Rouler aux blessures: Feminine Figures in Rimbaud's Illuminations

Although critics have focused on feminine figures in Rimbaud's Illuminations as figures of mystery, these figures in fact play a more complex and central role in Rimbaud's poetic project. They grow from a nineteenth-century cultural construct defining woman's nature. In the Illuminations, feminine figures are a crucial link to the natural world, holders of a power that can both stimulate and frustrate the poet. Feminine figures in fact provide the very body of poetic creation, illustrated particularly in "Being Beauteous." This marked and signifying body is thus both essential to the poetic project and fundamentally threatening to it. (RJD)