Old Father, Old Artificer: Female Sexuality and Male Authorship in Les Fleurs du mal and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

By the turn of the 19th century, the figure of the woman had become increasingly vital to modernism’s long-standing concern with the identity of the male artist. Whether it is Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal (1857), initially titled “the Lesbians,” or James Joyce’s Künstlerroman novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), female characters are heavily featured in order to define the authors’ own modern aesthetics. In particular, both Baudelaire and Joyce perceive underlying tensions between biological reproduction and artistic creativity, prompting them to explore in detail the relationships between gender, sexuality, and the production of literature. Published half a century apart, these two works marked critical junctures in the emergence of modernism, and a comparative approach thus allows us to trace shifting ideologies of modern personhood and gendered identity. For Baudelaire, the male poet as flaneur derives voyeuristic pleasure from his imaginary lesbian narratives, and his aesthetic awareness of the self that emerges is contrasted with the “sterile” nature of female homosexuality. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in Portrait, on the other hand, adopts a more ambivalent relationship towards women: like Baudelaire’s