Aestheticism and the Femme Fatale charts the development of a figure that came to dominate the nineteenth century aesthetic imagination: that of the cruel and beautiful woman, the femme fatale. This study documents the rise of a "masochist aesthetic," one that enabled several generations of Victorian artists and writers to liberate their aesthetic production from the strictures of a utilitarian, patriarchal critical culture. Drawing upon a variety of critical approaches, the author establishes the centrality of the image of the femme fatale in the works of Rossetti, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, and others, unveiling the ways in which the aesthetics of domination and desire lay the groundwork for modern conceptions of artistic value.