YEAR 1933: SHAMBLEAU

The short-story "Shambleau" was the first professional sale of C.L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore, appearing in the November 1933 issue of WEIRD TALES.  It introduced Moore's gun-wielding hero Northwest Smith, and begins on a futuristic version of Mars, colonized by Earthmen like Smith but still inhabited by more primitive native Martians.  Smith saves a mysterious alien girl from a mob who call her by the name "Shambleau."  Smith does not initially know why the mob hates her, but he claims her to save her from death.  The mob leaves in a mood of disgust, and Smith takes the woman to his own dwelling.  There, as the book cover above shows, the Earthman learns the folly of taking in unknown alien, as "Shambleau" is the alien source of the myth of Medusa.  Smith only survives Shambleau's soul-sucking attentions thanks to the intervention of a friend.

All the references to Greek mythology aside, purple passages like this one make clear what Shambleau really represents:

In nightmares until he died he remembered that moment when the living tresses of Shambleau first folded him in their embrace. A nauseous, smothering odor as the wetness shut around him—thick, pulsing worms clasping every inch of his body, sliding, writhing, their wetness and warmth striking through his garments as if he stood naked to their embrace.

YEAR 1933: QUEEN NEMONE

Edgar Rice Burroughs didn’t show a lot of interest in creating femmes formidables, but QUEEN NEMONE, Tarzan’s main opponent in the novel TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD, surpasses the more long-lived LA OF OPAR.  Tarzan finds his way to the City of Gold, where the inhabitants breed tame lions and Nemone rules the citizens with an iron hand.  In a revision of the “Snow White” motif, Nemone ceaselessly persecutes any woman who might be thought more beautiful than she, but she has a vital weakness: she’s spiritually bonded to her pet lion Belthar and feels that she will die when the lion does. If this were an overt fantasy Nemone might be an earthly incarnation of Cybele, who tended to run around with lions, but here her bondedness is mere superstition (though the queen’s name bears an interesting similarity to the “Nemean Lion” of classical myth).  She fancies Tarzan, who plays it cool while secretly working to overthrow her tyranny.  At the climax Belthar attacks Tarzan but the lion is killed by Tarzan's own lion-ally, Jad-Bal-Ja.  In response Nemone stabs herself to death.  Though Tarzan never succumbed to her feminine wiles, the novel ends with him paying his respects at her graveside.