Walter Huff as the Femme Fatale's Mirror Natalia Claudio O'Neill College

The novel Double Indemnity by James M. Cain not only shows us Walter Huff’s maliciousness and willingness but also his weaknesses and his frailty. These characteristics of his can be seen in his corporal movements and the lack of control he has over them. This flimsiness comes thanks to two powerful women in the novel: Phyllis and Lola. From the very beginning of Huff’s encounters with them, we can see his weakness and frailness surge, grow, and consume him. In very similar ways, both Phyllis and Lola’s power is reflected in those weaknesses, and not so much in their own actions. These two femme fatales control Huff both mentally and physically, and their dominance is reflected in Huff’s lack of it.

In the second chapter of The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, Megan Abbott thoroughly describes Walter Huff’s body movements, reactions, and transformations. This inversion of these powers breaks with the normative gender binaries the world was accustomed to seeing back in the early decades of the XX century and the many years before them. Or, as Abbott expresses it: “The hysteric then can unsettle meaning, essentialist gender structures, and heteronormativity through his/her body and speech”...