Women as Black Angels in Cornell Woolrich’s Noir Fiction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2025-47.1.3Keywords:
Cornell Woolrich, black angels, the femme fatale, noir fiction, female criminality, gender and crimeAbstract
This article examines Cornell Woolrich’s representations of his female protagonists’ black angels, that is, self-sacrificing but vengeful and dangerous women. As black angels, female characters in Woolrich’s novels, such as Julie Killeen in The Bride Wore Black (1940) and Alberta Murray in The Black Angel (1943), are seemingly defending their homes and standing up for justice but ultimately, they get caught up in a violent world and face the inescapability of failure. It is argued here that Woolrich’s trope of the black angel subverts the stereotype of the femme fatale by mirroring and simultaneously challenging the depiction of the roles of women during the turbulent sociopolitical period around the Second World War in the US, as well as the shift in gender dynamics at that time. Woolrich’s narratives become a vehicle to express this very sense of insecurity and anxiety and the need to both articulate and subvert the pressing need for order and control, particularly in relation to women. This article also illustrates that Woolrich’s black angels are complex creations that are part and parcel of the recipe of sex, paranoia and violence that fill the pages of Woolrich’s noir novels, and it is this recipe that destabilizes both gender norms and legal codes as far as the portrayal of female criminality is concerned.
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