Christa Giles

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decadent predilection for the dangerous and forbidden was
crytallised in the image of the sphinx and the femme fatale.
In the short story, ˝The Sphinx Without a Secret,˝ the
sphinx-like woman who is the focal point of the piece is
described by the central character in the following way:
It seemed to me the face of some one who had
a secret, but whether that secret was good or
evil I could not say. Its beauty was a beauty
moulded out of many mysterie–-the beauty,
in fact, which is psychological, not plastic–
and the faint smile that just played across the
lips was far too subtle to be really sweet. 307
What the secret consists of – if it exists – is unimportant, as
the woman is transformed into a symbol of the unknown.
The celebration of mystery and evil, the recognition
of, and wallowing in, dangerous impulses, resulted in an
identification of mysticism with eroticism. In Wagner, in
particular, the woman as mysterious siren was
popularized. Max Nordau objected strongly to what he
claimed was the degenerate eroticism of contemporary
mysticism:
Mysticism is, as we know, always
accompanied by eroticism, especially in the
degenerate, whose emotionalism has its chief
source in morbidly excited states of the sexual