Summary: A series of close parallels exist between the fin-de-siecle conception of society dying a depraved death at the hands of the femme fatale—that “monster of a degenerative age”—and the resurrected male attitude that contemporary apocalypses can be traced to her dangerous return. From novelists like Bram Stoker, sociologists like Cesare Lombroso, and psychologists like Freud, came “eloquent metaphors” spun to protect society from a demonizing feminine horde. The Woman as principle danger to masculine positivism became—and remains—a hegemonic given. Within a framework of questions—about popular science, about narrative and how the patriarchy signifies the female body—my project compares how late-Victorians Thomas Hardy and Stoker and contemporary authors D. M. Thomas and Martin Amis create their femmes fatale and then use a repairing and punishing analytic author-ity to re-establish proper social and cultural orders. Both sets of writers describe “narratives of redemption” in which the author/analyst saves his patriarchal world by “curing” the female through a narrative re-inscription of her body and mind. My project asks why women must “appear as objects of value only when they are aestheticized as corpses or phallicised as femmes fatale” (Bronfen), and why this continuum of “New Women”—from Tess and Mina Harker, to Lisa E. and Nicola Six—lays at the root of the apocalyptic menace. Consequences of narrative control are paramount. The project asks why these authors assume the Freudian model, the analyst's pose of narrative control and closure. Read through the lens of Freud's Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, these authors and epochs are re-assessed by this need to create an “aesthetics of the apocalypse” that affirms these male authors' distance from the murderous femmes fatale and the punishing, avenging males they create in order escape responsibility for their—and society's—degenerate collapse.