Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity

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. While feminine figures abound in Baudelaire’s œuvre, most critical readings of the poet have concentrated on the tendency towards objectification, and even denigration, in his portrayal of women. By contrast, in its early stages this article reads ‘À une passante’ in conjunction with Baudelaire’s observations from Mon Cœur mis à nu, Fusées, and Le Peintre de la vie moderne, suggesting that a form of femininity that I shall call ‘feminine singularity’ crystallizes in his work, and that it resists collectivization under the broader tenets of urban capital and political liberalism. The subsequent stages of the article discuss ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ and ‘Les Petites Vieilles’, arguing that there is a redrawing of gendered individuation in the Tableaux parisiens. Both of these poems approach gender ironically, using a grotesque mode of serialization to dissolve a conventional understanding of sexual difference predicated on binaries, reproduction, and heterosexual desire.