The Femme Fatale in Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep"

Contents

  I  Introduction 1

  II The Femme Fatale in The Big Sleep 1  

  II 1  Vivian 2

  II 2 Carmen 2  

  III Carmen and her Ancestors 4  

  IV The Femme Fatale in the City 7  

  Bibliography.............................................................................................................1  

  Secondary Literature 1  

  I  Introduction

  According to Janey Place the dark lady the spider woman the evil seductress who tempts man  

  and brings about his destruction is among the oldest themes of art literature mythology and  

  religion in western culture 1 She appears in many different forms and many different situations  

  In the following I will have a look at the origins of the femme fatale as she is depicted in The Big  

  Sleep In the first part of the essay I will concentrate on the main female characters and try to find  

  out who appears as a femme fatale In the second part I will work out that in forming the character  

  of his femme fatale Raymond Chandler borrowed from a common narrative motif especially from  

  antique Greek and biblical sources I will have a look at certain antique stories which I cannot retell  

  here such as the Greek Medea tale Homer s Odyssey the story of Medusa and the biblical Adam  

  and Eve and Joseph stories  

  In the third part of this essay I will have a look at how the femme fatale is set into the city of film  

  noir and how the city again is similar to mythology  

  II The Femme Fatale in The Big Sleep  

  The Big Sleep is Raymond Chandler s first novel and the film The Big Sleep by Howard Hawks  is

  put in the first period of film noir the wartime period 1941- 46 approximately 2 Both the novel  

  and the film stand at the beginning of a development and so they may not have all the characteristic  

1  Janey Place Women in Film Noir Women in Film Noir ed by Elizabeth Ann Kaplan Revised and expanded ed  

  first published 1998 London: British Film Institute 2 2000: p  47.

2  Paul Schrader Notes on Film Noir Film Comment 8 1 (1972): p 11  

elements of later ones. Especially the motif of the femme fatale is in the film not so strong as in

Double Indemnity, for example.

In the following, I would like to focus on the novel mainly, I will only have a look at a few special

scenes from the film. In the novel we meet two women we consider to be femme fatales, judging by

their outward appearance and their behaviour. This two women are the Sternwood sister, Vivian and

Carmen.

II.1 Vivian

Vivian has some certain characteristics of a femme fatale. First of all, she is very beautiful, or, like

Chandler puts it, she is “worth a stare” 3 . She is aware of her sexuality and knows how to draw men’s attention to her. The first thing Marlowe notices about her are her legs: “[…] I stared at her

legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the

knee and one of them well beyond.” 4 This is a hint that Vivian is a femme fatale, for “the femme

fatale is characterised by her long, lovely legs” 5 . In many film noirs she is introduced by a shot of her bare legs.

Vivian tries to disturb Marlowe’s investigation, she has no interest in Marlowe finding out what

happened to her husband Rusty Regan. She even uses her sexuality to seduce Marlowe, which is a

typical move for the beautiful, dangerous femme fatale to make, but he can withstand 6 . From her appearance and her behaviour Vivian seems to be a femme fatale, but in the end of the

novel we learn that she is not, because she lacks one important feature of the femme fatale: She

does not do it for herself, but to protect her father from the knowledge that he raised a murderer and

Carmen from being imprisoned. In contrast, the femme fatale is egoistic, she wants freedom, wealth

and independence and she stops at nothing to achieve this goal. 7

II.2 Carmen

Carmen is depicted as a femme fatale. She is an ambiguous character: On the one hand she is an

innocent child and on the other hand a cold blooded murderer. She has two faces, both represented

by a specific behaviour and a specific sound. One face is the face of a child. The characteristic

behaviour of this one is the sucking of the thumb, which evokes the association of a baby. Chandler

3 Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep. Stuttgart: Phillipp Reclam jun., 1994: p. 26.

4 Ibid. p. 26.

5 Place, Women, p.54 6 See Winfried Fluck. “‘Powerful, but extremely depressing books’: Raymond Chandlers Romane.” American Studies 23 (1978), pp. 281f.

7 See Place, Women, pp. 56f.

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even supports this association by using it as a simile: “She bit it [her thumb] and sucked it slowly,

turning it around in her mouth like a baby with a comforter.” 8 The sound that is connected to Carmen’s childish face is the soft, constant giggling. But this face doesn’t seem to be real. Her

actions are repeated several times in the novel and always stay the same: it is always the same giggling, always the same sucking on the same thumb. The repetition makes them look like rehearsed actions, it turns the childish face into a mask and Carmen into an actor playing a role.

Carmen’s other face is the face of the “scraped bone look” 9 . The characteristic sound here is the hissing. The use of snake metaphoric implicates the snake as biblical symbol of lie and builds a

connection to the original sin and Eve, a kind of prototype for the femme fatale. But it has also another effect: it gives Carmen the characteristics of an animal, which are even reported literally in the scene where Carmen tries to kill Marlowe: “The hissing sound grew louder and her face had the

scraped bone look. Aged, deteriorated, become animal, and not a nice animal.” 10 There is also a special behaviour which belongs to the hissing. In contrast to Carmen’s childish

face, there are variations here: It is either pointing a gun at someone, as in the Brody scene, 11 or using swear words, as in Marlowe’s apartment 12 . When Carmen finally tries to shoot Marlowe, she uses both.

Ambiguity is a typical feature of a femme fatale. In film, it is represented by many mirror shots –

the women “are visually split, thus not to be trusted.” 13 The femme fatale is the heir of ancient figures, especially of the Greek Circe and Medea. They are both witches and they both are two- faced. Circe draws men to her by her lovely singing and her outstanding beauty and then transforms

them into animals 14 . She is an ambiguous character, but her ambiguity is not so strong as it is with Medea. Medea is a master when it comes to ambiguity. She has a different face for approximately anybody she meets. To her father she is a faithful daughter while she is actually betraying him by

helping Jason. 15 She persuades the daughters of Pelias, who is Jason’s uncle, so that they kill him in an attempt to cure him from age. 16 To her husband she seems to be an innocent and helpless wife while she is planning her revenge on him 17 . She finally talks Aigeus, king of Athens, into swearing

8 Chandler, Big Sleep, p.8

9 Ibid. p. 312.

10 Ibid. p.312.

11 See Ibid. pp.131f.

12 See Ibid. pp.227-229.

13 Place, Women, p. 58.

14 See Homer. Odyssee. translated into German by Johann Heinrich Voß. 2 nd Ed. Düsseldorf/ Zürich: Artemis & Winkler Verlag, 2001, p. 137.

15 See Ovid. Metamorphosen. Latin/German. translated and edited by Michael von Albrecht. Stuttgart: Phillipp Reclam jun., 1994, pp. 336-341.

16 See Ibid. pp. 350-353.

17 See Euripides. Medea. Greek/German. translated and edited by Karl Heinz Eller. rev. ed. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1992, pp.64f.

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