This thesis offers a reappraisal of the recurring figure of the femme fatale within Decadent art
and literature of the nineteenth century. Despite the ubiquity of studies concerning the femme
fatale, most notably within genres such as Film Noir and Romanticism, the Decadent femme
fatale has often been relegated to a single chapter or footnote within these studies. It is here the
purpose of this thesis to rectify this critical disregard.
Combining multiple disciplines (literature, aesthetics, history, mythology and
psychology) each of the four chapters of this thesis will locate the femme fatale within
nineteenth-century European Decadent texts as represented as a specific objet d’art: the
haunted portrait, the corpse-doll, the fragmented sculpture, and the mutilated and/or sculpted
body of the androgyne. Invoking Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, the
influence and trajectory of each chapter’s respective femme fatale will be traced from the midnineteenth century through to the fin de siècle. By tracing the lineage of the aesthetic impression
made by French Decadent writers of the mid-nineteenth century (such as Théophile Gautier
and Charles Baudelaire) upon subsequent French and British writers and artists of the latenineteenth century (such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater,
Rachilde, and Vernon Lee), this thesis interrogates how the re/construction and usage of the
Decadent femme fatale was utilized as a means of exploring ulterior philosophies of classical
beauty and a fluid range of forbidden sexualities, including androgyny and homoeroticism.
Offering interdisciplinary readings of the nineteenth-century Decadent femme fatale,
this thesis shows the different ways in which nineteenth-century Decadent writers and artists
move beyond the femme fatale’s malevolence, though without losing sight of it, to explore the
mysterious relationships between life and death, art and artifice, pleasure and pain, and the seen
and unseen