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Yet the fact that femininity is absent does not mean that it does not factor into the systems the poem contorts and refracts. Certain elements remain constant in both poems: The structure of the poem suggests a clearer picture of the subjects the speaker is observing. The poem is arranged into four sections of varying number of stanzas. The four-line stanzas feature the same rhyme scheme as the previous poem abab , yet the sounds are more discordant, manifesting the disjunction between the sight of the aged women and the environment they simultaneously arise from and yet to which they do not belong.
Despite the earlier discordance, the poem makes clear that the old women manifest a specific feminine presence that appears grotesque only to the unobservant individual, yet contains an epic, near unfathomable history that deserves a specific reverence. As the poem progresses, the speaker is drawn further and further into the series precisely through differentiation. This later verse describes the women one by one:. The stanza demonstrates, once again, a depth of understanding with regard to the old women — who have even less value than the old men in the social system — by implying that they exist outside the totalizing grip of the present, and thus remain privileged to a kind of epic humanity.
But even more startling is the structural work of this poem to rethink how femininity, as individual or in a group, can be understood within a modern way of seeing. This stanza thus exemplifies what Kamuf has claimed to be Baudelaire's specific idea of femininity: The changing landscape of Paris is not simply a quiet background to the speaker's watchful gaze.
Rather, the poem casts a shrewd eye on the shifting arrangements of the Second Empire when the speaker contemplates the eventual death and burial of the old women. The speaker observes the smallness of the women and their resemblance in size to little girls:. He goes on to contemplate the size and shape of their coffins:.
The image appears once again to be aggressively grotesque, one in the vein of Baudelaire's general irony towards the human condition itself. But the motif of burial and coffins has far-reaching resonances in the urban climate of Paris in the s and s. Bourgeois families earned their own private plots while working-class Parisians were rendered anonymous in their graves.
With the edifice of patriarchy crumbling under the grounds of both of these poems, what emerges is a complex feminine singularity born of the delirium of the series. Baudelaire's specific interest in the seriality of gendered existence, as I have shown, not only creates a rupture within capitalism's totalizing project, but also reveals that femininity is the crux of such a rethinking.
This radicalization of femininity appears closely alongside his thinking about the city, but not as its subordinate.
Rather, Baudelaire's poetic contemplation of the urban masculine self dissolves its agency in the face of new configurations of gendered subjects — ones that emerge out of the collapse of traditional ways of conceptualizing the links between particularity and collectivity. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. Close mobile search navigation Article navigation. Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity Ronjaunee Chatterjee. Abstract This article revisits the representation of gender and femininity in Baudelaire's poems about the city, arguing that these works reveal a vision of femininity that cannot be reduced to the particularity through which the nineteenth-century individual is codified. Blanche fille aux cheveux roux,.
Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique,. Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! Son pareil le suivait: Car je comptai sept fois, de minute en minute,. Ce sinistre vieillard qui se multipliait! OC , i, Dans les plis sinueux des vieilles capitales,. University of California Press, , p. Princeton University Press, , p. Cambridge University Press, , p. Mercure de France, and F.
Cambridge University Press, Cornell University Press, , p. University of Chicago Press, , p. John Hopkins University Press, , p. Purdue University Press, , p. Gallimard, —76 , i , 83; hereafter referred to as OC , i and OC , ii.
Essays on Charles Baudelaire , ed. Harvard University Press, , p. Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts, History , 4 , 1—7 p. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity Oxford: Oxford University Press, , p. Pierre Pachet, Le Premier Venu: Burton, Baudelaire in Karl Marx, Marx on Religion , ed. Temple University Press, , p. Pichois also mentions that Baudelaire wrote to the Revue contemporaine: Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance , ed.
Gallimard, , i , 81— An Extravaganza Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, , pp. For a sustained discussion of their relationship, see R. Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire Paris: Gallimard, , pp. Hegel, Hegel's Science of Logic , trans. Cambridge University Press, , pp. Burton, Blood in the City: Cornell University Press, For Permissions, please email: Email alerts New issue alert.
Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic. The rational project underlying the city of New York is obscured by its progressive deterioration. Evelyn has no point of reference for New York. The sun beat down on that rotten meat, as if to be sure it was well done, and to render unto Mother Nature a hundredfold all she had joined together. And the sky watched that superb carcass blossom like a flower, the stench so strong you thought you might fall in a faint on the grass.
In both cases, animals feed off of human remains — whether it be flesh or refuse — in a grotesque display of carnivorism. Chromatically, New York exhibits the colours of decay: Evelyn comes to the realization that: Carter makes no direct citation or reference, only allusion. However, the reappearance of the city as seen by Baudelaire as a place of chaos and decrepitude cannot be cast off as mere coincidence.
This term has no exact translation in English — stroller or ambler providing only approximations of its meaning. Along the old outskirts of town, where Venetian blinds in hovel hide secret lecheries, when the cruel sun strikes with redoubled ray town and country, rooftop and wheatfield, I go to practice by myself my whimsical swordsmanship, sniffing at any corner for chance rhymes, tripping over words like curbs, bumping sometimes into lines long sought in dreams It is not given to everyone to blend into the multitude: Unemployed, Evelyn certainly is, but male — not for long.
From the very first pages of the novel, Carter presents Evelyn as a wanderer. He moves from London to New York. Despite all the upheaval happening around him, he is not a participant, he is merely an observer, dependent on his sense of sight and his sense of hearing: Evelyn also gathers information by hearsay: Evelyn reinforces the divide between himself and his fellow city-dwellers, becoming suspicious of others: Try as he might to escape the city and, as seen above, the evil it embodies, he cannot. Likewise, in The Passion of New Eve , Evelyn discovers in the cityscape a reflection of his own psyche.
Evelyn plans to flee crumbling New York, to a thought-to-be uninhabited part of the world: I would go to the desert, to the waste heart of that vast country, the desert on which they turned their backs for fear it would remind them of emptiness — the desert, the arid zone, there to find, chimera of chimeras, there in the ocean of sand, among the bleached rocks of the untenanted part of the world, I thought I might find that most elusive of all chimeras, myself p. The desert is no escape: The desert is a feminine space for Carter, ruled by a tribe of women and created in opposition to the decaying city.
It is in the desert that we meet a third Baudelairean figure, that of the dandy. According to Baudelaire, the dandy is a creature who emerges in periods of transition, his own era marked by the transformation of the city into a modern, industrial one. The dandy rejects work and condemns the production of anything but his own carefully tended self.
The dandy is an actor, possessing rigorous self-discipline and absolute self-control. He must live and sleep in front of a mirror. The dandy, narcissistic and vulnerable asks only: Woman is the opposite of the Dandy. Therefore she should inspire horror. She is in rut and she wants to get laid.
Woman is natural, that is to say abominable. As an actress, she indulges in a performance of highly stylized, painstakingly constructed selfhood. She corresponds to the aspect of dandyism that is utter theatrical construct, existing only in the eyes of the public and not beyond. Before his transformation, Evelyn grapples to define the actress: Tristessa is a creature of theatre, disguise, and rerouted sexuality — we in fact discover later that she is a man.
Like that of the dandy, her biological nature, that is to say, her virility, remains indecipherable to her audience, concealed by careful arrangement of makeup and dress.
Garelick, in her study on the encounter between the decadent dandy and the female performer, defines the Decadent era as a crucial moment in the evolution of the phenomenon of the dandy. Tristessa exaggerates all aspects of the dandy: Tristessa, as a man, goes beyond the general confines of dandyism, the absolute limit being androgyny, into producing a fully-fledged appearance of womanhood.
Each intertextual reference makes room for an alternative. She produces an alternate reading of a canonical poet reworking to different degrees the key notions that define Baudelaire: In order for her to deflate the canon, she must also reproduce elements of it, thus proliferating the source. Through the process of re-contextualization, Carter calls into question those values that have come to be associated with certain texts and their authors, values that she, in turn, is continually both haunted by and obsessed with in her own texts.
Le bruissement de la langue. Les Fleurs du Mal [].
Le Spleen de Paris. Le peintre de la vie moderne []. Little poems in prose. Translated by Keith Waldrop. The Flowers of Evil.
The kind of masculinity Baudelaire observes in the poem is merely the shadow of patriarchal authority, yet the old men certainly ironize the manner by which such authority reproduces itself largely, as Freud will put it fifty years later, through taboo, prohibition, and the law. She corresponds to the aspect of dandyism that is utter theatrical construct, existing only in the eyes of the public and not beyond. Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic. Each intertextual reference makes room for an alternative. Notably, the poem does not deal with femininity, but only the denigration of Oedipal masculinity. In these essays and fragments contrary to what a reader might infer prostitution becomes anything but a personal issue for Baudelaire, and transforms instead into a vehicle for theoretical contemplations of the gendered individual and the social world. Cornell University Press,