In literature, especially Spenserian romance, a deceitful or false woman; an archetype of betrayal and falsehood.
From Edmund Spenser's 'The Faerie Queene,' where Duessa is a major character whose name suggests 'two' (from Latin 'duo') or 'falseness,' representing duplicity and corruption. She became an archetypal literary figure.
Spenser invented Duessa as this perfect embodiment of hypocrisy and hidden evil—beautiful on the outside but corrupt within. She's so effective that 'duessa' became a term in literary criticism for any deceptive woman character, making one fictional villain spawn an entire literary vocabulary!
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