Beyond the Femme Fatale

A trend in recent productions of Strauss's _Salome_ sees directors using stage action during the Dance of the Seven Veils to position Salome as a victim of sexual abuse. This paper analyzes the Salome-as-rape-victim trope as it occurs in a group of _Salome_s produced between 2008 and 2018 in Europe and North America. My analysis of the productions is organized around two poles: Salome's agency in the events of the story, and the stylistic modes through which acts of sexual violence are represented onstage.
The productions in my collection share the goal of finding rational motivations behind Salome's monstrous desire for Jochanaan's head. By making the story about what or who _caused_ Salome to take the actions she takes, this trope minimizes Salome's agency. But within the framework of this trope, a number of productions leverage this history of sexual violence to transform their Salomes into avengers, wreaking humiliation and violence on their abusers.
There is a tension in the group of productions that stage Salome's rape between two contrary tendencies theatre scholar Lisa Fitzpatrick has recognized in stage representations of sexual violence: methods focused on showing the harsh reality of sexual violence, and methods that seek "to present the subjective embodied experience of sexual violence affectively" (Fitzpatrick 2018). Whereas realism risks exploiting Salome's suffering and exposing her body to a potentially eroticizing audience gaze, a highly aestheticized representation risks transforming rape into a beautiful spectacle.
At its best, the addition of sexual violence to Strauss's _Salome_ encourages us to sympathize with a complex heroine, and makes a powerful argument about the repercussions of childhood sexual abuse. At its worst, it renders one of the most compelling female monsters of the operatic canon a traumatized victim, and transforms her suffering into erotic spectacle. While there is not a single right way to ethically represent sexual violence on stage, in this paper I model a way of thinking through the effects that introducing sexual violence can have on operatic stories and characters, and the work these representations do in the world around us in terms of contemporary feminist frameworks.

The demonic sorceress-seductress has a fixture in opera throughout the genre's history. In recent years, contemporary operas have sought critically to re-examine classic representations of the "dark feminine," turning to both contemporary and historical figures for inspiration. With music by Peter Eötvös and a libretto by Albert Ostermaier, _Paradise Reloaded (Lilith)_, premiered at the Neue Oper Wien in 2013, looks to mythology, literature, and philosophy in reclaiming the quintessential "witchy woman." The opera draws primarily on the _midrash_ in Jewish mythology of Lilith, Adam's first wife before Eve, and her many subsequent manifestations as seducer of men and abductress of children; in Siegmund Hurwitz's words, "divine whore, terrible mother" (1992). Its narrative adapted from Imre Madách's epic poem _The Tragedy of Man_ (1861), and Milton's _Paradise Lost_, the opera reimagines Adam's journey through time after the Fall with Lucifer, now aided, abetted, and thwarted by Lilith's presence. 
This paper explores Lilith's insertion as the central power into this voyage in _Paradise Reloaded_, wherein she offers Adam and Eve a utopian (and illusionary) "greater Paradise." I explore two fundamental ideas: firstly, that the opera situates Lilith as a positive disruption to traditional narratives of humanity's origins and history. Based on my interviews with the composer, I also read partly against Eötvös's disavowal of feminism as a guiding ideology for the opera, proposing, especially given her significance in modern feminist movements, that Lilith represents a utopian and empowering alternative "eternal feminine," confronting and satirizing paradigmatic _femmes fatales_. 
Secondly, I contrast Lilith's utopian embodiment of truth with dystopian scenes experienced in the opera: from space and hellish landscapes to a futuristic _Phalanstère_, I analyze Eötvös's music articulation of operatic dystopia, focusing on his techniques of satire, parody, and manipulations of texture and timbre in depicting the cosmos, especially in parodic pastiches of Bach's chorales. I explore the opera's soundscape of the uncanny and the grotesque as woven into subtle commentaries on contemporary politics, from refugee crises to Putin's Russia. Ultimately, I suggest that _Paradise Reloaded_ embodies an operatic dialectic of utopia and dystopia, reinvigorating Lilith mythology for the twenty-first century.

Long regarded as Hollywood's first sex symbol, silent film star Theda Bara left an enduring mark on American popular culture. Though today she is known primarily as a legend from the early days of Hollywood, her role as the vampire or "vamp"-slang for a predatory and sexually voracious woman-in the 1915 film _A Fool There Was_ became an archetype for the cinematic femme fatale. Her legacy, and by extension that of the vamp, is also evinced by a trove of previously neglected musical material: popular novelty songs from about vamps from Tin Pan Alley. In a period marked by the emergence and rapid development of new mass media, more established forms of entertainment had to adapt quickly in order to sustain themselves. Tin Pan Alley was of course highly attuned to the whims of popular culture and was quick to capitalize on the success of the cinematic vamp. This path from cinema to song sheds light on a larger process of remediation taking place during a period of critical development in American popular entertainment, whereby one form of media borrows material from another, thus transforming it to suit the secondary medium. 


Taking as a point of entry Bara's vamp and the numerous Tin Pan Alley songs that were written about her, I will show how the vamp's remediation in music gave her a new, sonic dimension in which she, and the mode of femininity she represented, could be defined. In popular song, this figure took on additional signifiers for youth culture and modernity, specifically jazz. Both jazz and the vamp were of dubious propriety, and their pairing served to increase the marketability of the vamp song. A discussion of Bara's filmography and press representation in tandem with an analysis of the sheet music will show how Bara and the vamp as a cinematic phenomenon was the original focus of the songs. As jazz supplanted the references to film, the vamp's popularity also piqued with her as a personification of the social and moral transgressions associated with the genre.