Evil by Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale. Elizabeth K. Menon. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006; xi + 339 pages; illustrations; ISBN 0-0252-07323-1; $30.00US (paper).
In Evil by Design, art historian Elizabeth K. Menon provides a com prehensive overview of the various m otifs associated with the femme fatale in

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late nineteenth-century France. Menon's intervention is to turn to popular imagery, where other studies of femmes fatales have focused exclusively on "high" art. Indeed, she argues that popular cultural femme fatale imagery preceded and provided the conditions of possibility for the more highprofile representations. Accordingly, Menon m ines the archives for im ages in popular press of the biblical Eve, prostitutes, women as dolls or puppetm asters, as poisonous flowers, as snakes, and as fashionable consumers. These popular im ages, she suggests, em erge around mid-century for a reason: they are an anxious response to the rise of a French fem inist m ovem ent and the granting of new political rights to women.
There is no doubt that Evil by Design is a well-researched study. It is encyclopedic in its scope. Menon m akes a very strong case, presenting evidence for her position in the book's reproductions of over one hundred and twenty-five of the popular im ages that she analyzes. Having so many of the illustrations in front of us makes her arguments that much more convincing, and gives the book a lively, immediate, and accessible character.
Som e of the interdisciplinary connections that Menon makes are very innovative. For instance, she traces the connection between the femme fatale and panics over depopulation of the French nation, locating it in grotesque im ages of deformed fetuses and thus making an im portant link between visual and political discourses. In addition, her discussion of the ways that sex workers were panoptically "m apped" and classified in the popular press gives the project an intriguing geographic dim ension.
W here the book fails to satisfy is in its theorizing of the extensive resources that it draws upon. Illustrations are recounted in minute detail at the expense of a deeper exam ination of the claim s about fem inism , social change and cultural anxiety that underpin the study. It seem s the exhaustive detailing of im agery - especially of the im ages that are reproduced in the book for

readers to see - could be reduced in order to leave space for an investigation of some im portant questions. For exam ple, I am left wondering about the relationship between these popular cultural im ages and the widespread social anxiety about women's roles that she posits as central to the rise of the femme fatale. Precisely how this relationship works is never specified. This is a crucial m ethodological question whose absence weakens the premise of the book. As well, there a couple of opaque points that are left unclear to the reader and that would benefit strongly from further explanation, notably the claim that the actual forms of art nouveau reflected a cultural anxiety; how those form s reflect anxiety, and what that anxiety is, are never revealed. These kinds of om issions reveal the lim its of the book; though Evil by Design is a strong work with potentially interdisciplinary relevance, the failure to theorize such conditions as reception and anxiety will unfortunately work to lim it its audience to art historians.
Ilya Parkins University of British Columbia - Okanagan

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