Using French and American feminist theory, I analyze Charles Baudelaire\u27s symbols in Les Fleurs du Mal in an attempt to come to terms with symbolic representations of the female that are at once traditional and transgressive.
By examining the images of solids (statues, jewels, metals), lesbians and woman\u27s hair which appear frequently in Baudelaire\u27s text, I reveal Baudelaire\u27s desire to eliminate a woman\u27s generative power and her association with the procreative cycle of nature. His desire for a preoedipal union with the maternal female becomes evident in his early poems and his poems on the subject of a woman\u27s hair. Because he remains trapped in his acculturated association of woman with nature, his desire leads to fear: a fear of submersion in the maternal resulting in a loss of his masculine identity, and a fear of death as a part of nature\u27s generative cycle.
By discussing significant poems in Les Fleurs du Mal-- To a Woman Passing By, The Beautiful Ship, The Jewels, Beauty, Metamorphasis of the Vampire, To She Who Is Too Gay, Carrion, Doomed Women, The Invitation to the Voyage, and Hair --I conclude that Baudelaire’s intense yearning for a nurturing relationship with his mother becomes a suppressed incestuous desire for her. Conversely, his unconscious leads him to distance himself from actual women in an effort to idealize them, thereby seeking to escape his own sense of mortality in favor of the immortality--the solid artifice--of aesthetic achievement
