A classic detective story from the 1920s, The Maltese Falcon continues to prevail today
as a famous and true mystery novel. The characters within the book seem authentic, each with
quirks and flaws nicking their corners, producing realistic people for the readers to enjoy.
Written by Dashiell Hammett, this story contains an element of credibility to the way the
detectives act, as the author himself worked as a detective during the 1910s. Nevertheless, given
the era in which it was written, limitations appear that restrict the characters of the novel into
categorizations, such as the categorization of women through Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Hammett
portrays Brigid O’Shaughnessy under the stereotype of a femme fatale, creating the idea that, …show more content…
The archetype of the femme fatale (femme fatale in
French, meaning “fatal woman”) has been present in literature as far back as the Middle Ages,
with characters such as “fair, alluding maids [that] misled the hero when he was lost or tempted
him to sexual intercourse while he slept” (Marling, para. 41). Little differences exist between the
femme fatale from the beginning of the 20th century and its predecessors, as it still represented
women who not employed seduction to distract or fool men, and they do so with the purpose of
self-gain. With the suffragist movement and the changing roles of women in the early 1900s
came a rise in the use of femme fatale characters, especially by the male writers of detective
novels in the 1920s; some scholars believe that the increasing inclusion of a female character
detrimental to the idea of the nuclear family was a way to show the resentment directed at the
change in women’s behavior (“Overview: The Maltese Falcon”, para. 34). O’Shaughnessy is
significantly an attack to the conventional female roles because as a femme fatale, “she
as a famous and true mystery novel. The characters within the book seem authentic, each with
quirks and flaws nicking their corners, producing realistic people for the readers to enjoy.
Written by Dashiell Hammett, this story contains an element of credibility to the way the
detectives act, as the author himself worked as a detective during the 1910s. Nevertheless, given
the era in which it was written, limitations appear that restrict the characters of the novel into
categorizations, such as the categorization of women through Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Hammett
portrays Brigid O’Shaughnessy under the stereotype of a femme fatale, creating the idea that, …show more content…
The archetype of the femme fatale (femme fatale in
French, meaning “fatal woman”) has been present in literature as far back as the Middle Ages,
with characters such as “fair, alluding maids [that] misled the hero when he was lost or tempted
him to sexual intercourse while he slept” (Marling, para. 41). Little differences exist between the
femme fatale from the beginning of the 20th century and its predecessors, as it still represented
women who not employed seduction to distract or fool men, and they do so with the purpose of
self-gain. With the suffragist movement and the changing roles of women in the early 1900s
came a rise in the use of femme fatale characters, especially by the male writers of detective
novels in the 1920s; some scholars believe that the increasing inclusion of a female character
detrimental to the idea of the nuclear family was a way to show the resentment directed at the
change in women’s behavior (“Overview: The Maltese Falcon”, para. 34). O’Shaughnessy is
significantly an attack to the conventional female roles because as a femme fatale, “she