A Myth Is Born: The Femme Fatale in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema

Abstract

During the 1940s, Mexico produced and exported more films than any other Latin American nation. This boom in its cinematic production became known as the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema and the films of this era tended to produce a divided image of women; they were depicted as virtuous wives, mothers and daughters or as prostitutes, fallen women, or femmes fatales. This chapter examines the good woman/bad woman paradigm in Fernando de Fuentes’ Doña Bárbara (1943) and argues that the historical roots of the femme fatale and her counterpart, the virtuous woman, not only originate in two of Mexico’s iconic figures, La Malinche and the Virgin of Guadalupe, as Joanne Hershfield suggests, but reflect an anxiety about the changing social role of women in post-revolutionary Mexico. It also demonstrates how the redefinition of appropriate feminine behaviour is mediated by a hyper-masculinized identity; an examination of the film shows that the male characters can be read as a direct response to the threat of the femme fatale and reflect Mexican society’s struggle to re-establish patriarchal power.