Winowajczyni, niewinna, femme fatale, pocieszycielka... – Muzy w twórczości wygnańczej Owidiusza

The main purpose of this paper is to present the variable and diverse Ovid’s attitude towards Muses in his works from exile (Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto and Ibis). The poet seeks in these goddesses both the comfort and the cause of his exile, identifies them with his poetry frequently, as their faithful servant feels deceived but also hopes that Muses can ease the anger of Augustus. The article is an attempt to analyze this complex relationship.

Cleopatra's Translational Power

When Plutarch introduces Cleopatra in the Life of Antony, he notes that though she was not beautiful, she charmed those around her with her ability to speak an abundance of languages. In this passage, he associates the word hermeneus, «translator», with Cleopatra. Analyzing all appearances of hermeneus in Plutarch’s corpus reveals how, on the surface, Cleopatra’s association with the translator figure reinforces her reputation as a femme fatale, though this association gestures to a three-dimensional character who resists the two-dimensional bounds of extant written accounts—including Plutarch’s own.

Gothic Noir Filmic Male Gaze: Gender Stereotyping in Margaret Atwood’s “The Freeze-Dried Groom”

Stereotyping has been crucial in artistic representations, especially cinema, in the construction of gender paradigms. Males and females have been portrayed by means of simplified unrealistic clichés with the purpose of controlling and constraining them into patriarchal roles and conventions, promoting societal normative ideologies. Noir women are projections of male anxieties about female sexuality and female independence. In “The Freeze-Dried Groom,” Atwood unveils gender stereotyping through a typically film noir male gaze in three of its stock characters: the femme attrapée, the “detective” and the femme fatale. Hence, Atwood depicts a femme fatale to reflect not just on this character in film noir, but also on female identity, gender dynamics and feminism. She exposes and questions the marriage-family institution, and the patriarchal society as a whole.

Beyond Authenticity

Mulholland Drive (2001) forms the centerpiece of the final chapter, which assesses not only cinema’s recent transformation of the detective story but also David Lynch’s exploration of the genre’s multiple ancillary pleasures. So enthralled is he by them that the film comes to seem a meta-investigation, reducing any over-arching plot to sustained uncertainty if not complete irrelevance. Instead, it has been displaced by the beguiling divergences offered from the beginning by hard-boiled divergences. In a film in which all the ingredients of “furniture,” attitude, and identity are present (including a femme fatale, flashbacks, noirish lighting, and identity reconstructed) nothing finally adds up, or is meant to. That may be the most satisfying conclusion to a genre vehicle born of diversion and misdirection.

Gothic Overtones: The Female Monster in Margaret Atwood’s “Lusus Naturae”

In “Lusus Naturae,” Margaret Atwood shows her predilection for the machinations of Gothic fiction. She resorts to gothic conventions to express female experience and explore the psychological but also the physical victimisation of the woman in a patriarchal system. Atwood employs the female monster metaphor to depict the passage from adolescence to womanhood through a girl who undergoes a metamorphosis into a “vampire” as a result of a disease, porphyria. The vampire as a liminal gothic figure, disrupts the boundaries between reality and fantasy/supernatural, human and inhuman/animal, life and death, good and evil, femme fatale and virgin maiden. By means of the metaphor of the vampire woman, Atwood unveils and contests the construction of a patriarchal gender ideology, which has appalling familial and social implications.

Cinta, kematian, dan perempuan, dalam kumpulan cerpen Jatuh cinta adalah cara terbaik untuk bunuh diri karya Bernard Batubara

This research is intended to describe the relationship between love, death, and women, which is displayed in four short stories in a collection of “Falling in Love is the Best Way to Suicide” by Bernard Batubara. Data collected by a literature study and analyzed using descriptive analysis method. The study was conducted with the approach of literary psychology and feminist literary criticism. The theoretical basis for death and suicide used in this study comes from Durkheim, Freud, and Camus. The results of this study indicate that love is the cause or motive for suicide (physical or mental) committed by the protagonists. Suicides committed by the protagonists are categorized as egoistic and fatalistic suicides. The figure of the women in the shorts stories are imaged as a loyal woman and has a negative character (femme fatale).Women are shown to have power in love relations. Overall, the love that Bernard Batubara displays in these short stories is dark, unpleasant, and even deadly.