Temptress: From the Original Bad Girls to Women on Top

Britta Santowski is a freelance writer in Victoria.

Temptress is a seductively packaged coffee-table book that offers a peek
under the covers at some of history’s most infamous scandalous women,
beginning with Lilith and Eve, and ending with Mae West and Madonna.

Author Jane Billinghurst leaps with great ease between genres, moving
from canonized literature and art to theatre, TV, and pop culture. Each
section in the collection is framed by the context of social male
positioning. When masculinity is revered and honoured, the temptress
offers useful distraction; when masculinity is threatened, the temptress
becomes evil and deadly.

The collection offers a cursory introduction. The breadth of material
comes at the cost of depth, and much of the book is a simplistic
retelling of story. The first five chapters scan 2000 years. Three
chapters present the abbreviated stories of Lilith, Eve, Pandora, the
Sirens, Medusa, and Cleopatra. Chapters 4 and 5 fast-forward to the 19th
century, with a brief introduction to Lady Emma Hamilton, mistress to
Lord Horatio Nelson, followed by a nod of acknowledgment to 19th-century
theatre. The remaining seven chapters look at the 20th-century
temptresses (including Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Clara Bow, Rita
Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Bridget Bardot, Jane Russell,
Mae West, and Madonna).

The tales of historical temptresses are neatly summarized and the
artwork is briefly introduced, but there is no insight or analysis. This
is a book whose beauty really is, appropriately enough, skin deep.