This paper unveils traces of the femme fatale motif in the construction of femininity and female sexuality in Mercè Rodoreda’s Mirall trencat. The femme fatale is a product of the male imaginary, which emerges in literature and the visual arts under contingent socio-political conditions as a challenge to coherent and stable identities. The paper therefore reads the femme fatale as symbol and symptom of patriarchy’s fears and anxieties, a sign of multiple alterity, or a bodily surface where divergent discourses of power specific to early twentieth-century Catalonia conflate. It suggests that by imbuing her female heroines with some of the characteristics of this literary and cinematic female figure, Rodoreda not only exposes fissures within a hegemonic system which feels increasingly under threat but also re-writes this emblem of multiple otherness ultimately displacing it from the confines of the male imaginary.