Evil Sisters
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“The later nineteenth century used Darwin’s discoveries [...] to transform the scattershot gender conflicts of earlier centuries into a ‘scientifically grounded’ exposé of female sexuality as a source of social disruption and ‘degeneration.’ At the opening of the new century, biology and medicine set out to prove that nature had given all women a basic instinct that made them into predators, destroyers, witches — . . . a harbinger of death to the male.”--Evil Sisters (1996) by Bram Dijkstra |
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Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (1996) is a book by Bram Dijkstra.
The books discusses the vamp imagery, femmes fatales, and similar threatening images of female sexuality in a number of works of literature and art.
Blurb:
Bram Dijkstra's new book, ten years in work, is a stunning inquiry into the idea of woman as seductress: how, in many areas of twentieth-century high and popular culture, the female came to be portrayed as a regressive, primitive force whose sexuality could destroy the social order, undermining the supremacy of the white male - and shows the devastating historical effects of this portrayal. Dijkstra begins his 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, predatory, seducing respectable men and destroying them with her voracious appetite. The part played by turn-of-the-century biologists, gynecologists, psychologists, geneticists, and sociologists in helping to develop distorted ideas of gender, sex, and race is examined. And Dijkstra shows how these distortions have been reflected in painting; in popular and literary fiction, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to the novels of Conrad, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner; and in cinema's femmes fatales, from Louise Brooks, Garbo, and Dietrich to the fatal women of the 1990s. Finally, the book makes shockingly clear how the parallel paths of the new style of misogyny and racism merged in the 1920s during the rise of nationalist politics - converging in Hitler's Mein Kampf and the politics of genocide.
Index of Images from [1]
- Introduction
- “Sphinx” (William Sergeant Kendall, (1915)
- The Lords of Creation Battle the Vampires of Time
- Publicity still (Theda Bara, ca. 1916-17)
- Design for a book cover (Hugo Höppener, ca. 1910)
- Vital Essence and Blighting Mildew: Dimorphic Gender Evolution and the Natural Philosophy of Lust
- “The Source of Strength” (Arthur Lange, 1909)
- “The Thinker” (Auguste Rodin, ca. 1885)
- “Some Bears” (Rolf Armstrong, 1915)
- A Congo Song in the Heart of Darkness: The Vampire-Woman's African Genesis
- “The Ape” (Alfred Kubin, 1903-1906)
- “Inferno” (Franz von Stuck, 1908)
- Cover of Amazing Stories (October, 1949)
- “Hostile Forces”[2] (Gustav Klimt, 1902)
- The Physiology of Vampirism: The Root of All Evil and the Womb of Production; Seminal Economics and Spermatophagy
- “Sex and Character” (Alois Kolb, 1903)
- “Each Night a Dream Visits Us” (Alfred Kubin, ca. 1903)
- “The Egg” (Alfred Kubin, 1902)
- And Fools They Were: The Biology of Racism and the Iron Law of the Jungle; Love Rituals of the Socialist Vampire
- “Vanity” (C. Allan Gilbert, [1873-1929])
- Cover of Look (November 8, 1938)
- “They have killed my friend” (Unknown, 1914)
- “Fleeting Life” (August Brömse, ca. 1910)
- “The Infernal Feminine” (cover of Life, January 19]], 1922)
- Real Vampires: The Sexual Woman and Her Allies: Bolsheviks]], Semites]], and Eurasians; The Yellow Peril of the Aryan Imagination
- Cover of Weird Tales (Margaret Brundage]], December 1933)
- Poster for "En Israël]]” (1899)
- Anna May Wong
- Cover of Amazing Stories (Frank R. Paul]], September 1927)
- Domesticating The Vampire: Hollywood and Seminal Economy
- The robot from "Metropolis” (1926)
- Detail from "The Death of Babylon”[3] (Georges Rochegrosse, ca. 1901)
- Still from "Manslaughter” (Cecil B. De Mille, 1922)
- “The Battle over Woman” (Franz von Stuck, 1905)
- Still from "The Ten Commanments” (Cecil B. De Mille, 1923)
- Rigging the Great Race Against the Beautiful and Damned: The Cultural Genetics of Unclean Women and Emasculate Men
- Aryan handbill distributed by the "Anti-Communist Federation]]” (1939)
- Cover of Best True Fact Detective (July]], 1948)
- Dualism Enthroned: Oak Trees and Destroyers; Hitler and the Hammer of Death; Genocide as Gynecide in the Mythology of Popular Culture
- “Nosferatu” (1922)
- “Pandora's Box” (1929)
- “Comradeship” (Josef Thorak, 1937)
- Cover of Astounding Science Fiction (October 1948)
- Nazi poster (1943)
- “Depravity” (Franz von Stuck, 1894)
- “The Wild Chase” (Franz von Stuck, 1889)
