Gender and the Æsthetic of `le Mal': Louise Ackermann's Poésies philosophiques, 1871

Moral goodness and transgressive badness are conventionally gendered as feminine and masculine in nineteenth-century poetry; the cultural valorization of women's literary edification contrasts with a masculine aesthetic of le mal, informing the commonplace of unrecuperated æsthetic badness in women's poetry. Yet Barbey d'Aurevilly's 1873 review of Louise Ackermann's Poésies philosophiques proclaims the scandal of good female authorship of le mal. Ackermann, an obscure positivist poet, creates a slippage between le mal as evil and les maux as suffering to expose an uncanny epistemological alliance between forces of violence culturally encoded as sublime – Christian mysticism – and those culturally encoded as perverse – Sadean debauchery. Ackermann thereby destabilizes the very axes of goodness and badness along which nineteenth-century poetic æsthetics are gendered. (DJ)