I’ll admit I was being a tad flippant when I asked whether Fridging was the world’s oldest trope. Mostly I was interested in tracing just how old that trope was and that it went back to some of the earliest literature. But I mentioned it in front of an English department colleague and he said, “What about the Femme Fatale?”
In short, the Femme Fatale is a stock character, a seductive woman who leads (mostly) men to their doom or downfall (link to tvtropes.org, which also provides links to other, closely paralleling tropes).
My colleague was right. The Femme Fatale beats Fridging by over a millennium (see examples below).
But I was also struck about what these two ancient tropes have to tell us in conjunction with one another. Both these tropes center on the use of women as plot devices to advance the male protagonist’s story. And that parallel function spoke volumes to me. At the very root of recorded human story-telling lies the treatment of female characters not as actual characters but more as props for male characters and their journey. No wonder we end up with the Bechdel-Wallace test, which sets a very low bar for stories (literature, movies, etc.) to cross, but yet so many (even otherwise great) stories don’t pass.
So how does the Femme Fatale beat Fridging as a trope by over a millennium?
My colleague at first mentioned The Bible, but the Hebrew Bible (despite covering the creation of the world) isn’t (relatively speaking) that old, although the oral traditions upon which it is based are no doubt older.
(Side note: I read the term “orature” as the counter-part to written literature in a scholarly article on African mythic tradition and quite like it.)
But then we both thought about The Epic of Gilgamesh and agreed that the Femme Fatale did actually occur there – pushing it back to ca. 2100 BCE vs. the mere 8th/7th cent BCE of The Iliad or the 7th-4th cent. BCE of The Ramayana.
While my colleague and I talked, I brought up Shamhat, the temple prostitute who domesticates the wild man Enkidu, who had been terrorizing the countryside but then becomes Gilgamesh’s loyal sidekick. In the words of an on-line translation, what happens when Shamhat meets Enkidu is:
His lust groaned over her;
for six days and seven nights Enkidu stayed aroused, and had intercourse with the harlot
until he was sated with her charms.
But when he turned his attention to his animals,
the gazelles saw Enkidu and darted off,
the wild animals distanced themselves from his body.
Enkidu … his utterly depleted(?) body,
his knees that wanted to go off with his animals went rigid;
Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before.
Her seduction reduces the power of this wild man and brings him to heel for Gilgamesh (who had sent her out for this purpose). Later in the epic, Enkidu, facing his own death, does curse Shamhat for leading him on the path to this doom. He does, however, relent and say it’s not her fault.
But there’s an even better Femme Fatale in The Epic of Gilgamesh. I only later thought also of Ishtar. When I started looking at the trope, Wikipedia has a nice list of ancient Femme Fatales and includes Inanna, a Sumerian goddess who does show up in The Epic of Gilgamesh and who later gets conflated with the Akkadian-Assyrian-Babylonian Ishtar. Yet it is not the Inanna-face of the goddess who’s the Femme Fatale in the epic. It’s the Ishtar-face of the goddess. (Inanna has a story about the huluppu tree in the epic).
In the epic, Ishtar comes to Gilgamesh and tries to seduce him. In his rejection of her, Gilgamesh lists all the human male heroes who have been destroyed by Ishtar’s amorous advances (from the same translation):
Where are your bridegrooms that you keep forever’
Where is your ‘Little Shepherd’ bird that went up over you! See here now, I will recite the list of your lovers.
Of the shoulder (?) … his hand,
Tammuz, the lover of your earliest youth,
for him you have ordained lamentations year upon year! You loved the colorful ‘Little Shepherd’ bird
and then hit him, breaking his wing, so
now he stands in the forest crying ‘My Wing’!
You loved the supremely mighty lion,
yet you dug for him seven and again seven pits.
You loved the stallion, famed in battle,
yet you ordained for him the whip, the goad, and the lash, ordained for him to gallop for seven and seven hours, ordained for him drinking from muddled waters,’
you ordained far his mother Silili to wail continually.
You loved the Shepherd, the Master Herder,
who continually presented you with bread baked in embers,
and who daily slaughtered for you a kid.
Yet you struck him, and turned him into a wolf,
so his own shepherds now chase him
and his own dogs snap at his shins.
You loved Ishullanu, your father’s date gardener,
who continually brought you baskets of dates,
and brightened your table daily.
You raised your eyes to him, and you went to him:
‘Oh my Ishullanu, let us taste of your strength,
stretch out your hand to me, and touch our vulva. Ishullanu said to you:
‘Me! What is it you want from me!
Has my mother not baked, and have I not eaten
that I should now eat food under contempt and curses
and that alfalfa grass should be my only cover against the cold?
As you listened to these his words
you struck him, turning him into a dwarf(?),
and made him live in the middle of his (garden of) labors,
where the mihhu do not go up, nor the bucket of dates (?) down.
And now me! It is me you love, and you will ordain for me as
for them!
In addition to the doom for these former lovers, Ishtar almost destroys the world due to her anger over Gilgamesh’s humiliating rejection of him – and the consequences of that do lead to Enkidu’s death and Gilgamesh’s grief over that loss. A true – and very early – Femme Fatale.
Ramblings 