Marceline Desbordes-Valmore et la fraternité des poètes

The works of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) put in question the sexual paradigms that masculinize the practice, the processes, and the products of poetry. This article first examines typical and influential images of the poet and poetry from Lamartine, Balzac, Baudelaire, and Vigny to show how they literally incarnated poetry in male anatomies. The article then examines Desbordes-Valmore's flower imagery to suggest new ways of reading romantic lyrics as an inscription of the female body. Desbordes-Valmore's poems are, in fact, the "Flowers of Evil" of otherness, expressing the world of the female imagination where sensibility and sexuality are not controlled by men. She is, therefore, not simply another romantic poet who made no difference in literary history, rather she is the voice of difference, embodying a woman's consciousness of being a poet. From this perspective, literary history (e.g., androcentric interpretations of the conventional "femme fleur," women's unacknowledged contributions to poetry as voice, orality, music as Verlaine put it) and certain entrenched reading habits, (e.g., construing lyric poetry as destined for men) need to be revised. (In French) (MCD)