The natural woman: the influence of Charles Baudelaire in Boris Vian's "L'automne à Pekin"

Authors

  • Mariana de Cabo Universidad Católica Argentina
  • Estefania Montecchio Universidad Católica Argentina

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_tropelias/tropelias.2019312984

Keywords:

Vian – Baudelaire – woman – stereotype – French Literature

Abstract

In an epigraph from L’automne à Pekin (1947), Vian quotes a passage from Baudelaire's Fusées: «Aimer une femme intelligente est un plaisir de pédéraste». In Baudelaire's world view, the woman, a purely natural being, guides the man to his lowest instincts and, therefore, to evil. For that reason, the loving relationship with female represents a sadistic and primitive act between a victim and a killer. Our aim is to analyze, based on the baudelairean conception of women, the motive why Vian quotes the XIXth century writer and how much this intertext allows Vian to shape in his novel a presumed stereotyped vision of the feminine gender.

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Published

2019-02-08

How to Cite

de Cabo, M., & Montecchio, E. (2019). The natural woman: the influence of Charles Baudelaire in Boris Vian’s "L’automne à Pekin". Tropelías: Review of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, 1(31), 284–296. https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_tropelias/tropelias.2019312984

Issue

Section

Papers
Received 2018-08-22
Accepted 2018-12-11
Published 2019-02-08