vamps and transgressive females on film

Again, I have yet to read this properly, but scanning the article, found the following interesting:

“The image of the vampire as a dangerously sexual, racially mixed woman informs the rather simple plot of the film A Fool There Was, a cautionary tale told in the starkest possible terms: an unnamed woman known simply as the Vampire (Theda Bara) pursues and seduces the Husband, John Schuyler (Edward José), bringing about his nancial and physical ruination. Although Bara’s portrayal of the Vampire became iconic, she did not originate the character. The film is a very close adaptation of a stage play, written in 1909 by Porter Emerson Browne, which he followed with a novelization in the same year. Browne’s title A Fool There Was references a Rudyard Kipling poem of 1897 called “The Vampire”….” (p.1073)

“The Vampire in A Fool There Was is truly monstrous, quite literally killing the “fools” who are careless enough to fall for her charms. / The film version of A Fool There Was gestures toward the racial and sexual anxieties of Browne’s text with symbolism that would have been familiar to audiences at the time. The film made Theda Bara a star and was the source of the slang term vamp, derived from her Vampire character. In publicity photos, Bara developed the signature vamp expression: eyes heavy lidded, the mouth closed, and the chin tipped up, a pose assiduously copied by movie vamps throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Although most vamp actresses were white, the interracial nature of the vamp was so much a part of her identity that in the 1920s, the term vamp frequently described a black woman who seduces white men.” (p.1074)

“Through the late 1910s and into the 1920s, the vamp became a stock character on-screen. Theda Bara starred in more than forty films, often playing older icons of dangerous feminine sexuality in films such as Carmen (1915), Cleopatra (1917), and Salome (1918).” (p.1076)

“In the years before the emergence of the flapper, the vamp was the primary image of the transgressive female.” (p.1076)

Ref: (italics in original, emphases in bold blue mine) Deborah Shamoon ‘The Modern Girl and the Vamp: Hollywood Film in Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s Early Novels’  positions 20:4 Fall 2012