Ronchey, S. “La Femme Fatale bizantina.” Palaeoslavica 10.2 (2002): 103-15.

This essay analyses the fin de siècle myth of the Byzantine Femme Fatale through the figure of the Empress Theodora, impersonated by Sarah Bernhardt in Victorien Sardou’s pièce Théodora.  In the popularity of this pièce, attended by the young Sigmund Freud and even younger Charles Diehl, we can glean reciprocal contamination between Byzantium and decadentism, and the affirmation in the perception of the entire Byzantine world of certain stereotypes common to the myth of the decadent Femme Fatale.  Among these: the complete submission of human beings to a disquieting, emotional, and sensual exercise of power.  In Michael Psellos’ Chronographia, similar traits are attributed to Zoe, the porphyrogenita Femme Fatale of the Macedonian dynasty. Far from the imaginary productions of late Romantic mythology and the sex-phobic and moralistic readings of the early twentieth century, female power in Byzantium was a reality, according to historians of Byzantium, including Psellos: a kind of power not in the least irrational and excitable, but lucid and open-minded.

 

EXTERNAL LINKS

http://palaeoslavica.com/ (Palaeoslavica website)

http://www.cinemedioevo.net/Film/cinb_teodora_1922.htm (information on the film by Leopoldo Carlucci)