Theda Bara, the Vamp: A Mini-Essay

     In 1915, Theodosia Goodman, the daughter of a Jewish tailor from Cincinnati, was rechristened Theda Bara by movie mogul William Fox, provided a backstory which transformed her into the mysterious daughter of a French artist and an Arabian mistress, and placed in the starring role of A Fool There Was, which was based loosely on Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire.”[1] Over the span of a decade, Bara performed in multiple films – The Serpent (1916), The Vixen (1916), and The She-Devil (1918) among them – which cast the young woman into the role of the vamp: a deadly femme fatale (similar to that found in William Allingham’s “The Witch-Bride” and John Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci”) who lures males into her pernicious snares through her sexual wiles.[2] A stark contrast to the girl-next-door innocence of Mary Pickford, Bara represented an unrestrained European sexuality for movie audiences in the United States and her vampiric characters, images of the liberated new women, often met tragic fates, with men eventually freeing themselves from her seductions and the vamp becoming an exotic outsider punished for her transgressions against “the domestic life of ‘normal’ women.”[3]

Works Referenced

Rowbotham, Sheila. A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century. New York: Penguin, 1997.
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[1] Rowbotham, 110.
[2] Rowbotham, 110.
[3] Rowbotham, 110-111.