Les Fleurs du Mal
Flowers of Evil
Frontispiece for Baudelaire's collection of poems "Les Fleurs du Mal" 1857 by Félix Bracquemond
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
— Hypocrite reader! — My twin! — My brother!
This is a famous line in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal addressed to the reader: Au Lecteur
The last verse of the poem runs:
C'est l'Ennui! L'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,And translated many times with different emphasis. This is the translation of the last three verses by Eli Siegel.
II rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
— Charles Baudelaire
But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch-hounds,
The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The monsters screeching, howling, grumbling, creeping,
In the infamous menagerie of our vices,
There is one uglier, wickeder, more shameless!
Although he makes no large gestures nor loud cries
He willingly would make rubbish of the earth
And with a yawn swallow the world;
He is Ennui! — His eye filled with an unwished-for tear,
He dreams of scaffolds while puffing at his hookah.
You know him, reader, this exquisite monster,
— Hypocrite reader, — my likeness, — my brother!
Baudelaire's section Tableaux Parisiens, added in the second edition (1861), is considered one of the most formidable criticisms of 19th-century French modernity. This section contains 18 poems, most of which were written during Haussmann's renovation of Paris. Together, the poems in Tableaux Parisiens act as 24-hour cycle of Paris, starting with the second poem Le Soleil (The Sun) and ending with the second to last poem Le Crépuscule du Matin (Morning Twilight). The poems featured in this cycle of Paris all deal with the feelings of anonymity and estrangement from a newly modernized city. Baudelaire is critical of the clean and geometrically laid out streets of Paris which alienate the unsung anti-heroes of Paris who serve as inspiration for the poet: the beggars, the blind, the industrial worker, the gambler, the prostitute, the old and the victim of imperialism. These characters whom Baudelaire once praised as the backbone of Paris are now eulogized in his nostalgic poems.
For Baudelaire, the city has been transformed into an anthill of identical bourgeois that reflect the new identical structures that litter a Paris he once called home but can now no longer recognize.
Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877.
The Railway, widely known as Gare Saint-Lazare, is an 1873 painting by Édouard Manet. It is the last painting by Manet of his favourite model, the fellow painter Victorine Meurent, who was also the model for his earlier works Olympia and the Luncheon on the Grass.
Up front . . .
. . . and back
This montage of Up front . . . and back echoes the montage at the top of this article, but is clearly pornographic in its intent, rather than erotic, or academic, as in the paintings of the slave market by Jean-Léon Gérôme. The images are explicit. There is no evidence of bourgeois hypocrisy. The depicted context is a gallery of artworks exploring ribald themes. These works are taken to be both erotic and pornographic. In the one entitled Un instant de repos, the figure of a woman, a model, is relaxing, having a smoke and sitting on a chair, with her legs stretched wide apart by the furniture, and revealing her genitalia. In the other image entitled Le modèle campé the figure of woman is shown putting on, or taking off, her chemise. She is beginning or finishing her work.
There is no hiding what is going on! Quite the opposite!
Eroticism or pornography? What's the difference? The Wikipedia article on Eroticism says:
Because eroticism is wholly dependent on the viewer's culture and personal tastes pertaining to what, exactly, defines the erotic, critics have often confused eroticism with pornography, with the anti-pornography activist Andrea Dworkin saying, "Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer." This confusion, as Lynn Hunt writes, "demonstrate the difficulty of drawing… a clear generic demarcation between the erotic and the pornographic": indeed arguably "the history of the separation of pornography from eroticism… remains to be written"The Wkipedia article on Erotica says:
A distinction is often made between erotica and pornography (as well as the lesser known genre of sexual entertainment, ribaldry), although some viewers may not distinguish between them. A key distinction, some have argued, is that pornography's objective is the graphic depiction of sexually explicit scenes, while erotica "seeks to tell a story that involves sexual themes" that include a more plausible depiction of human sexuality than in pornography. Additionally, works considered degrading or exploitative tend to be classified by those who see them as such, as "porn" rather than as "erotica" and consequently, pornography is often described as exploitative or degrading. Many countries have laws banning or at least regulating what is considered pornographic material, which generally do not apply to erotica.
Feminist writer Gloria Steinem distinguishes erotica from pornography, writing: "Erotica is as different from pornography as love is from rape, as dignity is from humiliation, as partnership is from slavery, as pleasure is from pain." Steinem's argument hinges on the distinction between reciprocity versus domination, as she writes: "Blatant or subtle, pornography involves no equal power or mutuality. In fact, much of the tension and drama comes from the clear idea that one person is dominating the other."
Ever wonder what a dominatrix would do to Harvey Weinstein? Wonder no more!
Harvey Weinstein needs to learn consent — the hard way. Venus, a New York-based dominatrix, detailed how she would use BDSM roleplay to treat an alleged sexual predator like Weinstein. “The first thing I would do with Harvey is make him identify that he is a piece of s—,” she told The Post.
Returning to the Wikipedia article on Eroticism:
Queer theory and LGBT studies consider the concept from a non-heterosexual perspective, viewing psychoanalytical and modernist views of eroticism as both archaic and heterosexist, written primarily by and for a "handful of elite, heterosexual, bourgeois men" who "mistook their own repressed sexual proclivities" as the norm.
Theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayle S. Rubin and Marilyn Frye all write extensively about eroticism from a heterosexual, lesbian and separatist point of view, respectively, seeing eroticism as both a political force and cultural critique for marginalized groups, or as Mario Vargas Llosa summarized: "Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty".
Audre Lorde, a Caribbean-American writer and out-spoken feminist talks of the erotic being a type of power being specific to females. "There are many kinds of power [...] The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings". In "The Uses of the Erotic" within Sister Outsider, she discusses how erotic comes from sharing, but if we suppress the erotic rather than recognize its presence, it takes on a different form. Rather than enjoying and sharing with one another, it is objectifying, which she says translates into abuse as we attempt to hide and suppress our experiences.
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