Abstract:
The interest of Flemish author Tom Lanoye in the manifestation of evil in female figures finds expression in his drama Mamma Medea (2001) and his Monster-trilogy consisting of the novels Het goddelijke monster (1997), Zwarte tranen (1999) and Boze tongen (2002). This article interrogates Lanoye’s choice of a postmodernist femme fatale, Katrien Deschryver, as the main protagonist in his Monster-trilogy about the demise of the Deschryver family. The trilogy is a critical investigation into the societal malaise in Belgium at the end of the twentieth century after the atrocities of paedophile Marc Dutroux came to light. In Lanoye’s novels the beautiful Katrien, as the catalyst of a series of disasters that bring her once eminent family to ruin, functions as a convenient projection and scapegoat as Belgian society grapples with more pervasive crises that it is still unable to fathom or express adequately. The monstrous figure of the femme fatale, Katrien Deschryver, serves as the concrete manifestation of ongoing tensions in Belgium as a culturally divided country that was created in 1830 as a safeguard to the balance of power in Europe. It is only when she disfigures her face and literally comes to exemplify the monstrous properties that male dominated society invested in her that Katrien is liberated from her function as a projection of both masculine and more general societal insecurity. The article concludes with a discussion of Katrien as a symbol of Belgium as an artificial and therefore “monstrous” construct that threatens to fall apart as a political entity which, at the same time, is also the unsteady seat of European unity.
