Redeeming the Femme Fatale: Aesthetics and Religion in Théophile Gautier’s La morte amoureuse

This article situates one of the earliest representations of female vampirism in French literature in the context of work on the femme fatale and of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, arguing that Gautier’s text serves a foundational role in the creation of the vampire myth in France and allows us to move past interpretations equating Clarimonde’s demise with the inevitable punishment of female sexuality in nineteenth-century France. Clarimonde invites us to rethink the figure of the femme fatale since her love is generative in aesthetic if not religious terms, whereas female sexuality will become purely demonic in many fin-de-siècle representations.