How to read (women in) Baudelaire's prose poems

Abstract

Baudelaire’s prose poems present particular challenges to their female readers. Where women are not associated in Le Spleen de Paris with inaccessible ideals, they tend to be presented as disappointing travesties of that ideal. In the eyes of the unreliable authorial spokesperson, women often reveal themselves as grotesque in their selfishness, narcissism, and vulgarity. I outline here an approach to teaching the prose poems that complicates their overt meaning and, specifically, their apparent misogyny.