female, in the case of female choice of males among most non-human species). In the case of male-male intrasexual competition, usually size and strength or combat armour (like a stag’s antlers) confer reproductive advantage; in the case of intersexual male-female choice, reproductive advantage accrues to males who possess traits desired by females: impressive feathers in peacocks, melodious song in nightingales, aesthetic taste and architectural skill in bowerbirds, and so on. Natural selection is what drives evolution: individuals within a species will vary genetically, making some better suited to their environment and therefore more successful at surviving and reproducing offspring. Sexual selection means that intra- and inter-sexual competition for mates will favour the evolution of certain gender-specific traits.

EP maintains that psychological attributes that proved adaptive, in other words, and that conferred significant benefits in terms of survival and reproduction in the environment in which our hominid ancestors had evolved as a species²⁸ are present today in the form of evolved, content-specific, information-processing brain modules or algorithms designed to solve specific ancestral problems. Such problems, which arose from the situation of living in social groups with long-term pair-bonds and combined male and female parental investment, include optimising mate selection for both sexes, enhancing paternal certainty for males, ensuring and allocating optimal resources for the survival of offspring, acquiring language, recognising kin, detecting cheaters, guessing what others are thinking and evaluating risks.²⁹

Thus, while the merest mention of biology is still seen by some as essentialist and deterministically antifeminist, in my view this is an unfortunate error. An evolutionary approach is necessarily dynamic and biocultural: in no sense does it define species as unchanging essences³⁰ or (in humans) deny the importance of culture, the environment and individual agency.³¹ Au contraire. In respect to gender roles, for example, EP recognises that these are undoubtedly (though often unjustifiably and unjustly) reinforced by culture, and entail a degree of performance, more or less conscious role-playing. However, gendered behaviour patterns also have a biological substratum that is the product not just of a lifetime of experience, nor even of hundreds or thousands of years of culture, but of at least two million years of evolutionary history.³² Evolution is the end product of nothing other than the dynamic interplay of individuals striving for survival and reproductive success within their specific environment. And where Homo sapiens is concerned, the single most decisive element of our environment has always been other humans, i.e. culture. Current evolutionary science seeks to discover mechanisms of the mind that enable culture and learning to take place and to explain how and why human cultures evolved in the particular ways that they have.

Nor is an evolutionary approach deterministic. As pioneering evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1992) remind us, evolution does not deny intelligent purpose, indeed, it is the pre-condition of such purpose. According to this view, first advanced by one of the founders of experimental psychology, William James (1890), humans do not have fewer instincts than other animals, we have more. Our instincts are enablers as much as they are constrainers. They underpin our stupendous cognitive competency, our extraordinarily developed emotions and social instincts for both cooperation and competition: that which defines us as human.

The most exciting recent trend in evolutionary theory, which I shall term the biocultural turn, looks precisely at the interdependent relationship between biology and culture.³³ The biocultural turn enables bridges to be built between evolutionary science and constructivist theories.³⁴ For example, the concept of multilevel selection has led to a growing emphasis on pro-social behaviours and within-group cooperation in human communities.³⁵ Also, while there is still much healthy debate around the degree of hard-wiring vs plasticity in the human brain, recent accounts stress the ability of cognitive processes to override certain modular biases. Thus many evolved, so-called ‘hard-wired’ instincts are now seen as ‘soft-wired’, i.e. differentially triggered via experience,³⁶ and some are amenable to reconfiguration via reflection and learning.

Within this context, human life-history theory is an emerging field that describes human nature in terms of species-typical patterns in adaptive development and organisation over the course of an individual lifespan.³⁷ Compared to other mammals and primates, human life history is characterised by a long lifespan coupled with a much extended period of juvenile development and dependency, due to our large brain. This fact underpins the unusual provisioning of food by human males to their mates and offspring, thus mammalian bonding between mothers and infants is supplemented by monogamous pair-bonding between parents as sexual partners.³⁸ Moreover, humans have evolved to live not in isolated nuclear family units but in communities, which communicate via verbal language and in which related and non-related and individuals compete but mostly collaborate, providing reciprocal support and enabling the group to better compete for resources with other human groups. Thus humans are highly social beings, forming shifting coalitions and dominance hierarchies, like chimpanzees, our closest relatives, but we also display a much higher degree of cooperation than any of the great apes, and an egalitarian aversion to domination and injustice. The combination of large brain, language, pair-bonding and group living means that culture plays a far greater role in human life history than for any other species (many of which have recognisable cultures). A particularly elegant definition of culture in the context of human life history is as follows:

Culture consists of information transmitted in non-genetic ways: arts, technologies, literature, myths, religions, ideologies, philosophies and science. From the evolutionary perspective, culture does not stand apart from the genetically transmitted dispositions of human nature. It is rather, a medium through which humans organise those dispositions into systems that regulate public behaviour and inform private thoughts. Culture translates human nature into social norms and shared imaginative structures.³⁹

In viewing culture as an integral component of human nature, human life history theory enables evolutionary psychology’s focus on ultimate, evolved causes of behaviours and the brain modules claimed to support them to be integrated into a culturally informed study of proximal mechanisms as they operate throughout individual life cycles. Moreover, in this view, culture is involved in a dynamic, mutually reinforcing system of feedback loops with genetically evolved dispositions. This is what is meant by ‘evoked culture’⁴⁰ and ‘gene-culture co-evolution’.⁴¹ Contemporary evolutionary science is thus highly compatible with and complementary to sociocultural theory, as this book will demonstrate.

On one hand, evolutionary thinkers have underlined the prevalence of gender similarities in humans as arising out of the shared pressures of natural selection, like disease, predators and famine. However, they have also attempted to isolate and explicate gender differences as arising from the differential workings of sexual selection on human males and females:

Where the sexes differ most clearly, it is the result of sexual, not natural selection. The strategies that enhanced reproductive success for females were not identical to those that enhanced it in men. Through sex-linkage and sex-limitation, evolution has coupled genetically encoded adaptive strategies to the sex of the individual receiving them.⁴²

Evolutionary theory thus posits the existence of a certain number of hard- or soft-wired i.e. co-evolved, innate (genetic) though often environmentally triggered and/or culturally reinforced (or repressed) differences between males and females. An increasing body of evidence (over 25 years of empirical research) is pointing to a role for evolved physiological and psychological differences as being at the root of dominant – quasi-universal – cultural gender role construction. For example, men’s higher levels of testosterone (more than 10 times that of women, with no overlap between the sexes) ‘are linked with some of the traditional sex differences in behaviour such as aggression, domination and career choice’.⁴³ Conversely, women’s greater obligatory investment in child rearing (due to internal gestation and breastfeeding) requires a greater capacity for caring and empathic investment, greater emphasis on resource accrual, lesser propensity for risk taking and greater choosiness in terms of sexual partners (quality over quantity).⁴⁴ Of course, patriarchal societies often abuse these biological differences to acculturate women in ways contrary to their own reproductive and survival interests: confining women in caring roles of wife and mother, controlling women’s sexual choices or punishing them for pursuing optimal mating strategies (which may include having more than one sexual partner). Needless to say, evolutionary science does not condone nor justify oppressive social norms, even though these may well be rooted in our evolutionary past. Firstly, to equate the natural with the good, to confuse what is with should be, is to commit the naturalistic fallacy, a fundamental error of scientific reasoning contemporary evolutionists take great pains to avoid.⁴⁵

Evolutionary accounts describe what is as a function of what has been, over the long period of human evolution, not what should or can be. Moreover, feminist evolutionary scientists like anthropologist Barbara Smuts, sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy and others have long questioned male-centred tenets of early Darwinist views on gender, most notably the assumption of unbridled male sexuality versus female modesty and coyness.⁴⁶ Thus, today’s best evolutionary thinkers do not claim that ‘natural’ behaviours considered adaptive in specific contexts (e.g. male promiscuity, group violence and oppressive control of females⁴⁷) are either desirable or unchangeable.⁴⁸ And leading male evolutionary psychologists Buss and Schmitt (whom I shall quote extensively) state explicitly that their work is aligned with feminist agendas:

We share the view that the mate preferences of one gender can inflict psychological damage on the other, whether it is women being treated as ‘sex objects’ or men being treated as ‘success objects’ … We share the view that gender discrimination in the workplace is morally wrong … We share the view that rape is abhorrent, and policy, anchored in accurate scientific understanding, should be directed at eliminating its occurrence … We share the view that men’s historical control of power and resources, a core component of patriarchy, can be damaging to women in domains ranging from being forced to endure a bad marriage to suffering crimes such as genital mutilation and ‘honor killings’ for perceived sexual infractions.⁴⁹

Moreover, while evolutionary theory claims validity at the statistical level, it makes no claims at the level of the individual. To cite a less controversial example, the statement that human males are taller than human females is not contradicted by the obvious fact that some human females are demonstrably taller than the average human male.

A major challenge for feminism lies precisely in recognising and explaining statistical gender differences without succumbing to essentialist overstatement or the reactionary misapplication of moral judgements, i.e. the naturalistic fallacy, which relegate women to positions of subservience.

This book will argue that evolved, gender-related adaptive strategies can be seen to underlie culturally and sociohistorically inflected gendered constructions in noir. For example, romantic love is treated not as a purely cultural construct but as a human universal, a central feature of our evolved nature as a pair-bonded, social species: a ‘complex suite of adaptations’⁵⁰ or neurophysiological state⁵¹ designed to focus mating effort on the selection of an optimal partner in terms of producing and co-rearing viable offspring. In order to highlight both sides of this nature vs nurture equation, I read gendered figures in French noir against their American homologues and in relation to their specific sociohistoric and cultural contexts, noting similarities but also key differences. The most striking of these, I will argue, is the role of romantic love as a key trope in French noir, via the dyad of the ill-fated star-crossed lovers, as opposed to the more common spider-woman/fall-guy dyad of American noir. The remainder of the book is laid out as follows.

Chapter 2 reviews 1930s French poetic realism as an early form of both classic French and American noir, arguing that the distinctive French noir couple of the star-crossed lovers can be traced back to these dark films of the pre-war years.

In Part II, ‘The Long Shadow of War’, I read the sombre period of World War II, marked more by the Nazi occupation and Vichy collaboration than by the frequently lionised Resistance, as a ‘clue’ to (though not the sole reason for) the gender paranoia of much French noir, as well as its moral ambiguity. French experience of World War II was in many ways far from heroic, and this can be seen to result in a crisis of masculinity that both produces a number of flawed heroes and failed patriarchs (Chapter 3) and also scapegoats women (Chapter 4). Here I also point out that large-scale war inevitably leads to low sex ratios: a dearth of marriageable men and a concomitant oversupply of unwed young women seeking partners. I use cross-cultural studies informed by socioeconomic and evolutionary theory⁵² to argue that low sex ratios, along with the accession of women to positions of increased power, are a significant contributor to the diverse cinematic representations of assertive feminine sexuality in American and French variants of the femme fatale. Chapter 8 argues that a dearth of eligible men also contributes to the emergence of fatal, sexually exploitative males.

Part III, ‘Cherchez la Femme’, focuses on feminine figures of fatal desire and their significant others in both French and American noir, extending recent work on the complex female characters of American noir.⁵³ While I see the romantic, star-crossed lovers as the central figures in French noir (Chapters 5, 6), I also chart the emergence of a number of scheming and sometimes monstrously ruthless French fatales (Chapter 7).

Part IV, ‘Cherchez l’homme’, shifts the focus to masculine characters, whether sexually exploitative, fatal men (Chapter 8), law enforcers embroiled with seductive women (Chapter 9) or gangster anti-heroes (Chapter 10) as conspicuous consumers and cynical, world-weary or romantic ‘honest thieves’.

I read gendered figures in relation to both contemporary sociohistorical contexts and ‘mythical’ archetypes of femininity and masculinity, from evolutionary, anthropological-mythological and cultural perspectives. Against the view that ‘[m]yth is an essentially cultural phenomenon … it cannot possibly evolve from the nature of things’,⁵⁴ I argue that in many cases, the power of myth itself stems from its ability to encapsulate ancient, evolved human traits and mating strategies within socioculturally inflected, archetypal figures, including a raft of fatally attracted males and females.