ABSTRACT
The Byronic Woman, as a character in literature, is almost entirely a male creation. German Romantic literature is chock-full of mysterious female agencies, and dubious spirits of Nature. The German Nee-Romanticists, though deeply in-debted to French literature, had other fish to fry. The "George Circle", with its homosexual preferences, was heedless of exotic, feminine charm. Thus, a clear field was left to the Naturalists, who were deeply preoccupied with the problems of the New Woman. Inevitably, their conception of la femme fatale was very different from that of Gautier and Swinburne. In all literatures, Ia femme fatale has a double aspect—human and allegorical. The supreme exponent of the proletarian Fatal Woman in German literature, is Frank Wedekind. Like Sacher-Masoch, Wedekind protested vigorously against imputations of satanism and cynicism. Wedekind's plays are pregnant kaleidoscopes, where men and women ricochet off each other with the same barbaric urgency that activates Grabbe's puppets.
