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Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives ... on prostitution, particularly successful is a

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theory; it ends with a general piece on the role of Swiss tutors and governesses in the Netherlands. Under the heading ‘Creation’, we find a discussion of how Belle, author of 2500 letters, uses epistolary form in fiction to examine masculine and feminine forms of reason, and how gendered concepts of reason oppress women. She uses the sub-genre of the portrait to give an unflattering self-portrait under the name of ‘Zélide’. The section ends with two contributions on Belle’s (abortive) career as an operatic composer, and a parallel between her and Rousseau as committed, but untrained, composers. If by ‘Reception’ one means ‘what the readers/critics said’, then the section’s title is misleading. Instead, one finds a masterly discussion of the role of French as an international language in the eighteenth century, and a consideration of Belle’s literary sources (La Fontaine, Molière, Madame de Sévigné). Only in the final contribution, drawing on the ‘International reception of women’s writing, 1700–1900’ project at the University of Utrecht, is the reader’s response and distribution of Belle’s work dealt with, and even then, the pickings are thin. In many ways, Belle emerges as a rather sad failure; her pedagogy — real or fictional — is unsuccessful; despite having attracted Sainte-Beuve’s interest, she did not achieve fame, probably because she used seventeenth-century form to express Enlightenment ideas; her musical career failed, perhaps because of her gender and absence from Paris, but also through lack of training. It is clear she is belatedly conquering a place in cultural history. David, Parris

Trinity College Dublin

Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005, 246 pp. The full ironic impact of Baudelaire’s prose collection is underestimated, since the reader’s initial gratification and sense of irony arise from a blindness in reading which each poem artfully exploits. Such textual trompes l’œil hinge on the assumption that narrative voice and poet are one; Baudelaire exploits this complacency by creating the illusion of an irony shared by poet and reader, while in reality directing ridicule back in the face of the reader. This is the argument of Maria Scott’s dense and persuasive series of analyses of Le Spleen de Paris. Scott endeavours to dismantle the illusory shared perspective of poet and narrative voice. Wary of any finalizing interpretation, she aims to emphasize the uncertainty produced by the texts themselves. If the chapter headings of this study are traditional – caricature, prostitution, morality, allegory and aesthetics – it is because Scott has deliberately chosen to expose a series of familiar themes to her ‘anamorphic’ critical model. The first chapter dwells on Baudelaire’s association of the overwhelming laughter

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119

inspired by ‘le comique absolu’ with disintegration of the ego. The analysis hinges on the reader’s identification with figures from the prose poems, an identification that often co-exists with the narrator’s mockery of those same figures. Scott argues that this connection underlies the poet’s interest in caricature, and she detects in the ‘Le Thyrse’ a self-effacing paradigm and in ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’ one which caricatures the sympathy and sentimentality of the poem’s readership. In the section on prostitution, particularly successful is a comparative analysis of ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ and Régnier’s ‘Satyre XII’, both of which allude to the act of abortion. Departing from a statement of the ambiguities surrounding nineteenth-century toleration of prostitution, a pattern of ‘invisible visibility’ is identified which illuminates the discussion of the intertext. Here, Scott includes an impressive examination of medical discourse to support her interpretative strategy and endeavours to undermine the narrator’s attempt to join separate perspectives of the event of abortion. When analyses such as this are so satisfying, it is a little disappointing that others are not more fleshed out, such as in the case of some of the seven poems discussed in the section on morality. This chapter concentrates on the tendency of narrators to pass moral judgement on the action they oversee, while failing to recognize their own weaknesses. As Scott indicates, this pattern conceals many a snare for the narcissistic reader. While it is conventional to stress the prevalence of material concerns over idealism in Le Spleen de Paris, the section on allegory intriguingly renders problematic this supposition. An examination of the collection’s many internal contradictions suggests the possibility of allegorical readings that come into conflict with more literal interpretations. More diffuse is the discussion of aesthetics, which identifies irreconcilable tensions in the poems and attributes them to Baudelaire’s antagonism towards creative artists who do not succeed in bringing about an imaginative transformation of the real. As becomes apparent, Scott’s book is embedded in multiple critical perspectives and continues work by Sonya Stephens and Naomi Schor, while it will complement Steve Murphy’s recent Logiques du dernier Baudelaire. It is brimming with insightful close readings while it also borrows from psychoanalytical and deconstructionist frameworks. It also includes a useful title key that includes dates on which certain of the prose poems were refused publication. In consistently redirecting the argument of each text back on itself, Scott is able to reveal anew its irony, its duplicity, which so often feed off the reader’s obliviousness. For the reader of the prose poems, her book will provide a useful interpretative model and should inspire a reappraisal of reading strategies. Greg Kerr

Trinity College Dublin

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