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Writing Desire On The Lesbian Body: Baudelaire’S Fantasies And Vivien’S Realities, Emily Wieder

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

In The Flowers of Evil [Les Fleurs du Mal (1857)], French poet Charles Baudelaire paints three female bodies: the mistress, the prostitute, and the lesbian. The latter appears in three of one-hundred poems but so captivated Baudelaire that he almost titled the collection The Lesbians. Censors nevertheless condemned the anthology and suppressed two of the lesbian poems. The remaining lesbian poem compares the “damned women” to “thoughtful cattle.” A rare representation of lesbian bodies, this metaphor problematically depicts them as savage.

Yet this “Other” exemplifies the baudelairean poetic ideal. By crafting Beauty, the Poet immortalizes his corpus. As the …