The Shift of Power Relations in Turn of the Sentury British Novels

In this paper I will examine the power shifts that are lurking in seemingly unequivocal situations in the above mentioned novels, focusing on how dominant figures become the victims of their own power exactly due to their dependence on the inferior, passive other to strengthen their dominance. I will analyse the ‘femme fatale’ figure as the initiator of desire and at the same time as the object of it. I will show that even though these powerful female figures are capable of emasculating men, they are at the same time dependent on the male as the constitutor of their identities as man-eaters. This paradoxical dependence also applies to hypnosis, something that appears in all of these novels and was very much in the air at the turn of the century, where power relations seem sharply divided, yet the hypnotized, passive victim also has a certain power over its hypnotizer. That is why we cannot easily decide which of these figures are the dominant ones in the novels and which are the objects of all kinds of exploitative power. Claiming that it is always women is not true.Bscanglisztik