Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis (review)

256Women in French Studies life far different from the superficial circles she frequents as a courtesan. For example, though she occasionally idealizes life in the working-class neighborhood ofher youth in Paris, her ambivalence about lower class individuals flares up when she witnesses the violence of the 1 848 uprisings; it stirs up anxiety about the terrifying atrocities she had witnessed as a child during the Lyon insurrection . Issues ofsexuality and feminism come into play as well in her tome; her attraction, fondness and sometime obsession with Denise, a young woman who befriends her in Saint-Lazare, hint at a lesbian liaison. Her desire for financial independence and her pursuit of a career certainly correspond to the goals that feminists and socialists like Flora Tristan demand in the 1 840s, and the strong bonds she forges with many ofher fellow actors and kept women emphasize the importance offemale solidarity. Nevertheless, critics anxious to label her a feminist beware: she is not entirely supportive of female emancipation, especially when one considers her tacit agreement with her lover that women participating in me political insurrections ofthe 1 848 revolution deserve a whipping. Curiously enough, this anecdote suggests a possible intertextual link between Mogador's autobiography and Gustave Flaubert's l'Éducation sentimentale (1869), for althoughJoannaRichardsonmaintains thatFlaubertfashionedhis lorette, Rosanette, after Baudelaire's lover, La Présidente, the fact that Rosanette agrees that women at the 1848 Club desfemmes gatherings should be flogged, and that her military monitor, La Maréchale, evokes war in the way the reference to Mogador does, makes one believe Mogador's story may have influenced Flaubert's fiction. Nagem bases her translation on the 1968 Les Amis de l'histoire version of Mogador's memoirs, an edition that has shortened passages considered redundant in the 1 854 version and added catchy chapter titles to the narrative. While what the Les Amis tome edits out is mostly banal, it sanitizes the memoirs in a few cases by omitting the passages that directly name and vehemently denounce prostitution. In particular, the 1854 version has Mogador condemning "ce monstre hideux qu'on nomme la prostitution," thereby dramatizing this social plight by labeling it a monster. For the scholar eager to explore prostitution from a female point of view, Mogador's biting social commentary supports the argument that an actual prostitute voiced dissent against the writings that called for her social estrangement and containment. This fascinating portrait of the life of a prostitute offers a riveting testimony from an important social group all too often silenced in the nineteenth century; I therefore anticipate the important dimension that critical readings of this text by scholars in the fields of nineteenth-century literature and women's studies will contribute to scholarship on prostitution. Courtney SullivanUniversity of Texas at Austin Eliane DalMolin. Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2000. ISBN 0-472-11073-X. Pp. 215. $47. In an era when cutting (female) bodies appears one of the most elegant "preventive" solutions in contemporary medicine, it is fascinating to see a Book Reviews257 female scholar approach, from a psychoanalytical perspective, the whole notion of cutting female bodies by means of words or images. A poet, a cinematographer, and a thinker, as presented by DalMolin, thus seem to be able to reduce the obsession with the female (body). A modernist approach to life, translated into poetry by Baudelaire, may suggest that artists often appear to be at the forefront of new tendencies at one particular time, and that they eventually express more poignantly, in a more condensed way, the obsessions which haunt people (or men) in general. In this regard, Eliane DalMolin's book Cutting the Body definitely inscribes itself in a feminist reflection upon how genders perceive each other, and how our fears, obsessions, and fantasies inevitably shape our artistic or philosophical discourse. Also, DalMolin approaches Baudelaire, Truffaut, and Freud from a somehow "deconstructionist" position, or rather, she looks for the deconstruction of"reality" as it appears in their works. In a certain way, in this essay, the Orphic paradigm, to which Western art in general is often linked, can...