Irony and Violence in Baudelaire's "À Celle Qui Est Trop Gaie"

Abstract

Charles Baudelaire's predication of his aesthetic on the wellknown "deux postulations simultanées" toward God and Satan (and, implicitly, other polar dualisms locked in a violent struggle for ascendancy in the poet's soul) makes his work particularly apt for the deployment of irony. In one of his most notorious poems, "À celle qui est trop gaie," which was censored from Les Fleurs du mal during the infamous trial of 1857, the poetlover's simultaneous experience of conflicting, although not mutually exclusive, feelings of love and hate, in response to a woman's excessive beauty and gaiety, creates an oxymoronic ironic tension so intense and intolerable that it precipitates a mad, dizzying plunge into violence. Another ironic tension exists between the poem's virtual sadistic phantasm and the actual person, Madame Sabatier, who inspired it, providing an extraordinary instance of text and context that are reciprocally elucidating.

Keywords:

• Charles Baudelaire
• "À celle qui est trop gaie"
• Les Fleurs du mal
• irony
• madness
• oxymoron
• phantasm
• Madame Sabatier
• sadism
• violence