Word: temptress
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...continual illness, she committed suicide after two years of marriage. Another woman soon replaced her; Rossetti became fascinated with Janie Morris, the wife of William Morris. Involved in a triangle, Rossetti understandably found her at times a heavenly apparition, as in the "Blessed Damozel," and at times a temptress, as in "Pandora" opening her box of evils...
...over black and consistently taught male superiority over female. Color prejudice in theology has been largely expunged. Gender prejudice remains. God is the Father. Jesus Christ is the Son. Even the Holy Spirit, in the New Testament, is "he." And women? Women are the daughters of Eve, the original temptress...
...TEMPTRESS. The Judaeo-Christian tradition and its offshoot, puritanism, run very deep in Western culture. By the preconceptions of this mentality, Eve is the initial occasion of sin. While women frequently seem like supernumeraries in Arthur Miller's plays, the preface to his distinctly autobiographical drama After the Fall is revelatory. He writes: "After all, the infraction of Eve is that she opened up the knowledge of good and evil. She presented Adam with a choice." The sin then seems to be Eve's, and Adam, we are to assume, would have been better off without a choice...
...women in Tennessee Williams' plays are often temptresses, but they are also more complicated creatures partly because Williams is almost religiously obsessed with the duality of the flesh and the spirit, and partly because he has an abiding concern for the violated heart. Many of his women spend an amazing amount of stage time in negligee, a provocation and an invitation to the bed. The widow Maxine Faulk (the surname is scarcely subtle) comes onstage in The Night of the Iguana with her blouse enticingly unbuttoned. Yet Hannah Jelkes in the same play is a stalwart saint of duty...
...studs are the exception and not the rule; in modern drama, the temptress holds sway. Compounded of many elements, the image of the woman as temptress contains one that may possibly be paramount. It is the fantasy of a relatively passive male who would like the woman to take the sexual initiative or even requires her to do so. Few writers have caught that particular aspect with the exactitude of a speech in British Playwright E.A. Whitehead's Alpha Beta, a corrosive drama about a married pair that death would do well to part. The two characters...