Toxic Doxa in Baudelaire: “À celle qui est trop gaie” and “Une charogne”

Abstract

Baudelaire derogatorily equates woman with nature in such misogynist statements as “La femme estnaturelle, c’est-à-dire abominable” (Baudelaire's emphasis). This equation exists in his poetry as well; however, certain poems both use and undermine it. A detailed analysis of the metaphor established between the woman and the natural landscape in “À celle qui est trop gaie” reveals it to be an empty commonplace of doxa that aggressively invades the poet and contaminates him. The poet then reacts violently to this invasion in an attempt to destroy the cliché and to give to the woman, his sœur, a new self-consciousness like his own. A brief analysis of “Une charogne” reveals a similar undermining of this cliché and an analogous equation between the woman and the poet. In these poems, Baudelaire revolts against the emptiness of his culture and reveals a desire to awaken others, however violently, to a melancholic awareness of it.

Keywords:

• awakening
• cliché
• contamination
• doxa
• misogyny
• nature
• self-consciousness
• violence
• woman

Notes

1. Sanyal does not pursue in detail the illusion of the maternal instinct here but rather studies the role of art in the violence of a society of commerce. The second nature she explores derives in the main from Benjamin and is one “that encases the mutilated human body as but another commodity for the reader as consumer” (112). In my analysis of “À celle qui est trop gaie,” I pursue a more generalized notion of culture and language, closer to Bourdieu than to Benjamin, as inescapable second nature.

2. Leakey shows that what is of prime significance for Baudelaire is ultimately nature in its relation to man.

3. Pichois in his notes to the Oeuvres complètes points out the borrowings made by Baudelaire that, in fact, make “L’invitation au voyage” also a kind of “lieu commun” (1: 928–30). However the metaphors of “L’invitation” are much richer and more detailed than the comparisons in “À celle qui est trop gaie.” Susan Blood has an interesting reading of the clichéd nature of “L’ennemi,” in which the mechanical function of allegory supersedes the clichéd “‘natural’ relationship between labor and its fruits” (144–45).

4. Minahen, in his fine reading of this poem, pursues the ironization of the cliché of the “traditional conception of female beauty” and the infliction of violence as it is related to “the cliché of feminine beauty that has persisted through the ages” (7). We are not able to pursue the enormous question of irony here, although a fruitful path of that investigation, building on Minahen's reading, might take up Edward Kaplan's definition of ethical irony and its powers of contestation.

5. This is similar to the image in “Les sept vieillards” (1: 87), “Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant” (line 2).

6. Gasarian in his discussion of “Confession” notes a similar recognition of the unnaturalness of the woman's beauty and its relation to the poet's work: “La beauté qu’elle cultive, comme celle que produit le poète, lui apparaît comme le fruit d’un travail contre nature” (27).

7. McCann also analyzes this contagious madness (149, 151).

8. Chambers studies a similar “clandestinity” in “Au lecteur” (138).

9. As Pichois notes: “ni le substitut du procureur dans son réquisitoire, ni les juges dans le libellé du jugement n’ont proposé une ‘interprétation syphilitique’: celle-ci est du fait de Baudelaire” (1: 1133).

10. For Babuts, the structure of reversibility in this poem is a kind of experiment that might lead to the conversion of the woman into a true spiritual and physical sister (71–72).

11. Chambers describes doxa as the cause for ennui (“atonie” in “À celle qui est trop gaie”) as follows: “This outbreak of ennui is a straightforward symptom of the bourgeois ‘order’—of the regularity and uniformity of existence” (26). Also Sanyal shows how “La femme sauvage et la petite maîtresse” stages the way in which a natural woman is produced through a violent, artificial, commercial performance (114).

12. Gasarian sees this as a kind of new speech that the poet's “sœur” helps him to discover: “Elle ne dit mot et provoque ainsi chez le poète le désir sadique de la faire parler, mais poétiquement, à travers des ‘lèvres nouvelles’ d’où puissent sortir des mots fraternels” (37).

13. In a way, this is analogous to the temporal situation in “À celle qui est trop gaie,” where the poet imagines a fictional, future awakening of the woman.

14. Weir writes: “This reading can be expanded to include the poem as a whole if we take the poet literally when he says ‘mon âme.’ That is, ‘Une charogne’ can be read as Baudelaire's apostrophe to this own soul, which he likens to the decaying corpse of an animal” (xiii).

15. Nägele sees the revision of the Ronsardian form of Les amours in this poem as a decomposition of form, an interesting view in terms of our understanding of the temporal decay of memory. For Nägele, we should see “the composition of the poem as a result and transfiguration of the decomposition of its sujet” (1071).

16. One could expand the investigation of the demystification of the natural even to a poem such as “Correpondances,” which might first appear to celebrate man's unity with nature. However, following de Man's remarkable analysis, one could view the repetition of the word “comme,” the word in the poem that links man with nature, as the desperate attempt to create that unity through language—an attempt which, at the end of the poem, remains distant from nature and imprisoned in language and its mechanical listing of equivalent things.