WOMAN, IN THE LIEBESTOD TRADITION, is both a love object and an agent of death. Charlotte, for example, is both a madonna and femme fatale to Werther, a paragon of lust-defying purity but as seductive as the magnetic mountain in Werther's grandmother's tale, a mountain that pulls the hardware out of passing ships and sends them to a watery grave (16. and 26. Julius 1771). The narratives that evolved around Friederike Brion, too, rely on stereotypes of woman as virgin and woman as whore. The Princess von Este in Torquato Tasso appears first as Tasso's muse, and then, in his in-constant eyes, as a siren and Armida, when he embraces her and is rejected (FA 1,5:830–31, lines 3333, 3349). Stella's cascading locks of hair might become chains for Fernando like Armida's for Rinaldo. No suggestion that she is a Medusa, although Medusa is part of the tradition, one Goethe breezily alludes to in the Divan poem “Locken, haltet mich gefangen.”

The femme fatale, Machtweib, peril to male innocence, devouring female, instrumentum diaboli, and host of venereal disease, is to the masculine consciousness the bringer of death. As love object, she promises release from individuation; as a femme fatale, she threatens it, inspiring both rapture and terror. She is attractive for the liberation she promises, offering both ecstasy and fulfillment. As either mother or menace, woman is an object to the male consciousness.