Given that the role of Heinrich Heine as a precursor to Charles Baudelaire has long been recognized and examined in the critical literature, this dissertation aims to explore congruities in their respective poetic universes, by conducting a parallel reading of the image of woman in their poetry. Contrary to a feminist critique, which denounces the writers' reductive and hence misogynist use of such images, we will remove the anathema momentarily in order to allow a discourse of love to be expressed, in a complex language which reveals the fears and desires of the loving subject in the 19th century. / The representation of the woman by Heine and Baudelaire points to a rupture characteristic of modern poetry. In accordance with the principle of irony, in which a strategy of evasion and detachment is employed, the various female characters presented by the two poets can never be reduced to the two-dimensionality of a pure object. The relationship to woman is marked by distance, suffering and dissonance. Occupying a liminal position between life and death, between animate and inanimate, the image of woman exercises a power of seduction which constitutes a challenge to the social order, extended from its margins. / The image of the prostitute will be analyzed in terms of its close relationship with the metropolis. Subsequently, Freudian theories will shed light on the stakes of the erotic experience which occurs in contact with the demimondaine. The symbolic exchange established with the commodified body of the prostitute ends in the transmission of illness, and ultimately, in the woman's death. In a vain attempt to control his fear of death, the modern poet displaces this fear onto an object as other: the female cadaver, whose horrible beauty emits a "disturbing uncanniness". The object of desire, put to death in this manner, returns to haunt the fetishist, even to take vengeance in the form of the vampire woman whose body resists death, but breathes it into the one she seduces. Finally, through the images of the statue and the sphinx, the poets reveal a divine and revolutionary dimension in the realm of love.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.36877 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Boyer, Sophie. |
| Contributors | Peters, Paul (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of German Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001808302, proquestno: NQ69973, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
Page generated in 0.0014 seconds