![]() ![]() Both are struggling to deal with class prejudice while suffering under men who objectify them. The unconvincing narrative voice aside, both protagonists are complex characters with complex emotions. ![]() Both of these novels are first-person narratives that read like a man writing a woman character. ![]() In two of his novels, The Root of His Evil and The Cocktail Waitress, he told the story from the perspective of women who were viewed as femmes fatales. It seems Cain himself was wary of the trope. I started to ask, is our contemporary approach to femmes fatales as dated as Phyllis Nirdlinger’s name? Nirdlinger” driving you to madness and murder.Īs I reread Double Indemnity recently, Phyllis Nirdlinger’s name spun me into a reevaluation of all of Cain’s women characters and the trope of the femme fatale in general. Still, from a 2019 perspective, it’s hard to imagine someone you call “Mrs. Seuss made up the word “nerd” in his book If I Ran the Zoo. If you challenged yourself to come up with the least seductive name you could, you’d have a hard time beating “Phyllis Nirdlinger.” Of course, first names are generational (even “Edith” was sexy once), and Cain wrote Double Indemnity fourteen years before Dr. The only thing that keeps her from being the perfect femme fatale is her name. ![]()
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