MORE INNOCENT SADISM

 Boss abuse by Suzie.

And uncle abuse from Ginger.

KNOCKOUT DROP

 The SKY GAL makes her imposter see stars not found in the sky.               

FOLLOW-UP TO HISTORY OF FEMME FORMIDABLE

 Some additions and subtractions to the "history" I wrote here...

Though I still consider Rider Haggard's 1886 She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed to deserve pride of place, the dime novel westerns had a slight friendliness to the folkloric figure of Calamity Jane, who was a support-character in the serial adventures of "Deadwood Dick" that began in 1877, and an analogous character had her own 1882 dime novel adventure, "Calamity Jane: Queen of the Plains."

Also, slightly before SHE is Haggard's scheming villainess Gagool in the original Allen Quartermain novel KING SOLOMON'S MINES.

There's also a villainous queen, Phorenice, in the 1899 novel THE LOST CONTINENT, though I haven't reread it in many years.

Aside from the examples I mentioned in the earlier essay, the 1900s decade seem to be pretty bare. I left out the publication of ALRAUNE in 1911, which concerned an artificially conceived female killer, though I think all or most adaptations stress romance over violence.

I should have mentioned that after 1914, Americans started seeing the phenomenon of "the serial queen," not all of whom were "formidable," though I've heard good things about THE HAZARDS OF HELEN, released over the years 1914 through 1917.

I mentioned IRMA VEP in the French serial LES VAMPIRES, but after a re-viewing, I don't consider her much of a formidable, either. She does use a gun once or twice but she's really just a henchwoman.

In 1916 Edgar Rice Burroughs published his fourth "Mars" book, which may be his first novel in which the heroine-- the titular THUVIA MAID OF MARS-- was a co-equal character with the male hero, rather than a support-type like Dejah Thoris and Jane Porter. Thuvia, introduced in the 1913 book GODS OF MARS as a support-character, had an unexplained power to command the Martian animals, particularly the lion-like banths, though she didn't really use the power very dynamically.

Thanks to this post on THE PULP SUPER-FAN, I learned that Johnson McCulley, creator of Zorro and several forgotten mystery heroes, also created a one-shot heroine, Madame Madcap, in 1919, the same year that Antinea appeared in Benoit's L'ATLANTIDE.

No great additions to the earlier list for the 1920s, though Ray Cummings used a couple of non-formidable female heroes in such novels as THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM and THE SHADOW GIRL. However, in 1930 and 1931, Cummings authored two books focused on a character called "Taama, Princess of Mercury," a winged humanoid with some modest battle-skills.

From then on, I think my individual posts capture the history of the femme formidable adequately, though I lost interest in the project before I got to one of the best, 1934's JIREL OF JOIRY.

THE PREHISTORY OF THE FEMME FORMIDABLE IN POP CULTURE

I essentially agree with Camille Paglia that the rise of popular culture, particularly though not exclusively in Europe and North America, allowed for the rebirth of a wide number of cultural archetypes that could not be expressed by the reigning religious credos. The femme formidable is one of these archetypes, though to be sure it did appear in scattered forms throughout “high literature”—Spenser’s Britomart, Sade’s Juliette, Shelley’s Witch of Atlas, LeFanu’s Carmilla.


While “popular culture,” as separate from “folk culture,” rose steadily following the invention of the printing press, the period of the late 1800s is arguably the period when pop culture most assumes a distinct character, as various authors—Verne, Stevenson, Wells, Doyle, Stoker, and Haggard—coalesce the mythic scenarios and characters that comprise fiction slanted toward mass appeal. I credit the last-named one, H. Rider Haggard, with the feat of creating the first major Femme Formidable of popular fiction.

A year or so after Haggard published his most enduring male archetype, Allan Quatermain, in Year 1886 he published an even more influential female character: SHE-WHO-MUST-BE-OBEYED, in the novel simply entitled SHE. (The full novel was published in 1887, but in 1886 it began serialization in a magazine entitled THE GRAPHIC.) This immortal queen of a lost city—possessed of quasi-magical powers that never seem to appear in any cinematic adaptations—combines two older archetypes: the woman as regnant queen, able to order men to carry out her will, and the woman as sorceress, able to perform acts of literal magic.

Over the next forty years, the majority of femmes formidables tended to be either witchy magic-makers or queen-commander figures. The following mini-history no doubt omits many figures, but for my money the most noteworthy are:



YEAR 1886—The same year SHE appears, Sherlock Holmes’ father Arthur Conan Doyle also tries his hand at a woman with sorcerous powers, albeit in the contemporary setting of Victorian England, as an evil woman named KATE NORTHCOTT enslaves men with hypnotism in the short story “John Barrington Cowles.”



YEAR 1893—In George Griffith’s “scientific romance” OLGA ROMANOFF, OR THE SYREN OF THE SKIES, the titular villainess commands a fleet of air ships as part of a mission to subjugate the decadent West for the glory of Mother Russia.

YEAR 1900—One of pop fiction’s most persuasive witch-figures, THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST, appears in L. Frank Baum’s novel THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ. A couple of film adaptations appear during the silent era but though both have witch-villains, neither explicitly uses the Witch of the West.

YEAR 1903—Bram Stoker creates one of his foremost witch-villains, QUEEN TERA, in his horror-mystery THE JEWEL OF SEVEN STARS.

YEAR 1904— YUKI-ONNE, the “snow-fairy” of Japanese folklore, is translated into literature in a short story, “Yuki-onne,” published in Lafcadio Hearn’s collection KWAIDAN.

YEAR 1905 – A vampiric ghost, known only as CHRISTINA, appears in F. Marion Crawford’s “For the Blood is the Life,” first published in Collier’s Magazine.



YEAR 1911—Bram Stoker scores another formidable femme in the novel THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM: a woman named LADY ARABELLA MARCH, able to change herself from woman to serpent.

During this year there also appears the first filmic adaptation of SHE, starring Marguerite Snow. A 1899 Melies short was labeled “Haggard’s She,” but two contemporary reviews assert that it has nothing in common with the Haggard novel. Better-known film versions of the story appear in 1925, 1935 and 1965.



YEAR 1913—In RETURN OF TARZAN, Edgar Rice Burroughs creates the priestess LA OF OPAR, whose very name marks her as something of a SHE-knockoff.

YEAR 1915-- Sometimes-costumed criminal IRMA VEP appears in Feuillade's serial LES VAMPIRES.

YEAR 1919—The “female Bluebeard” QUEEN ANTINEA debuts in Pierre Benoit’s novel L’ATLANTIDE.

The same YEAR 1919 also featured another silent femme formidable, LIO SHA, mastermind of a treasure-seeking criminal group whose name is also the title of Fritz Lang's film THE SPIDERS.

ADDENDUM: I recently did some  research (4-2-2024) on western heroine-films and came up with two additional entries. One series of shorts, devoted to cowgirl "Tempest Cody," began in 1919. I can't judge the series since there are no films available, though this poster is quite suggestive:

The one-shot comedy film ROWDY GIRL (1919) is on YouTube in full, and for a femme formdiable flick is the punchiest silent film I've ever seen. 

YEAR 1920—Sax Rohmer creates a peculiar half-cat, half-woman NAHEMAH in THE GREEN EYES OF BAST.

YEAR 1921—The first cinematic adaptation of ANTINEA appears in the film L’ATLANTIDE.

In addition, yet another prose-born "queen of a lost race," LA OF OPAR, makes her first appearance in the serial THE ADVENTURES OF TARZAN.


YEAR 1924 – In A. Merritt’s THE METAL MONSTER, explorers stumble across a city of living metal, which is entirely under the mental control of NORHALA, a human foundling raised by the city.

YEAR 1926— In the silent film DON JUAN, Estelle Taylor portrays a fiendish fictionalized version of LUCRETIA BORGIA.  There were indubitably filmizations of the real-life Lucretia before DON JUAN, but this is the first I've found in which Lucretia is seen as a figure of power rather than a romantic figure.





YEAR 1928— A “soldier-girl” named WILMA DEERING appears in Philip Francis Nowlan’s sci-fi novel ARMAGEDDON 2419 A.D. Wilma doesn’t appear in the novel as much as the hero, one “Tony Rogers,” but she’s clearly a female able to fight on her own behalf.

Wilma’s prose advent marks a turning point in the development of the pop-cultural archetype of the femme formidable: the “fighting femme formidable.” I don’t suppose that Wilma was the first of her kind, but she seems to be the first to have garnered some measure of lasting fame, though not in the prose format. Her fame came about thanks to the medium of comic strips, though she would also gain fame through other media-adaptations. Given the importance of this breakthrough, I begin my solo character-posts with the comic strip incarnation of this character.

DEFINING THE FEMME FORMIDABLE

Prior to the new name atop this blog, its name was AMAZONS ASCENDANT. The purpose of that blog was relatively limited. For years I’d been hearing various fans carp about the supposed marginalization of female heroes in comic books specifically and popular fiction generally. Supposedly this lack signified the bias of male chauvinism, though to my mind real male chauvinism would not allow for any female heroes whatsoever. A remark by Heidi McDonald moved me to devise this blog in order to demonstrate the significant prevalence of an amazon-like archetype throughout the medium of comic books. I finally decided that the best demonstration of this prevalence was a list of 50 noteworthy female vs. male battles in the comics medium, most of which conclude with either the female’s victory or a respectable draw (see this post). After that, I let the blog lie fallow.

I’ve been interested in the “amazon archetype” for some time. In the last month I finally got around to writing some essays on THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE, which interpreted the archetype theoretically, as a symbol of the Schopenhaurean/Nietzschean will. But years ago I contemplated writing a history of the archetype as it appeared not just in comic books, but in all popular media. To that end I made my own year-by-year list of the most notable occurrences of the archetype.

I’ve seen a few related lists on Wikipedia, and years ago there was a website that tried to provide mini-histories for all the major characters, mostly in comic books and animated cartoons. Like a lot of sites, it eventually disappeared, probably due to the expense of the enterprise.

Blogs, at present, cost nothing but time, and have the advantage that they’re more open-ended in structure. Thus I’ve decided to parse out my old list in the form of a few entries every week (frequency to be determined as I go). At that rate it’ll take some time to build up a respectable number of posts, but I feel sure that I can depend upon the blogosphere to ignore this enterprise until it gets built up somewhat (and maybe even afterward!)

Now, as to the name of the blog…

I didn’t want to use the term “amazon,” whose connotations are too narrow. The well-known term “femme fatale” strikes a little closer to the mark, but in common use it suggests mainly female characters that exist to lure the hero, Delilah-like, with their “fatale” attraction. I’m not interested in the temptress-archetype except where it shades into the archetype of the concept of the female as a possessor of power. Thus my adaptation of a common enough French phrase, “femme formidable,” for an archetype of culture.  As far as I can tell from a basic Google search, no one else has so employed the term in this specialized sense.

Patently this category can include many villains as well as heroines. In addition to omitting the manipulative temptresses, whose specialty is persuasion rather than force, it also omits many heroines whose influence is more sentimental or intellectual (Dorothy Gale, Nancy Drew) than physical. The category will also include pop-fiction incarnations of mythic or legendary figures as well as fictionalized versions of real people. Aside from the next essay—which covers the earliest pop-fiction occurrences of the archetype—each post will chart each figure’s first appearance in a given medium with a short interpretation of her symbolic importance. I’m not going to get into encyclopedic histories of any characters: that’s more Wikipedia’s line.