In the Wake of Decadence: Anna de Noailles' Revaluation of Nature and the Feminine

In the Wake of Decadence: Anna de Noailles' Revaluation of Nature and the Feminine Catherine Perry Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals UNTIL RECENTLY critics have tended to associate Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) with her French Romantic predecessors,1 as though the poetry of a woman coming in the wake of Decadence and Symbolism could be no more than a throwback to older literary practices, and hence as though the poet herself took no account of the achievements and innovations of her immediate predecessors. Such a critical assessment, based partly on the fact that Noailles adopted Nature as a major trope in her work, is accompanied by an inclination to identify her poetic personae with traditional representations of Nature. From the standpoint of aesthetic tastes at the turn of the century, when French poets were largely taking their inspiration from modern urban life rather than from the natural world, Noailles thus appears as a reactionary. A careful reexamination of her poetry suggests, however, that she tried to redefine the lyric subject and to discover approaches to Nature which would challenge previous treatments of this theme in both Romantic and post-Romantic literature. Throughout her works Noailles held in fact a double-voiced discourse implying a dual attitude of competition and cooperation with her cultural inheritance. The binary paradigm characteristic of much nineteenth-century thought, in which male and female are envisioned as distinct and absolute categories, comes to a head with Decadent literature. Whereas man in this paradigm is identified with culture, woman is defined as "Nature," a term denoting three intertwined notions: the external world of natural phenomena; a primitive or primordial state of things that is prior to civil society; and the internal processes of the human body, corresponding biologically to the instincts and psychologically to the emotions . According to these essentialist determinations, woman is bound to her biological function and hence to her body as a symbol of the material world of sexuality, species perpetuation, and mortality. Although a 94 Winter 1997 Perry rehabilitation of Nature was well under way with the Romantics, woman rarely appears as a desiring subject in the texts of this period; rather, there seems to be only one vital energy, that of the male libido, from which artistic creativity originates. Reacting against Romanticism, many writers in the second half of the nineteenth century conceived of Nature in disparaging terms, according to a dualistic conception inherited from Christianity, which opposes the "spirit" to the "flesh." One of the most prominent, of course, is Baudelaire, the "spiritual father" of Decadent and Symbolist writers, for whom Nature is a threat and an evil to be overcome through the cult of the artificial. Since this cult is tied to a spirit understood not only as masculine but as belonging exclusively to men, Baudelaire generally does not distinguish Nature from woman. An assertion in "Mon cœur mis à nu" exemplifies his perspective: "La femme est naturelle, c'est-à -dire abominable."2 Even at the turn of the century, a female poet who adopted Nature as a signifying term in her poetry risked confronting a dismissal like the one demonstrated in Baudelaire's ambivalent essay on the poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859).3 Written in 1861, this essay typifies a trend in male critics which continued well into the twentieth century. Though praising Desbordes-Valmore for her qualities of heart and her spontaneous inspiration, in the opening sentence of his essay Baudelaire excludes her work from the domain of authentic poetry: Si le cri, si le soupir naturel d'une âme d'élite, si l'ambition désespérée du cœur, si les facultés soudaines, irréfléchies, si tout ce qui est gratuit et vient de Dieu, suffisent à faire le grand poète, Marceline Valmore est et sera toujours un grand poète." As the reiterated conjunction "si" indicates, Baudelaire refuses to conceive of Desbordes-Valmore as an artistically creative woman. Despite the positive way in which he subsequently employs the word "Nature" and its derivations in the essay, he makes them antithetical to high art: "Jamais aucun poète ne fut plus naturel; aucun...